Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Jungmi and Christian walk thesis

(post-walk, but only minimally post-rationalized)

San Francisco is a topographically varying city, and it is in the
negotiation of that topography that it is exposed as a city of
section. Our walk intended to find a particular category of public
lands, those categorized as "slope protection," for we presumed that
we would find a topographic condition of interest. What we
discovered was that the "slope protection" often meant nothing more
than an exposed slope, rather than some engineering response. We
expected to find other slope conditions that we had not encountered
in maps, and did find them: stairs, ramps, sloped concrete, sloped
earth, retaining walls (some of which were used for murals), and
shear (situations where a sidewalk or property occurs at or creates a
sectional difference--a mini-cliff)...all of which revealed an
underutilized portion of SF real estate. Our hope was to see the
possibility of an urban playscape in that slopescape and slipscape.
These vertical expressions of the earth beg to be enjoyed and
emphasized!

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