Global Design New York University: Spotlight: Code

Thursday, September 6, 2012

Spotlight: Code - "Fjell Center"

Drammen, Norway

The Fjell area is emerging as a distinct district in Drammen. The area is characterized by its contemporary modernistic expression with high rise housing blocks and a central area with public and commercial services. The project suggests measures as a starting point for a holistic development of the Fjell area. The project takes account of developing Fjell as a campus with important public services, commercial businesses and leisure activities in addition to a large housing development.

Fjell Center

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MISSION

Global warming effects pose new challenges to the architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design communities. The immediate response has been a turn toward a host of energy-saving technologies. What has rarely been addressed, however, is the problem of scale. How can the designer make sure that global solutions do not come at the expense of local traditions, cultures, and environments? By placing human rational, emotional, technological, and social needs at the center of our environmental concerns, we propose a new GLOBAL [Global Local Open Border Architecture and Landscape] design initiative.

We seek a Global yet still Local design that can Open the sociopolitical Borders that all too often separate Architecture from its Landscape. The overreaching aim is to develop a language of design that can create proximity between individual responsibility and the current global environmental crisis. We see environmental problems as a crisis of human alienation from the natural world, and our initiative will explore ways in which design can reformat the unfortunate separation. In our plea for proximity between the individual and the global we will explore, in the words of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a design that is "as close to the beyond as to things near" when we evoke "our power to imagine ourselves elsewhere."