"Mutability is our tragedy, but it also is our hope." - Boethius
LIFTED, or Imagining Vertical Culture in Urban Vancouver offers a strategy, rather than a solution, to issues surrounding the podium-tower typology. Instead of adopting a top-down approach driven by arbitrary ideals and standards, this project looks to the ground for inspiration.
It is lamented, that the proliferation of the current podium-tower typology has led to, and will continue to lead to, an urban fabric that lacks cultural, economic and architectural diversity. With the intention of generating a transdisciplinary architectural process that incorporates the cycles, patterns and traces of a breathing mutable city, this project explores an existing urban reality.
What Vancouver's Downtown Eastside lacks in economic stability and architectural vigour, it makes up in deeply etched history, cultural diversity and unending spirit. Through interpretive mapping exercises that analyzed the 'site' at the macro scale in terms of renewal, sustainability, growth and adaptability, the site's morphology (grids, zones, boundaries), its traces (train tracks, greenspace, history) and its spirit (art projects and community and social obligations) served as possible generators for places of meaningful dwelling and co-inhabitation within the micro scale of the 'podium'
This strategy has begun to suggest an urban infrastructure within the building scale that blurs distinctions between, and within, community and commerce with the hopes of offering an alternative to the current podium-tower typology - one that is not foreign to the city's diverse participants, but one that responds to the needs of its citizens, and offers places for living and dwelling in such a way that we may all become more socially and ethically enlightened, or LIFTED.
(From competitor's text)
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