The City of Utopia (sketches)

I’ve took some time to make the layout and sketches. They are not too precise but it’s not really important on this stage. “Kahn or not Kahn?”,- I keep asking myself while adding new details. The most difficult part of my work is keeping to a line of Kahn. Here are the sketches of the key building of Kahn’s project. You can see the detailed information on them below.

CITY TOWER

“In Gothic times, architects built in solid stones. Now we can build with hollow stones. The spaces defined by the members of a structure are as important as the members. These spaces range in scale from the voids of an insulation panel, voids for air, lightning and heat to circulate, to spaces big enough to walk through and live in. The desire to express voids positively in the design of the structure is evidenced by the growing interest and work in the development of space frames’.” Louis Kahn.

The City Tower Project is important as part of the broader development of spaceframes and the notion of growth. These frames enabled architects of the 1950s and 1960s to develop modular structures of utopian proportions. The impact of the structures on the organisation of space was huge. Architects involved in this development of spaceframes, modular buildings and growing structures were among others Graham Bell, Buckminster Fuller, Fumihuko Maki, Alice and Peter Smithson and Reyner Banham.

VIADUCT

“In the center of town the streets should become buildings. This should be interplayed with a sense of movement which does not tax local streets for non-local traffic. There should be a system of viaducts which encase an area which can reclaim the local streets for their own use, and it should be made so this viaduct has a ground floor of shops and usable area.” Louis Kahn

CIRCULAR PARKING TOWERS

Kahn’s most controversial proposition, the civic centre, emerged organically from the system of movement ‘order’. Components of the civic centre came out of the city’s organic structure. They were circular parking towers—an order of stop and go—from the order of movement, commercial centres from the order of the business city core, city hall from the order of institutions.