URBANISM ECOLOGY AND PLACE: Reading "City Riffs"

The recent publication of book titled " City Riffs" by Richard Plunz ( Columbia University, GSAPP) is based on urbanism discourse (dialogue) in relation to place and ecology. The preface by Kenneth Frampton argues the production of urban knowledge in neo-liberal economy results in aporetic question on limits and scope in the field of urban study. He brings about three important and critical discourses by Christopher Alexander on low rise, high density model, E.J Mishan work on "The Cost of Economic Growth" and Plunz work on "CIty Riffs" demonstrating the linear process of indictment of urban transformation towards maldistribution of resources.

The book brings the analogy of place and ecology, which needs in-depth understanding as both shares concept of place and space. His argument on place based centrality to urban discourse which perhaps has not been dissected theoretically enough as compare to environmental science. He argues further that how biological diversity merges with urban diversity and how evolutionary process of environmental science can aid the process of advancement of field based urbanism. The place based urbanism (field urbanism) and environmental science (not ecology) can be seen as entangled bank, which engages the challenge of conflict and dependency. 

The argument of  "Riff", improvisation is a disciplinarian movement addressing subtlety, ambivalence in field urbanism. 

ARCHITECTURE OF THE ENMESHED CULTURE

The recent trends of architecture demonstrates the pugnacious departure from disciplined modernism. The traditional notion of creativity is slowly replaced by innovation in technological inputs and tools that generate the forms rather than tools that aids the process of generating one. The sinuous forms, non-structured or non euclidean geometry are encapsulating minds and thoughts into unidirectional understanding of architecture as form making process. Having said that the argument of Aesthetic or delight is not only re-created but formally put in to the realm of hedonism. The architecture has never been so polemic at any stage of its evolution. The only reliable source of justification of  the emergence of such architecture is the way cultural ingredient that are induced universally, uniformly and unequivocally across the globe through in-numerous mediums amounting into forced reality.

The sterile or dogmatic ideas are slowly giving away to kinetic notion of architecture, the purity is giving away to meandering chaos, the sacred is becoming blur and indulgence is emergence reality. The everywhere architecture of modernist manifesto is replace by anything architecture.