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Highway-Scrapper (Intermodal social Yonghegong)

Part 2 Project 2015
Sebastian Loaiza
University of Chile | Chile
The Economic boom called for an explosion of car infrastructure communicating long distances by car and interfering with the small scale networks. Beijing is a city defined by Ring Roads. The total linear area of the ring roads would be equivalent to the area of 18 forbidden cities. This thesis explores the possibility to live and cohabit with large systems of vehicular infrastructures and wonder; what would we do if we had that space?
Ring road footprints are no longer conceived as part of this ‘New Forbidden City’ instead they can be an opportunity for activating the edges of the highway, enabling not only permeability but also permanence and active use of a public space, challenging users to new kind of spaces and trying to ultimately re-connect the urban fabric previously interrupted.
Nowadays a high-rise building could arguably be defined as an icon of China’s economic progress. A Highway-Scrapper is a visual metaphor to a fallen high-rise building tumbled down to be reached by everybody like a horizontal skyscraper. It works somehow as a massive construction that responds to the need of densification of Beijing but with a human scale, mixing the development and the local feeling of the site. It function is to aid the city on the ring road borders. It works as an artifact that host different kinds of units that make people orbit around the highway without a necessary realisation of its presence, aiming to obtain a more seamless perception of the city trough an unconventional ecosystem of sensorial and physical experiences .

Sebastian Loaiza

Tutor(s)

2015
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