ABSTRACT
A concern with embodying the postmodern city’s flux and mutability has emerged as a strategy for generating structure and form in recent urban architecture. Works by firms such as UN Studio, Foreign Office Architects, MVRDV and OMA, among others, have engaged with the architectural potentials of ‘datascapes’. That interest in pursuing formal strategies related to the dynamics of the city has also engendered the projection of socially integrative spaces: conceptual heterotopias of flows. The Yokohama Port Terminal designed by Foreign Office Architects (FOA) (completed in 2002) and the Arnhem Central interchange by UN Studio in collaboration with Cecil Balmond of Arup (due for completion in 2007) are examples of that interest. They explore what one could call an urbanism of flows, or Flow Urbanism – both are framed by their designers as ‘smooth spaces’ of urban mobility that generate new forms of public space.
