Urban Fabric

Adam Greenfield once said, “There’s little need to invest in the comprehensive instrumentation of the urban fabric with sensors, device controllers or informational displays when people themselves are already equipped with something that can act in all of these roles.”

-Adam Greenfield

We as architects are some of the biggest proponents of studying the urban fabric, advocates of advancement. But the situational irony we find ourselves in is that one of the biggest disadvantages of a city is lack of social responsibility and public awareness. Through our own deliberate designs, we are crafting and seeding the breeding grounds for the very issues we are trying to fix.

Technological advancement is a miraculous invention, but as designers we need to move and adapt with the times. When I first mistakenly set out on this journey, I focused on utilizing the best methods of conversations, to try and translate that into drawings.

Conversations into drawings.

 And even attempting to find fellow advocates, I ran into major problems. Designers who were convinced they knew what the results of my conversation would be. That everyone I spoke with would ask me for housing and commercial space-regardless of what I attempted to talk with them about. So, I chose to focus after my initial attempts on a global scale with my podcast on a case study instead. That I would use the Standard Knitting Mill in Knoxville to understand a small piece of the urban design and perhaps devise a method to better one day understand the city, but perhaps with a team of minions to go out and conduct the conversations for me. Instead, the Knitting Mill became a catalyst, an accelerant to understanding the perceived urban fabric of Knoxville directly. And it all started with proposing something radical, active listening.

On the podcast and social media, I learned pretty quickly how creating moments of genuine intimacy were key to cultivating an impactful relationship. When I applied this on my research, I went out first in hopes of understanding the impact a building or business can have on individuals. I went to all forms of social media, to understand how the swiftly moving times impacted the way we as designers interacted with it. But the major result of my findings was the discovery of something I like to call pleats.

When I was speaking with individuals, they-and this was covering people from all ages, as young as 2-3 and as old as 89, they described a Knoxville that was eclipsed by folds in the urban fabric, areas, that seemed to disappear or reshape and created a Perceived Knoxville. Each of these perceived urban fabrics were defined by themes, and while I image that the conversation would change from city to city using my method, in Knoxville, those themes were Redlining, the Civil War, the University of Tennessee vs Knoxville, and the ‘seedy underbelly’ of Scruffy City.   

I think the best explanation for the original inspiration behind the drawings came from a conversation I had in the city. The person stated that for them, Knoxville existed only at the bus stops, and the roads they were on. While they were sure that the areas and the streets in-between exist, and they are certain that they do, for them, it’s a blurred distorted haze, a barren no man’s land. Sometimes because they feel unwelcome, or it is unattainable. These distorted areas became the pleats and folds, and it was this idea of their Knoxville, and their urban landscape that I was trying to capture. So, each of the drawings, Scruffy city, Civil War, the University of Tennessee vs Knoxville, and Redlining. In the course of the interviews, I was able to map the areas they were talking about and locate it. Sometimes these would take place with having them point to a map, other times it involved them rearranging my props and maps. But once I had established and created the maps from the themes, I treated them like any other landscape or urban scape. I added depth back in, by creating DEMs, or Digital Elevation Models, which are topographic drawings, that I then created a model. I did end up taking these final drawings back to several people the final topography to receive their feedback. One of the comments was that while they might not recognize it exactly on a map, they were able to identify ‘their’ drawing and ‘their’ landscape.

Overall, this is important because for us as designers to truly advocate for socially responsible architecture, we need to actually follow through. And it to that, we need to design for the Perceived Urban Fabric, the abstract 4^th Dimension of understood fabric to better understand what we are actually designing for. From those who were able to understand and identify their space, their locations, they were able to take a sense of ownership. It allowed me as the designer to truly understand the foundations and connections in Knoxville in a way that I had previously been unable, and to transcend some of the traditional limitations. I started my project attempting to learn a small piece of Knoxville through a unique building with an interesting history, but I finished my project with a deeper understanding of the cityscape and the people who call it home.

I jokingly called these two linework drawings the “Inception series” as it was based on the series of conversations of that the University was its own self entity that could be scooped up and dropped off anywhere in the world at first glance but had a series of hidden connections and deeper threads tying it to the grounds no matter how far it moved. It was a repeating element in conversations, and ended up inspiring me to create these and several other series that I am working on currently.  

I have several more collages, and countless drawings and maps I made for this project; however, I would love to one day revisit it. I still have the desk and chair I used for conversation, covered in the remains of the Nolli Map I used, several sculptures and pillows, which I painted maps and models on. However, for every technique I tried and learned along the way, no skill has stuck with me as much as learning to listen.