Màster universitari en Estudis Avançats en Arquitectura: Contemporary Project

Recent years, we could see a trend that the infrastructures are coming back to the topic of today’s architects. With the development of science and technology, and the progress of globalization and urbanization, we could see that infrastructure is playing a more important role in urban environment, not only the functional influence but also in urban form and citizens’ feeling of the city, especially the transportation infrastructure in city like railways and metros. in most case, infrastructures become visible and tactile as effective means of urban development. This is not only due to increasing requirements concerning the efficiency of modern high capacity infrastructures. Conventional infrastructure projects have also significantly transformed the urban fabric and topology as well as that of the surrounding landscape. A single-purpose and high-standard engineering managed transportation infrastructure system is becoming more and more difficult to meet the needs of nowadays urban life. In architecture, landscape architecture, and even economic and politics fields, we have seen recently the emergence of the infrastructure as an important concept that appears in a larger thinking about urbanism. This thesis, will aim at this contemporary problem about the integration design of transportation infrastructure in urban environment. The whole research will use literature study, case study, comparative study and induction as the methodology, chase two lines of the development of the relationship between transportation infrastructure and urban environment. One is theory, from the first development of urban planning of Hausman in Paris, to the period that infrastructure was not a space but an engineering structure in urban planning, and to today’s theory research like the infrastructural urbanism first invented by Stan Allen and Transit oriented development from new urbanism. Another is the cases, finding the contemporary example in reality, to see how nowadays transportation especially railway infrastructure integrated different functions and space together. From these two lines of development, I raise a conception called “symbiosis relationship” between transportation infrastructure and urban environment. It means the integration design of transportation infrastructure in urban environment is to solve the contradiction and shape a closely combined relationship. And also it is a balance between these two items. This relationship could be divided into public space, greening system and landscape, scale and the social benefits. And that shows two most important things, one is the ability and potential that transportation infrastructure could push the development of city and become a new regeneration point, another is the possibility and diversity that in symbiosis relationship transportation infrastructure could integrated in city and serve people. Finally, I will apply these theories and proposal into the project in the surrounding place of Shanghai Station in China. On one hand, China is still under the fast development of infrastructure in whole country to meet the development of finance and the huge amount needs from the population, on the other hand, this fast development make the efficiency as the first consideration, so very often, it is not good to be used in urban environment, and damage the urban fabric, become an obstacle for the futher development of the city. The practice here is try to solve these problems using the experience from the theory study and European development. It will talk about “skill of hiding”, “building connection” and “creating public space” as the experience and cases that could be learnt in Barcelona and other European Countries. So this project of trying to make some regeneration in Shanghai Station is to check whether the trend and theory of transportation infrastructure could really be useful to a developing country like China. And through this kind of trying and rethinking, hope this thesis could more or less become a help and reference to today's situation of transportation infrastructure in urban environment.