Gridland︎
Cloud Studio Research, Planning, & Design

Finalist and Shortlisted for the Louis Vuitton Spark Award

Chicago, Illinois
Completed at Illinois Institute of Technology with Jake Harney
2015

New Station Typologies Across the Metropolis

Can we take the prevailing ambivalence in contemporary society and weaponize it? Can we take the beneficial attributes of ambivalence and apply them with a mindful intentionality? Ambivalence has the power to guide economics, politics, culture, and lifestyle. Through resiliency, society has responded with the new economic hierarchies of the sharing economy, cultures of polyvalence, and a flourishing of new technologies. These technologies will have a massive effect on urbanistic patterns in the future and have the ability to change how we live, how we are educated, and how we interact with other neighborhoods. We speculate on the creation of a new transit system for Chicago and its metropolis which bonds the efficiency of the existing grid and new technologies with the ability to distribute public services across Chicago, provide a new civic realm that blurs boundaries between neighborhoods, building programs and typologies, and give opportunity for new lifestyles.

How our cities will adapt to these changes is still largely unknown. The urban morphology of Chicago is one sculpted by an extensive chronology of land speculation, barnyard fires, a masterful system of commodity exchange, geoengineering force, populist civics, regulatory lines, and the rapid growth and decline of successive populations. As a result, the contemporary city and its surrounding lands are scarred and fractured within an underlying field of organization. The grid bonds city and countryside through its strict provisioning born from an uniquely American ideology of a joint agenda of both revenue collection and civic equality. As the grid scales to the urban level, it presents a planning system which promotes freedom of choice in movement and development.

The collision of this system with the possibility of autonomous public transit gives rise to a new transit system which can do more with less. Complex algorithms allow for transit systems to transition from route based service to on demand service, increasing the efficiency of vehicles and trip times. New infrastructures supporting this system work to aggregate trips, while providing neighborhood services. The principles guiding the sharing economy could be applied to the school system to provide a network of shared spaces easily accessible through new forms of transit. Larger stations acting as network switches stitch together neighborhoods broken by large scale infrastructure. These stations also absorb new typologies which promote a renaissance of the flaneur who continuously lives life across the city. With the free space provided by the efficiency of autonomous vehicles, a new system of pedestrian streets has the ability to filter through the city for a more active, sustainable transit.

Together these stations can inhabit the city to facilitate movement through the city to equalize access to education and culture all while stitching together broken neighborhoods. All while responding to future lifestyles to celebrate the ambivalence of the metropolis.