"La Calle": Insignificant resources for significant impact / Architecture
Supersudaca / Corvalan, Madrazo, Rivero

"When it rains in Oxford Street, the architecture is no more significant than the rain…" Peter Cook, Archigram, the Living City, 1963.

The whole new urban culture seems to have some link to the street: street fashion, street music, street skate, street racing…street fighting…street riots
What about street architecture? And street urbanism?

As architects and planners we have studied for years the architecture of the city, the buildings, materials, new technology, program, infrastructure…
Then is it possible, or can we say what’s the architecture of the street?
Is it too simple? Or is it just part of another “superior” topic?
What if we consider it the trigging element and inspiration to define whatsoever intervention should be done?
What if we studied bottom up?

Workshop: The plan is to develop 2 basic but radical phases (a) Street Research and (b) Urban Actions:

A) Street Research

For this purpose a new methodology is necessary. The research will be done in 6 main approaches in different streets of Shimokitazawa:

1: Robyn Collyer method: Subtracting and adding interventions on photography to make more explicit some urban elements or actions. (See Bruce Mau, Lifestyle, page 576)

2: Oligoptical or Bruno Latour analysis: follow a small street object trajectory to understand major complexity. (visit the "Paris Ville Invisible" website).

3: “24 hours” method: a photographic sequence in time (minutes, days, hours) to discover street everyday secrets (Check film “SMOKE” with Harvey Keitel).

4: Nolli 4D: draw interior and exterior space (void) in black maps in a time sequence.

5: Datascape or Winy Mass’s influence: order all statistic information (inhabitants, m2, program,…) in comparable diagrams and project the in time. (See MVRDV’s Farmax, Metacity datatown and KM3).

6: Surprise approach: to be defined in place.

B) Urban Actions

Considering all the knowledge from phase A, do a low cost-maximum impact REAL, one to one project and take it to the street, register all the process and present conclusions back in the studio: now with a better idea of an alternative plan for Shimokitazawa district.

Tokyo city is a massive global reference; therefore this experience could become a new model or way of urban development: Para-architecture?