Mejia_Rodriguez: Mach 5 Recreational Park Description

When we first started our team looked into a big brown bag full of goodies, as we dug deep we found the Mach 5 toy race car, and it would be our concept for the rest of the semester. The Mach 5 race car is a fictional race car from the Japanese comic and cartoon by the name of ‘MachGoGoGo,’ with the English adaptation being a cartoon called ‘Speed Racer.’ Speed Racer was the name of the fictional cartoon driver of our car, ‘The Mach 5.’

We first began by dissecting the toy car. We looked at the insides and outs; further, we saw four main components that could be useful: the rotating component, the enclosing membrane, the interior, and the aerodynamic structure. The one that stood out mostly was the aerodynamic structure. As we researched people like Ali Rahim, Zaha Hadid, UN Studio, and more, we began the first steps to giving this concept an identity.

In our next step we began to transform the aerodynamic curves of the Mach 5 race car. We transformed the Mach 5 curves, which can be seen as a gradual progression of curves, into an exaggeration on stressed curves versus relaxed curves. Using these curves we assembled a structure that could hold 1 to 5 people. After various analysis and diagrams we came to the conclusion that the structure was still very conceptual. In the Final rendering a organic landscape shyly apparent seemed more appealing than the concept itself, it looked odd as a building structure. This sparked a new initiative of creating a landscape. We realized that the most important inspiration to our final project would not come from the likes of Ali Rahim and Zaha Hadid, but it came in the form of landscape architect Maya Lin. Her works like the wave-field which consist of eight rows of grass waves done at the University of Michigan and the Bicentennial Park at Ohio University would inspire our project throughout.

Although, before we started our journey into the actual process of developing a purposeful space that could hold a maximum of fifty people, we had to research how particles would interact with the curved surfaces we created. We used RealFlow software to digitally animate a ‘water-bucket’ and then a ‘wind-vortex.’ What we witnessed was that the particles had more motion around the tight curves as opposed to the relaxed curves. The particles were in motion inside the tight curves; we then saw these tight curves begin to dictate the movement of the particles.
Once our performance research was done, we began our journey into transforming these curves into a purposeful space. We began the landscape by having the same opposition of tight curves and relaxed curves. As we began to create this landscape, it hit us, people do not react the same as particles. People will become stagnant and use the tight curved surfaces as resting spaces, or become active and use the loose surfaces as functioning spaces. This began the start of our Mach 5 Recreational Park. The park is made up three modules, each module containing curved surfaces that can morph and create standing, leaning, and seating conditions. The landscape was designed to evoke the aerodynamic curves of the Mach 5, which dictates air movement, in order to dictate human movement.