Site & Infrastructure Planning

Tama New Town, Japan
The Spring 2009 Site Planning studio is a continuation of a long-term research project initiated in the summer of 2008 and followed by the Advanced Japan Design Workshop of Fall 2008. The research project rethinks the future of housing development within the context of developing a prototype for sustainable urban community. It utilizes Tama New Town outside Tokyo as a reference for the work. The Studio was funded and conducted in part in collaboration with the staff and resources of Sekisui House Ltd. of Japan.
The goal of the Site Planning Studio was to create a manual for Ecologic Oriented Development and infrastructure design that derives from the study area’s typologies. Rather than providing a single plan, the purpose of the manual is to create a flexible set of codes/typologies that account for site variability. In addition to outlining techniques and intervention points, the manual also includes few permutations of how these techniques could be synthesized and employed at the neighborhood scale.
Process:
A – Japan visit, site investigation and design charrette
B – landscape units and site physiography, mapping abstraction of site characteristics, natural systems, infrastructure, transects,fFuture scenarios, alternatives and new approaches to site and infrastructure technologies
C – technology driven schematic site plans investigations, rraming ‘large scale” general goals, developing different site typologies for each alternative technology
D – synthesis - neighborhood site plan assemblies – permutations