1985
Master of Architecture
A Study of Urban Infrastructure
David Baier Hotson traveled to Turkey, Greece, Yugoslavia, Italy, Malta, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Portugal, Spain, and France.
David Baier Hotson traveled to Turkey, Greece, Yugoslavia, Italy, Malta, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Portugal, Spain, and France.
David Baier Hotson
Yale University
Pavilion. © David Baier Hotson.
Jury
Henry Cobb
Raul de Armas
Lawrence Doane
Richard Giegengack
Bruce Graham
Robert Holmes
Ronald Krueck
I am interested in studying the ways in which elements of urban infrastructure can be integrated into the fabric of the industrialized American city. The cities in Europe provide many examples of how fortifications, aqueducts, dykes, bridges, and other difficult and atypical urban elements were reconciled with the predominant urban order. Such examples are likely to offer significant insights into how elevated highways, exit ramps, bridge piers, railway and subway lines, and flood control works could be better integrated into the cities of America. I am also interested in the institutions, rituals, and symbolic architectural devices which evolve around these infrastructural elements: the fountains and baths fed by the aqueducts of Rome, the urban rituals which take place on the riverwalls of the Seine, the windmills associated with the seawalls of the Netherlands; the devices which achieve the cultural as well as formal integration of these elements with the city.
I therefore propose a travel itinerary that would begin with a study of the ways in which elements of pre-industrial urban infrastructure have been integrated into the fabric of mature, traditional cities and would conclude with a study of the analogous but unresolved problems of the American city.
The first part of the study would examine both how pre-industrial elements such as aqueducts and fortifications were integrated into the city while they were in use, and how they have been dealt with in the centuries since they have become obsolete. These studies would focus on the city of Rome but would involve extended trips to document such elements as the following:
Upon completing these studies, I would return to the United States where I would consider the architectural and cultural conditions surrounding analogous infrastructural elements in our own cities:
Following these studies, I would proceed with the final portion of the project; I would produce proposals for specific infrastructural conditions in specific cities of America but which address issues which are of broad significance. These proposals would deal with three cases: the colonization or reuse of an obsolete infrastructural element; the integration of an existing, operational element into the urban fabric; and the design of a new element of infrastructure being introduced into an existing urban situation. The following hypothetical projects are examples of the kind of problems that these proposals would examine:
With the insights gained from the study of infrastructural systems in Europe, these proposals would attempt the cultural as well as architectural reconciliation of these elements with the city. The proposals would attempt to explore the mythologies and rituals associated with the elements of infrastructure in order to give cultural and architectural legitimacy to their place in the city.
The results of this study—the documentation of infrastructural elements from the past and their relationship to the form and culture of the city, and the proposals for specific problems in the present—would form the contents of the final report to be submitted to the foundation.
Film study center. © David Baier Hotson.
Branch library. © David Baier Hotson.
Branch library. © David Baier Hotson.
A play in seven thousand parts. © David Baier Hotson.
Office tower. © David Baier Hotson.
David Baier Hotson
Yale University