ULTRA JOURNAL
PAST EDITIONS
VOL. 2
LAYERS
This year’s theme explores the notion of layering and complexity at scales ranging from the city to a single intervention. By exploring the relation between thresholds, intensities, juxtaposition, and overlap, new opportunities emerge for reading the entirety of a composition as a whole; as a form; before one is to realize the layering of its individual components. By blurring boundaries or making them more explicit, how do projects embrace the layered environment or challenge its existing order?
The city fabric is an ever-changing field, characterized by obscuring physical, social, and theoretical boundaries. The projects and editorials within this journal speculate on new modes of layering program, form, user, and context to create complexity. Always at work, overlapping layers associate or separate from one another, each one contributing to the whole while maintaining its own identity. The variance in permeability results in some aspects being concealed, revealed, or the distinction being altogether blurred. Some layers are intuitive and universal. Some are highly functional, while others are purely aesthetic. Some are physical, virtual, or temporal. Whether they combine or contrast, they are crucial to how we read and produce new compositions as poetic depictions.
This journal showcases new realities within the diverse fields of architecture, landscape architecture, and planning. The curation and organization of these projects reveal the connections between conceptual thinking and graphical representation across these disciplines. These pages can be read not only as individual works, but also as a speculative narrative challenging our approach to the built environment and the way in which we occupy it.
The city fabric is an ever-changing field, characterized by obscuring physical, social, and theoretical boundaries. The projects and editorials within this journal speculate on new modes of layering program, form, user, and context to create complexity. Always at work, overlapping layers associate or separate from one another, each one contributing to the whole while maintaining its own identity. The variance in permeability results in some aspects being concealed, revealed, or the distinction being altogether blurred. Some layers are intuitive and universal. Some are highly functional, while others are purely aesthetic. Some are physical, virtual, or temporal. Whether they combine or contrast, they are crucial to how we read and produce new compositions as poetic depictions.
This journal showcases new realities within the diverse fields of architecture, landscape architecture, and planning. The curation and organization of these projects reveal the connections between conceptual thinking and graphical representation across these disciplines. These pages can be read not only as individual works, but also as a speculative narrative challenging our approach to the built environment and the way in which we occupy it.