Tropic of Charlie
“The world of images controls the world of matter.”
- Christopher Alexander
Images
Blog
Work
About
News
Copyright © 2026 Charlie Allen
all rights reserved.
Urban Drawing Iterations
“We thought that we had the answers, it was the questions we had wrong"
— 11 O'Clock Tick Tock by U2
Introduction
To temper the throes of practice, I’ve engaged in a quasi-daily act of drawing vignettes that continue to work on the ideas explored in my graduate thesis at SCI-Arc. The Modern and Post-Post Modern architects have lionized light and air, but we humans smoke, we fume in traffic, we basque in the glow of blue light emitted from monitors with homescreens featuring locations we will likely never, nor ever care to, visit. These exercises in articulating spaces with different spatial programs and polemics baked in are ungrounded and speculative in nature. Their purpose is as much to disintegrate as construct, to stretch the imagination as to resolve it, and it’s been an excellent opportunity to challenge my creative inhibitions. What new environments, biomes, and urbanisms, can emerge when we supsend our disbelief about questions answered in the reality presented by gravity and master planners?
Avenues
These avenues are an attempt to decouple our conception of street void space as as a sinple vertical extrusion of the street. Here avenues run adjacent, through and around the building masses. The volume constituting the urban void contains portions of these avenues, but is punctured, aligned, lined, and nearly- missed by these avenues. Streets are still democratic public thoroughfares, but they are decoupled from the rambling bulbous urban void that guides the building volumes. All cities have these urban voids, they are just dictated by air rights and the economics of parking structures rather than an intentional and collaborative across governing formal entities.
Surf
In the same way we have water features that are dressed up like natural streams, so also must surf propogate from pools and ponds associated with an urbanism that seeks to reimagine cities as ever more creative syntheses between the natural and the artificial. To restate. The natural-artificial dichotomy would best be disregarded, replaced instead by an urbanism who’s expansion defies cost-benefit logic. Can we live, both work and play, amongst our global aspirations for environmental restoration? This will involve density that necessitates new and ever more creative juxtapositions of programs. The insertion of waves pools demonstrates just how surreal such an urbanism can be.
Verticality
How do vertical elements suture these crisscrossing streets on different levels/planes together? I doubt that they’ll remain flat planes purely for the use of climbing, but here I’ve drawn them this way. Inevitably, they’ll need both structural and ADA compliant thickness, for elevators. But elevators should always be coupled with several other creative means to move through these spaces. These elements are strange and abstract, demanding further exploration.
Riverine
The next element is water, and I’m definietly borrowing from the four elements of the Japanese garden: greenery or plants, water, stone, and artifact, as a starting point. There is something telling in conceiving of a city using the building blocks of a garden, especially in the wake of Modern city planning with “Radiant Garden Cities,” etc. Nevertheless, we must use the density afforded by cities to enable new and dynamic juxtapositions between evermore surreal elements. We’re not inventing new LED light shows around every corner, but if you thought the city was dry, it’s wet. If you thought the city was dominated by ambulance noise and poorly domesticated dog and their leavings, maybe it’s drowned out at times by waterfalls and scents of an encroaching vine that inhabit the nooks, crannies, and overhangs of the urban topography. A new geography emerges where the city is itself an urban salve.
Roof
A new geography emerges. The rooftop terrace must be implemented wherever possible. This has become a conviction that also ties back to a different part of Koolhaus’ Delirious New York - the multiplication of real estate that is the skyscraper and the opportunity for multifaceted program to be sandwiched throughout any given building.1 The roof of the building should be no exception. We should have neither black roofs, nor white roof’s, but instead green and blue roofs. There should be some program that is not mechanistic in nature that inhabits 90% of the roof. And that 90-10 is open to interpretation as of course there are MEP functions that must be factored in. And roof quality and systems must move to this space for us as well. But we invest so much in half a built level, why not just pay the rest to get the additional value. Multiplication of land is the common thread through the evolution of dense urbanism, but we must carry this into compelling rooftop programmatic use, otherwise the space will always be looked at as lesser than enclosed conditioned spaces.
Conclusion
All of these big ideas are exlored with an awareness of our cities’ current affairs. In the moment, change seems impossible, inconceivable, and wildy out of reach. And it is this way...until it’s not. One regulatory break through, one interested national government, one global pandemic, one creative move by a city can radically change the way we urbanize. Hopefully we’ve stretched ourselves beyond the narrow confines of contemporary urbanism prior to these moments of potentially cataclysmic change.
In the interim we must hone our craft. Engaging with the present forces and exploring new ones through drawing. For now this is a physical process, but it may enter the digital quite soon. Regardless, drawing transcends medium, providing a means by which we can think, analyze and iterate, simultaneously.