Bandra station.

Image is blurred, but speaks of the experience within the arteries of the city.

Old Church Square,Turku, Finland.

Back ground: 60's industrial movement, the fire, the rebuilding, the laying of the grid.

Initial response: Breaking the grid!

Erasing the divide.

Reviving memories.

Road cut, insect fly.

Process:

So we decide to remove the road of course we couldn’t completely eradicate the road but we tried to reduce the presence of it. We change its coarse and make it thinner, rarer traffic, and conquerable by foot.

The monument to hold it all together: the Turku cathedral.

Enhancing the presence of the square, revitalising it and directing into it a new flow of energy: A bridge emerging towards the library.

This bridge would be a light insertion onto the water, connecting the land. A resting insect, a transforming membrane, a fluttering wing, a metallic shine. A delicate film. A democratic (socialist) bridge intimately placing you in the square.

The Tram: An ancient intra transport system with some of its rails still intact. Tweaking paths to see more, stopping to leave and disperse in the streets of Turku. Starting from one entry point of the city and moving along the Aurajoki, by the market square to the city hospital and back. Like extending outwards from the nucleus/heart-church...And like blood, re-injecting energy and pumping life into the city. Becoming a fertile stream, allowing germination of new ideas, to spring out a refreshed Turku.

Project:

The square will have a renewed area of x sq.m. It is a primarily pedestrian zone. Only public transport vehicles will service the area. New and larger pavilion/ gathering/ exhibition spaces.etc opportunities will occur. The cathedral will be the main monument acting as the head of the system. The green space will be the lungs and the library as the co function. Auxiliary functions will be plugged in depending on need and season. The new bridge will give a new viewpoint to the whole site adding to the diversity of the same. The new bridge is expected to be a product of the expectations and actions of the people of turku.

The old turku tram will be revived with a new route amalgamating the earlier 2 routes. It will begin from the harbour and enter the city through itanen latinkatu making strategic turns for designed viewports/ peeks into the city. It will showcase the castle and then travel parallel to the aura only to turn and come right onto the side at the old jail. Continuing on erikinankatu it will go to the market square and then get onto the bridge towards the old cathedral. It will go all the way to kupitta park via the university and hospital.

A description of the process and experience of evolution of a new space.

Pumping the heart back into action. Activating the square. We made the road thinner like all the waiting people are pushing it to distort and it does. It becomes thinner smaller rarer and there are people walking freely all over with respect for the occasional bus or tram. The linearity of the road breaks and like spurts nodes erupt in a few places. There is water and movement destabilizing the established grid gradually. I am reading the whole place as one with the green banks of the river merging into the garden in front of the cathedral, may be a dance pavilion will be born there in the summer, may be from this nucleus the energy will spread outwards towards the extremities of the peoples’ buildings. I go further and rediscover the courtyards and connections within these buildings; they become like the tendrils trailing off from the main creeper... adding more to the support group.

Then I look at the library across the Aura lustily, could I just prance across, like the deer who lightly tip toe on water in the wetlands. What if I did, what if the tendrils grow with my each advancing step, only to reach the other side. I bridged it; I can feel the flow from the new source flooding across to the square. I feel like I am swimming in a current, the current is directed by my wants; I could float in any direction.

So now I have a blotting paper sheet and I am the ink I have dropped and diversified the colours, reactivated the ancient grains of the sheet, created some new, drowned some old in my colour. I hop onto my memory of the tram, I create a new route seeing how I see Turku. I begin from the harbour using the rails as guides, get on to the main road, get sneak peaks into the river from in between buildings, while understanding the structure of the built city. I turn and get right onto the river from the old jail. Here I have a green park to my left and the aura flowing to my right. Soon I turn back to linankatu and am heading for the market square. May be I get off there for a bit. On my return I am heading to the Kupitta Park via the varpouri and the hospital. I loop at the park and I am back on track!

Refreshed! I come back from a new experience of the old square.

The scene in the first class compartment of a slow train to Churchgate.

01 Dec, 2010. Wednesday

The City as a game board.

The game is snakes and ladders.

The objects on the game board are trains and the highways, movement slowed down by skywalks and traffic jams, station intersections and junctions.
The game player becomes the citizen of this impersonal frustrating environment.
Dice, chance, replaces the planning, the unforeseen circumstances, the good luck, the nightmares experienced by the citizen who is in this labyrinth of transport networks within this unconscious being.

A game, a drawing, or better left as an image in the writing?
Anyone wants to help make it?
What do you think?

C i TY

16 Nov, 2010. Tuesday.

“THE MATERIAL OF CITY PLANNING ARE SKY, SPACE, TREES, STEEL AND CEMENT IN THAT ORDER AND IN THAT HIERARCHY."
- LE CORBUSIER.

Q: Are all imaginations of the city independent of the citizen that inhabits it ?

The city functions as an organism, it lives by itself, because that is the way it is imagined and that is the way it is planned. Nowhere in the conceptualisation does the individual appear. There is no, "i," in city. Citizens of the greatest cities have been reduced to numbers. They are looked upon as statistical quantities, as charts, graphs and projections based on formulae.
The city survives. The city is alive.
The city fails to acknowledge the material that gives it life, the Citizens.
The citizens behave as blood cells within the body. They are each assigned a function, a job that must be carried out and a destination. Like blood flow, the citizens flow through the arteries of the city, the transport corridor. They lose their importance and identity. They are a part of a larger volume.
The city is not conscious.
Unlike the human body, the organs that regulate the citizens and allows for growth and expansion, lie outside the realm of the city's control. What drives these organs is something external, something that does not understand the body that is the city.

Q: What drives these organs?

Thus, the city is alive and growing. It is independent, but, under the control of a force which operates under a larger framework.

Q: What is the nature of this larger framework?

Let us save the city,
restore its consciousness,
prevent bodily decay.

Let us put, "i" back in C i TY
Let us put, "i" back in ARCH i TECTURE
Let us make a City for its Citizens.

Work in progress - http://apurvaparikh.blogspot.com/2010/11/work-in-progress.html