OMA's Melun Senart

When OMA first saw the site for Melun Senart, they instantly grew emotionally attached, "it was heartbreaking if not obscene, to imagine here, a city". The land was too beautiful architecture, too breathtaking to be interrupted. But, they had to surrender and build something despite these feelings...

The strategy for building Melun Senart was ruled not by asking "where to build", but "where not to build". In voiding out the most precious beautiful pieces of the land, turning them into "islands", that these "unbuilt" islands would be the most popular, ecological spaces in the city... and the rest of the constructed landscape can happen/develop/unfold as it may. The built/ designed is not the focus, the original pieces we find attractive, specifically voided, are.

The question becomes, what beauty is worth voiding in Streetsboro, Ohio?

In a hunt for potential "islands" to save in Streetsboro, I actually found deep behind freeway many pockets of mangled trees, tall whispy grass, willows, and jungle-like conditions. These un-seen pieces of Streetsboro (featured on the first board) ruled the application of urban planning.

Linear City

Leonidov’s Linear City model was birthed out of 1920s Soviet Russia; a context where communism logic lets people not own but share all land “through the organ of government”. Leonidov become quite interested in “the working people” (being quite poor himself, he did plea to art schools to admit him on scholarship) and began imagining a “worker’s utopia”. The form came out of linear parallel bands, each holding a different slice of a city’s program, of course, centered on a worker’s city. The widely accepted bands go in this precise sequence:

1. Railway

2. Industry

3. Green

( BAND OF TRANSPORTATION )

4. Residential

5. Park/ Sport

6. Agricultural

The “band of transportation” as the center piece of the sequence seemed to be a strong anchor to impose this on the transport-based city of Streetsboro. Siting the route to the highway, and then unfolding the sequence on the land caused an interesting phenomenon, the green trees would line the highways as opposed to the current state, industry/retail on the transportation band. With a Linear City model, you would drive along the most beautiful band, and industry would be pushed away from the highway, hence, a new façade is offered to people driving through one of the busiest roads of America.