Unbuilding MTL
Storefront for Art and Architecture
Taking buildings down
January 2016
http://storefrontnews.org/programming/call-for-ideas-taking-buildings-down/
with Samuel Rancourt
Montreal is an island 50 km long and covering 483 km2. Home to 1.8 million people, it has a population density of 3716/km2.(For comparison, the island of Manhattan is 22 km long, covers 59 km2, houses 1,6 million people and has a population density of 27 489/km2.) While the center is fairly dense, there remain large expanses of suburban-type development, scattered with small neighbourhoods and interspersed with industrial tracts.
Though the island is divided by three major north/south highways, though new roads are built for speculative residential developments without great regard for an overall urban coherence, though it is dissected by several railway lines running in all directions and though important portions of its territory are occupied by massive industries, there remains a passage spanning from the east to west tips of the island of generally contiguous terrain vague, loosely expanding and contracting along its length, which has somehow withstood the city’s development.
UNBUILDING MTL is a proposal to both maintain and enlarge this passage, building open land as a resultant of building the city: it is an equation that requires demolishing parts of the city in order to build anew, to build the terrain vague through the process of demolition.
Following a proportional calculation of UNBUILDING dependant upon the type and scale of a project to be built, a corresponding area, contiguous to the now growing east-west passage originally identified, has to be made available, necessarily engaging the demolition of either existing buildings or infrastructure. This exchange between occupied and freed land, made possible through demolition, maintains a proportional balance between void/filled, concentrates the terrain vague, and necessitates the building of a denser city.
Following a plan of incremental demolition, starting with nearly derelict buildings to eventually demolishing large active infrastructures, and considering Montreal’s current and planned growth, it is possible to imagine multiple scenarios for the process of UNBUILDING MTL over a 60 year span, one of which is mapped here, during which portions of open land would incrementally be re-built and the built, incrementally re-emptied, generating new passages of the terrain vague through the dense city.
An active defender of sound urban growth, UNBUILDING MTL proposes that the building of the city comes with its demolition and that through this demolition, open land is built: a reciprocal process of UNBUILDING.
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Présentations
Sapienza Università di Roma
Walking, Drawing, Documenting