Sprawl
Project location: Unknown Desert
Project year: 2050
Objective: An ex-novo city influenced by the King Khalid Military City
Situated on the harsh desert plains of the middle east in 2050, sprawl investigates the notion of a self-sufficient city created to shield its inhabitants from environmental extremes consequence of resource exploitation. Due to severe external climate conditions, the city is planned around hyper-efficient mobility routes, linear in nature to maximise speed and ease of construction. From this initial axis, the city is sprawled and planned in section in order to maintain appropriate internal climatic conditions during construction. The outcome illustrates a new urban morphology, the emergence of the sectional city challenging traditional paradigms of top-down planning
_01 Precedent Analysis
An initial analysis of the King Khalid Military City (KKMC) revealed an octagonal concentric city surrounded by smaller satellites. Within the larger composition, contained smaller self-sufficient communities including the family residences suburbs and soldier brigades. At the centre of the city lies the centrum, an area for collective recreation, congregation, and conversation.
_02 Concept
_taking the initial concentric nature of the city, the initial centrum is dispersed, effectively decentralising the city
_this sprawl of centrums is then combined with an aggregation of the angular nature of the initial octagonal form and examined in section. Creating the base framework for an entirely new typology of city
_creating a base pattern for the development of the city, programme is then able to be arranged in section, with the heart being an axis of mobility
_this same pattern is scaled up to develop the city in plan, with two main types of horizontal mobility – fast and slow
_02 Vision
_fast mobility (blue), medium & slow (green)
_the centrum spaces between the hard programming envisaged as soft function, retaining the characteristics of the centrums in the KKMC – places of recreation, congregation, and conversations
X-Urban // IaaC, Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia
Developed at Master in Advanced Architecture in 2019 by:
Student: Vien Nguyen
Faculty: Willy Muller, Jordi Vivaldi