A platform for research: civil engineering, architecture and urbanism
A platform for research: civil engineering, architecture and urbanism
Notes on "Camping" : vacationing in Fairmount Park.
Vacationing in Fairmount Park
The public perception of landscape is still primarily shaped by eighteenth-century English aesthetics, pastoral idealism disassociated with infrastructural reality. This idealism is on display in most cities, in the form of municipal parks which Koolhaas states can be read as both "an operation of preservation" and "a series of manipulations."' Further support of this assertion is the means by which municipal parks preserve an appearance of naturalness. Philadelphia's Fairmount Park, the site of this thesis, is continually constructed and managed by a staff of hundreds, assuring the right varieties of vegetation, constant fish stocks in a polluted river, purposeful insect infestations, etc. If this presentation of nature is wholly synthetic, can it be re-imagined as an architectural project? Modern architecture adopted the conditioned interior as a means of isolating the interior from exterior. Pushed to its logical end, could the conditioned interior become a new municipal park? The thesis proposes that the preservation programs of the park be recast as a new interior pleasure garden which makes visible Fairmount Park's necessarily synthetic construction.
Notes on "Camping" : vacationing in Fairmount Park.
Vacationing in Fairmount Park
The public perception of landscape is still primarily shaped by eighteenth-century English aesthetics, pastoral idealism disassociated with infrastructural reality. This idealism is on display in most cities, in the form of municipal parks which Koolhaas states can be read as both "an operation of preservation" and "a series of manipulations."' Further support of this assertion is the means by which municipal parks preserve an appearance of naturalness. Philadelphia's Fairmount Park, the site of this thesis, is continually constructed and managed by a staff of hundreds, assuring the right varieties of vegetation, constant fish stocks in a polluted river, purposeful insect infestations, etc. If this presentation of nature is wholly synthetic, can it be re-imagined as an architectural project? Modern architecture adopted the conditioned interior as a means of isolating the interior from exterior. Pushed to its logical end, could the conditioned interior become a new municipal park? The thesis proposes that the preservation programs of the park be recast as a new interior pleasure garden which makes visible Fairmount Park's necessarily synthetic construction.
Notes on "Camping" : vacationing in Fairmount Park.
Vacationing in Fairmount Park
Murphy, Ryan M (author)
2009
69 pages
Thesis (M. Arch.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2009.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 69).
Theses
Electronic Resource
English
Engineering Index Backfile | 1894
The Cresheim arch, Fairmount Park, Philadelphia
Engineering Index Backfile | 1893
Erection of a Fairmount Park Bridge
Engineering Index Backfile | 1898
The Walnut Lane bridge, Fairmount Park, Philadelphia
Engineering Index Backfile | 1907
A novel electric railway in Fairmount Park, Philadelphia
Engineering Index Backfile | 1896