Instant Collage City

Siteless
Fall 2016 / GSD Semester 2.1
Professor David Mah
Speculative Urban Design

Taking Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter’s “Collage City” as a starting point, this speculative project asks how the improved efficiency and mass-customization design opportunities offered by contemporary digital design tools, principally the parametric plug-in Grasshopper, may aid in simulating complex urban compositions.  Beginning with a series of simple operations, a blank test site approximately one-third of Manhattan’s Central Park is gradually embedded with additional synthetic operations, simulating in seconds what is generally built incrementally across decades and centuries.  The result is therefore the Instant Collage City.