Architectural Laboratory II

Description and Assessment

Table of contents:

1.  Introduction

2.  The Intersection

3.  The Exploration

4.  Tools of Presentation

5.  The Teaching Process

6.  Students' Results

• Introduction

• Land Use Analysis

• Signage Analysis

• Audio-Visual Analysis

• Urban Fabric Analysis

• Visual Perception Analysis

6.  Students' Results:

Introduction

The students started visiting the site at different times of the day (and night).  They drove through the site, walked in it and around it, and also took a bus line that passed through it.  They went inside its buildings, and they looked at the site from the windows of those buildings and even from their rooftops.

They looked at the "collisions" between the commercial zone immediately around the roundabout and the residential areas that lay just beyond it.  Going through the site, one would not imagine that a more serene area is located just behind the hustle and bustle of the site.  The areas where the two zones met however leave much to be desired.  These have become a sort of no-man's zone, and the commercial enterprises of the site usually dumped all sorts of items, such as empty containers and discarded furniture, in the setbacks behind their buildings.

A couple of students explored the commercial signs dominating the site.  Along with the heavy traffic zooming through the intersection's overpass and underpass, and often coming to a standstill along the roundabout, the commercial signs of the site are its most prominent feature.  Not only are they plastered on its buildings, but enormous commercial signs also are placed on the roofs of buildings, and they may be viewed from considerable distances (as from the roofs of houses located a couple of kilometers away from the site).  The use of oversized signs is not limited to the buildings located along the roundabout, but extends into Mecca and Medina streets, especially along the commercial part of Medina Street that continues to the north of the site.  In one building along that street near the intersection, it was observed that the square area of the signs is 1.3 times the area of the main façade of the building with which they are associated.  The signs clearly have come to dominate that which is built, and the buildings often seemed no more than props that held the signs.  At night, when the signs are lit, the buildings almost disappear, and all that one sees are the signs tacked onto them. 

As the students examined the signs more carefully, they began to discover that a system of categorization and hierarchy could be identified out of the seemingly chaotic spread of commercial signs.  The hierarchy placed the largest signs on the rooftops of the buildings located immediately bordering the intersection and facing it, since these were the ones most readily visible to vehicles as they moved into or through the intersection.  The enormous size of the signs clearly indicates that they are intended for those in motor vehicles and not for pedestrians. 

One student put a video camera around her neck and had it document her footsteps as she walked around parts of the site.  The resulting video clip showed the various textures of the ground surfaces of the site, the paved and the unpaved.  It showed patterns of light and shade in the site.  It also showed how and when pedestrian movement met vehicular movement, as she would stop when crossing one of the streets cutting through the site.  The zooming vehicles clearly had priority over the marginalized pedestrian.

Another student took a video from a moving car (the medium of videos was the most popular tool of documentation and analysis used amongst the participants, but more about that later).  An informative video he took showed movement through Medina Street as it starts at its "T" intersection with Zahran Street, goes through a two-kilometer stretch of street that primarily consists of residential apartments, passes over the roundabout, and moves on to another stretch of the street that primarily consists of commercial buildings.  He coupled the video with a map that showed the density of buildings along this part of Medina Street that he traversed.  The images he produced showed that the residential stretch of Medina Street, to the south of the intersection, consisted primarily of a specific building type, the four-story, eight-unit apartment building.  This building type has its problems as a solution to residential needs in Amman (a subject that is beyond the scope of this essay), but it does present a unified building scale along the street.  Although each residential building has a different set of tree types planted along the stretch of sidewalk in front of it, the greenery of the trees provides some continuity along the stretch of the street.

Once one approaches the intersection and moves into the commercial part of Medina Street, one enters a markedly different realm.  The banal and uninspired, but generally coherent, residential stretch makes way for an anarchic urban scene.  There is no consistent building form that characterizes the commercial retail and office buildings located along that part of the street; there also is an absence of a consistent scale that brings these buildings together.  The proliferation of commercial signs on the facades of buildings and over their rooftops adds to this chaotic feel.  In addition, there are no trees in front of any of the buildings, and, for all practical purpose, no sidewalks.  Instead, there are asphalted areas bordering the street itself in which vehicles park, in no apparent order.  The difference between the two stretches of the street separated by the intersection, the residential and commercial, is overwhelming.  Interestingly enough, the uniformity of the residential stretch of the street is interrupted in the pockets along it where commercial uses are located.  Here, one gets a glimpse of the chaos prevalent in the commercial stretch of the street, since massive signs located over relatively small buildings overwhelm these commercial pockets.

Some students also carried out what might be referred to as "dead-end" exercises.  One student followed red-colored elements beginning from the intersection, and from there followed these elements along the western extension of Mecca Street.  She followed everything including red signs, red automobiles, a red container discarded along the street, and even a red chocolate wrapper thrown along the street.  It was an interesting exercise.  It did provide a linear visual line of elements connecting parts of the street together.  However, in addition to the fact that the presence of many of these elements on the street is transitory, it was very difficult to find a visual system or pattern that explained the distribution of the red permanent red signs along the street.

This section provides the students' descriptions of their projects.  Although the texts of the descriptions have been considerably edited for the purpose of realizing as much clarity and brevity as possible, the editing process has aimed at facilitating the process of self-expression and explanation for the students, rather than attempting to provide an external interpretation of their projects.

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