"Eleos", main conceptual drawing, 2011
From an organizational and functional perspective the Mirrored City subunits are Floating Ilets: whose waterline public Macrostructures function as administrative boroughs, responsible for running local public services, such as schools, social services, public functions, waste collection and infrastructure, independently or as shared services; have commercial semi-public Elevated Walkways and Plazas and have primarily private Residential & Business towers.
"Eleos", the Mirrored Cities prototype, 2011
Functional hierarchY
The Borough Islet prototype is made up of a borderless leisure ground sandwiched between a waterline public macrostructure and a residential superstructure. The people go to school and to public events inside the macrostructure, they have their picnics on the boundless beaches and on the greens, and later climb to their private perches in the sky.
The manner of zoning the Flagship is dictated by a necessity for COMPETITIVE COMMUNITIES, interpreted here as a pursuit to foster not a single unified Isle persona, but from the very beginning to differentiate a borough islet into a multitude of neighborhoods with compatible and competitive identities. The approach to facilitating this is to break up the total number of residents of a Borough into as many groups as there are neighborhoods. Each group of people, represented in the Islet prototype case by an appropriately sized Apartment Block, will cluster to establish a vertical neighborhood inside a residential tower: a clustered Apartment Block and it’s mix of distinct semi-public spaces, and the immediate vicinity of Walkway trade venues and Macrostructure public functions.
The Borough Islet prototype is made up of a borderless leisure ground sandwiched between a waterline public macrostructure and a residential superstructure. The people go to school and to public events inside the macrostructure, they have their picnics on the boundless beaches and on the greens, and later climb to their private perches in the sky.
The manner of zoning the Flagship is dictated by a necessity for COMPETITIVE COMMUNITIES, interpreted here as a pursuit to foster not a single unified Isle persona, but from the very beginning to differentiate a borough islet into a multitude of neighborhoods with compatible and competitive identities. The approach to facilitating this is to break up the total number of residents of a Borough into as many groups as there are neighborhoods. Each group of people, represented in the Islet prototype case by an appropriately sized Apartment Block, will cluster to establish a vertical neighborhood inside a residential tower: a clustered Apartment Block and it’s mix of distinct semi-public spaces, and the immediate vicinity of Walkway trade venues and Macrostructure public functions.
A public building (or any other most loved location of a vicinity), ultimately names and sets apart its very own neighborhood, distinct from all the others on a Borough Islet. Kids from Kino’s will venture out on weekly fruit forays into Orchard Grove, while their parents are away to the sky Bazaar for the weekend market fair. A neighborhood delivers as a socio-economic microcosm. The apartment towers may constitute more than simple living retreats. They may serve as ateliers and container gardens, giving the owners the choice to pursue their crafts and trades to fruition.
The Mirror City may employ superstructures of varied purposes, designed to function as entertainment or industrial grounds, intensified floating greenhouses, etc. Some single-purpose macrostructures may themselves be differentiated by necessity into static or mobile facilities: e.g. a type of floating farms meant to speculate the seasonal patterns by floating across the Mediterranean.
One purpose for the aggregation into strongly defined neighborhoods is to build the city as a place for memories, with countless and varied places for adventure, discovery, nurture, such as cool secret gardens in the shadow of a particularly ivied tower, moody alleys and colorful street clocks, a stream somewhere by a lavender knoll and a well-known secret beach for lovebirds. The design requirement is for a thousand places of a thousand different and authentic kinds. Arched walkways and secret courtyards, dead-end streets patched up with empty ancient shops – a successful city is perhaps foremost a place of reminiscence and great stories, and such focuses for the design process of this project are no less important than the principles of sustainability, ecology and habitat generation. The aim is to realize an elegant and novel urban development model, equally environmentally positive and humane.
Cities bring close together trade, production and private living spaces. It is this closeness that makes them such efficient organisms, and efficiency is good for business- a fact that ultimately reflects in the overall quality of life. The stacking design aims to work out some of the bigger compromises of ultra-efficient density, while keeping the obvious advantages of downtown living (social diversity, modernity, prosperity).