Destructive preservation : figuring the urban ground

Abstract

What does it mean to invert the urban fabric? When figure becomes ground, and ground becomes figure, how does a neighborhood adapt to moving from extreme privacy to communal living? Despite the complete destruction of the existing fabric, the proposition immediately disallows a Utopian, Tabula-Rasla response. Although ghosted, the idiosyncratic identity becomes even more identifiable, and somewhat nostalgic; rather than the footprints being inhabitable buildings, they become holes in the built environment that one can walk out into (ground floor courtyard) or look down into (upper floor windows/terraces). As one of the largest and most populated cities in the Middle East, the city of Riyadh is a clear example of a metropolitan city that is continuously growing in a low-density sprawl. This thesis aims to explore how we can re-imagine the city in the already-built environment as a way of densifying the fabric. Despite its metropolitan nature, importance and large population, life in the city of Riyadh is more suburban than urban, with the majority of people living in stand-alone houses. The culture of habitat has, however, begun adapting in this generation; from completely segregated stand-alone houses, to duplex houses, to gated communities, and finally moving a little bit into high-rise living. The project aims to push the slow transition into a faster trajectory towards a super-block mega-structure. Different people would come together under one larger roof, where different programs come together and pull apart. A unified plinth acts as a mediator between different kinds of traffic, different kinds of users, and different kinds of spaces, blurring the lines between public spaces, religious spaces, housing, and working environments. The whole aboveground environment becomes a pedestrian space, while a lower level of the plinth pulls vehicular traffic below ground, and creates an expansive parking and road zone