Highrise living and the inclusive city
University of São Paulo and Université de Lyon, 2019 / 2021
Does building upwards actually make a city more inclusive? Academics answered that with decades of statistical series, spatial cartography and field observation. And we translated that into visual output that made expert knowledge accessible online.
Results that left the page:
A 5-day international symposium of conferences, broadcast openly and free to attend.
A book published by Vernon Press, Producing and living the high-rise: New contexts, old questions?
A film presented at the Venice Architecture Biennale.
The design challenge
Communicating the result meant communicating the process. Dozens of interdependent data sets had to become one visual language, legible to specialists and stable across every format the research travelled through: publishing, digital, static and animated.
Multiscale reading process
One diagram became the navigation system for the entire project. A true visual guide that tells you where to look at each moment, which data to look for, and what nature of information that data carries.
The morphology of the city.
The closer the study moved to its object, the more detailed the data became, and the greater the challenge of representing it.
Searching for creative solutions everywhere, a city block was unfolded like a flattened 3D object, correlating uses and morphologies on a single readable plane.
The walk, mapped.
Dozens of layers, one readable surface. Colour, symbols, line, photography, zoom and a measured dose of abstraction, calibrated so nothing is lost in print or on screen, still or in motion.
From map to 3D extrusion.
A dense overlay of points, redrawn as an extruded intensity graph, made visible what the research had set out to prove: the sheer concentration of sociospatial practice gathering around the building.
The beauty of digital.
The project took the freedom of format, application and interactivity that digital allows, and turned years of narrative into an interactive timeline.
Credits: Researchers — Camila Moreno, Julio Padrassoli, Luciano Costa, Manoel Alves, Marcel Fantin. Students Researchers and Graphic Design — Sarah Rolindo, Giovana Sibinel, Laura Scrideli, Maria Sylvia Serra, Matheus Vasconcellos e Ricardo Santhiago.