elease ariana samms

Nutrição Natureza

Fall 2012

​​When the physical product of oil is completely erased what will this land be known for? We want our city to outlive its industry; we also want our city to build an awareness of what used to exist in the past. The players involved range from the educational workers and top level executives to the environment and ecological relationships to the oil industry. This is a place where people can come to learn about the mechanics of the oil industry and how to properly build on a special landscape. Education will be put on a platform, where most of this program will be open for the public.

Our injection into the site will be a trinity between education, industry, and environment. Each program will be separated and connected in the appropriate moments. Using infrastructure as the connecter; our moments of transition will not only be roads, but also buildings and landscape. We would like to stress the importance of sharing the shore of the canal between the public and the industry so there is a level of balance in the city. Because of the diverse environmental condition that exists on our site, the geometries placed will not be uniform. We will strategically locate our programs to create zones of potential interaction; through indirect commonalities between the different areas, we will cluster them together through stacking. Looking at Unger’s book, we believe that the theme of “dissemination” satisfies all of our needs for our company town. We have extracted the main seeds of this conguration into a structural set of rules that choreograph the organization of our project. All of the elements involved are directly connected through a network in a nontraditional way. With this precedent, there is no issue of hierarchy because it realizes that all of the components are individual entities that serve their purpose, while at the same time, codependent on each other for successfully existing.

Project Contributors: Xin Zhang, Felema Yemane, Elease Samms