Joshua Cole

A Brief Inquiry into (Sub)Urban Relationships

…Learning from Philadelphia, I became interested in the relationship of the pedestrian and the built form. The pedestrian in the city meets the same street corner every block and is consumed by the shadowing of the buildings above them. The ground plane is consistent, only changing from road to footpath, and footpath to building entrance. Furthermore, as a city with a rich social and political history, there values are stored in the stone of the monumental buildings and the statues that define their city scape.

The primary aim of the new city was to recompose the idea of the suburb, with the approach an urban scheme. This statement, in combination with the ideologies of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown formed the basis of my project. Whilst I hope that the project still embraces the ideas of suburbia, the formal gestures of the city itself had to use a similar operation of the existing city centre; ground plane, pedestrian, monument…