The Walled City (10-Mile Version)

Date: 2017

Location: Oakland, CA

Exhibition: Drawing Codes: Experimental Protocols of Architectural Representation, January 17 – February 4, 2017, Hubbell Street Galleries, San Francisco

Size: 635mm x 635mm

Instructions for a Walled City:

1. On a site of any size, create a closed wall at the site edge.

2. Gradually increase the perimeter of the wall while making sure the wall never intersects itself or the site edge.

3. Continue increasing the wall perimeter until all available land within the site is full.

4. Increase the wall thickness by some amount so that it can contain program.

5. Divide the wall into smaller sections.

6. Go to www.google.com and in the search box enter the word “rooftop” followed by a space and, sequentially, each letter of the alphabet. From the list of auto-completed suggestions for each phrase, choose one phrase that suggests a possible program for the Walled City and record it. If typing only one letter after “rooftop” does not produce any interesting suggestions, type an additional letter starting from letter “a” and iterate through the alphabet again until a better suggestion appears. For this iteration of The Walled City, the following program suggestions were used:

Rooftop Antenna
Rooftop Bar
Rooftop Cafe
Rooftop Deck
Rooftop Exhaust
Rooftop Film
Rooftop Garden
Rooftop Hotel Pool
Rooftop Ice Skating Rink
Rooftop Jacuzzi
Rooftop Kitchen
Rooftop Lounge
Rooftop Market
Rooftop Nightclub
Rooftop Observatory
Rooftop Park
Rooftop Quad
Rooftop Restaurant
Rooftop Solar Panels
Rooftop Terrace
Rooftop Unit HVAC
Rooftop View
Rooftop Wind Turbine
Rooftop Xmas Tree
Rooftop Yoga
Rooftop Zen Garden

7. Randomly sort the wall subdivisions into 26 groups.

8. Populate each group of wall subdivisions with one of the rooftop programs.

9. Populate the area outside of the wall with various landscape features and the area inside the wall with various urban street furniture.

10. Connect the rooftop with the land inside the wall with stairs.