Over the past week we have had a series of reviews with Thom and now have ten days to crank for the midterm review. It hasn't been easy presenting the material due to its scope and scale. Typically we've allowed one aspect such as the infrastructure to progress past the programming, sustainability, open space, etc.
The ideograms above, while overly basic, proved very helpful in communicating the core ideas to Thom. Our 3.5 mile long site is a strip in Northern Madrid stretching from the inner ring M30 to the outer ring M40. On top of this, their is the possibility for a major transit hub on the site that could control automobile access in to the city as well as connect multiple transit networks including bus, metro, regional rail, the airport and a high speed intereuropean line.
A major strategy is to loosen the interstate exchanges at both ends of the site to obtain spatial opportunities out of the infrastructure and allow for a high degree of programming over top a major intersection of systems and routes. It goes back to the ironies of Koolhaas's Delirious New York- the simultaneous drive for congestion and access.
With a site so imbued with infrastructural connections we are using it to guide the site and trying to figure out how to program as much by time as by space. The past few days we have obtained commercial density measurements from comparisons with downtown (spatial densities), now we will return to questions of time and attempt to describe temporal densities such as traffic congestion and urban flows.
