Thickening the Public Realm: Choreographing the Interaction of the Public Realm with the Built Environment

The ground plane has always been the primary domain of public activities. However, cities developed under the Modernist influence demonstrate an “object-in-space” circumstance with proliferating sky-scrapers that fragment the city’s ground surface into mid-block spaces and vaguely defined plazas. The demands of motorized-transportation and private enterprise further scatter spaces for pedestrian activities across the plan, section and stratified layers of the city (subterranean or/and elevated networks).The result is an inconsistent public realm that remains from being animated by public vitality. Through the manipulation of the ground-plane, this thesis seeks to remedy such stratification. It posits that a thickening of the ground to create a three-dimensional spatial condition will amplify opportunities for social interaction within otherwise muted civic surfaces. Addressing the contemporary reality of the multiplied ground, this thesis advocates reactivating it as a thickened continuous public domain that dissolves the polarity between the built and social fabric of the city.