A Bridge of Speeds
The project explores an expanded threshold for a slow city that enables movement & interchange between the zones of fast & slow. The bridge becomes a linear laboratory that allows for operations of cross-programming, displacement & re-sampling of the elements from the city.
I explore the idea of speed on urban, programmatic, architectural & cultural levels. I tried to find ways to notate the changes in our perception of space & how architecture could alter familiar speeds. In the context of this project, ‘Speed’ is understood as the time it takes an individual to create a cognitive map of a given space & the content presented within it. I approached a number of architectural programmatic & urban parameters that either decelerate or accelerate our reading of spaces as tightly inter-connected. Focusing on these parameters, I questioned their combinations in a series of urban junctions.
Overall, the bridge is a new speed ‘modulator’: it plays on new combinations of structure, program & content to suggest transitional spaces & events.
As you progress along the speed modulator you are forced to slow down. Once the speed is decreased, the reading of the space elongates; we gather more information on the content to the point that the walls appear to swell with layers.
I first got interested in the idea of speed after researching St. Petersburg and getting the feeling that it is a very slow city. I then realized that this is a unique time in which we find ourselves standing at the threshold between two ways of life; slow and fast.
Longer interaction with the space creates a deeper reading of the content.
The re-assembly of programmatic and architectural parameters of speed results in the overall shift in speed.
Through mixing and cross-breeding I am creating new spatial devices or 'Junctions'. They are designed through a process of sampling and rearranging, of placing barriers vs. placing connections.
Each Junction results in a shift of movement, which alters the speed, and thus, the perception of the inhabited space.
Architectural plan describes the relations between humans and matter. However, another important relationship is the one between the individual and the content, the perception link between the subject and the object.
The way to analyse the effects is through the objective view of the 'section'; to see how a change in the parameters alters the speed and therefore triggers a change in the perception.
