The city of tomorrow

The 30 square kilometre Tianjin Eco-City is to serve as a model for future developing Chinese cities. As China rapidly modernises, there is need to create a sustainable city model as increasing rural-urban migration places pressures and demands on overtaxed and crowded existing cities.

A conscious effort was made not to create a generic city devoid of humanising features or cognitive characteristics, one that is replicated ad infinitum in cities of rapidly developing economies. With the aim of creating a sense of place, the urban design of the scheme is driven by a set of coordinated solutions with theme...

What are the most challenging aspects of your work as a futurist at the moment?

One of the critical questions we are asking ourselves at the moment is what do we do as architects in a near future where the dominant building material exists outside the physical spectrum. The infrastructure that drove the development of the city was once large permanent networks of roads, plumbing and park spaces but are now nomadic digital networks, orbiting GPS satellites and cloud computing connections. Cities are being planned around the speed of electrons, satellite sight lines and big data. Connection to wifi is more critical than connection to light. The city must be planned around the mobile phone not the automobile. Today we are much closer to our virtual community than we are to our real neighbours. This death of distance has created new forms of city based around ephemeral digital connections rather than physical geography.

These changes mean we must rethink the very core of what our profession is. It is true that there will still be physical objects and spaces that some sort of architect like character will have to engage with but this window of operation is becoming increasing narrow. To continue to define our work within this part of the spectrum will just lead to us becoming more and more marginalized and irrelevant. We think reimagining the architect as futurist and strategist is part of a necessary process of adaptation.

Over millennia floods, earthquakes and fire have brought hell and high water to cities, leaving a path of death and destruction in their wake. However, could today’s disasters could be turned into tomorrow’s opportunities for cities?

The cities of the past and present were built on the assumption that we live in a steady state world, which of course we don’t. We instead live on the surface of a series of ever-moving plates, upon a ball of molten rock spinning through space at approximately 1038 miles per hour. Several thousand years of relatively low seismic activity, against the backdrop of a generally stable and temperate climate in most parts of the world, have led man to forget the nature of our planet.

While researching resilience within natural ecosystems to extreme meteorological and geological events, I came to realize that there are several distinct universal principles that enable these systems to sustain their core infrastructures over expansive periods of time. These principles are completely at odds with the built environment design paradigm by which we currently build our cities. In contract to man, nature builds complex flexible inter-connected intelligent infrastructures with both the ability to anticipate and prepare for significant environmental changes. Wherein such changes occur with relative frequency (i.e. annually), nature builds the changes into its lifecycle, for example ecosystems located within deltas and wetlands are designed to accommodate annual flooding events.

Albert Einstein once said, “The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.” Leonardo da Vinci exemplifies the pertinence of Einstein’s comment, for as an illegitimate child da Vinci was exempt from receiving a formal education and thus self-taught; learning much of what he knew from his personal observations of the natural world.

However, while an increasing number of architects are looking to nature for answers to some of our toughest built environment problems, the sustainability movement as a whole has not acknowledged the fact that, to once again quote Einstein, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it”.

The Bionic City is an attempt to answer the question “how would nature design a city resilient to such events?”

One of the most striking differences between man-made environments and natural ones is the fact humans veer towards off-the-peg solutions, whereas nature only ever opts for bespoke. Whereas man takes an architectural or planning concept and rolls it out universally with few, if any adaptations from site to site, nature carefully tailors its concepts to suit the specifics of individual locations, which explains for example, why the Asian elephant is similar, but noticeably different to the African elephant.

How might The Bionic City look? In contrast to the sprawling mass of disconnected, static and inert structures that compromise today’s cities, it would instead operate as a seasonally adaptive collective of interconnected and interdependent shape-shifting, colour changing, dynamic architectures, that sensitive to their surroundings, fused to form a complex adaptive system in sync with the Earth’s natural processes. The city’s relationship with nature would be hand-in-glove, wherein ecosystem services and man-made bionic technologies engaged in symbiotic relationships spanning from the molecular to the metropolis in scale.

A unique structure called The Cloud is being proposed as the centre piece for the Olympic Village in London.

Cloud technology is fast becoming the method of choice for users that want to access all their information where-ever they are in the world... but an actual 'Digital Cloud' is being pondered to be a centre piece of the city's Olympic village.

The Cloud would 'float' over London's skyline and would be made up of 120m towers holding a series of interconnected plastic bubbles that would display images and data. It would also be used as an observation deck as well as a park.

The unique structure has come from the minds of an international team of architects, artists and engineers and due to its 'flexible nature', the design team are planning to raise funds for the scheme by asking for micro-donations from millions of people.

Czech architect Jiri Richter recently unveiled his proposal for a self-sufficient vertical city to be located in pristine landscapes. Richter’s project investigates the possibility of creating a building that will support an entire community without a nation’s help. The structure is designed as two 150-meter tall arches with hanging floors. The central core is an open space aligned to wind currents where two wind turbines, along with photovoltaic cells will generate the required energy for the community.

We don’t need nuclear power, coal, or biofuels. We can get 100 percent of our energy from wind, water, and solar (WWS) power. And we can do it today—efficiently, reliably, safely, sustainably, and economically.

Vertical Landscape is an urban intervention proposed by Pratt Institute graduate student Sejal Bhimjiani where architecture and landscape appear as a continuous element. The project creates an exchange between rigid urban grids of metropolises such as Shanghai or New York City and “soft” landscape through a series of vertical experiences. The topological and continuous areas in a multipurpose plaza at ground level transforms into a serene vertical sculptural park, jogging trails, and camping grounds. Sejal describes the project as a new typology that activates and transforms the cityscape at different scales. The structure also defines public and private spaces through an innovative structural ribbon that expands at lower levels.

The 2011 d3: Housing Tomorrow competition called for the design of “transformative solutions that advance sustainable thought, building performance, and social interaction”. David Zhai and Alexis Burson’s winning selection for the New York category was an innovative project that speculated on the future of the network society through the hybridization of data and living.

The design strategy called for a series of server farms established within a network of high and low-density housing. The servers interface with surrounding domestic spaces allowing informational feedback to occur between the inhabitants and a kinetic architectural system that responds to the various spatial needs of its community.

Camlica Hill TV-Radio Tower, Istanbul

This TV-Radio tower designed by architects Ahmet Unveren and Seckin Maden will be located on the great Camlica Hill – Istanbul, which has an altitude of 240 meters above sea level. The site consists of 120.000m⊃2; in a natural reserve protected by the government. The project aims to be an innovative 350 meter high tower that would clean the overall mess of the current TV and radio antennas on the site.

The project is based on the duality of the natural protected site and the tower. This duality comes up with: functional trauma, formal trauma, and spatial trauma. Instead of accepting the disconnection and fixing it; the intention is to utilize the tower as the functional and formal continuation of the natural protected site.

It has been some time since we “logged on” to the internet. Most of us have ditched dial-up ages ago. I still have fond memories of the sounds my modem would make. The dial tone, the numbers being dialed, and the funny connection static. That last noise signaling the handshake was complete and I could now surf the web. Today, we turn on our computers and they are already connected. Our wi-fi enabled devices have already stored our connection settings and connect to any network in memory automatically. While wi-fi and cell phones have enabled us to bring the internet with us, the future of the internet will spill out of our homes even more. It will free itself from our devices and become available to us wherever we are. It will be embedded in our appliances, our buildings, our clothing, and even our trash.

Building work in Milan for a pair of skyscrapers that will become home to the world’s first vertical forest is underway.

The sci-fi movie fantasies depicting the cities of tomorrow have a range of commonalities: the sheer density of urban form, the soaring building heights and the multistorey compartmentalization of space into different uses. The ground becomes the seedbed for humans to pass around with proportionally greater ease – a more efficient and pleasant way to live. The echelons above ground level are the breeding ground for mechanized urban mobility, each layer presenting a free and rapid flow of electric vehicles hovering the city straights. Movement is reaching optimized levels as the notion of traffic becomes antiquated; congestion is monitored by an inter-connecting set of supercomputers that ensure the most well-ordered movement of humans, goods and services.

The ground consists of sweeping green areas, beautified public recreation areas and other habitats (such as exotic biomes). The basic quality of life created is of exceptional caliber and the health of urban citizens forges a major platform for human advancement. Life expectancies rocket, the plights of an aging population eliminated and perhaps even civilian morale will be boosted (which trickles down from the corporate world to the very basics of family life). In fact, an Austrian architect by the name of Frederick Kiesler, the mastermind behind the ‘City in Space‘ concept, claimed that the ability to “move in a straight line” without physical impediment (besides buildings) is one of the key drivers behind lowered energy consumption.

To confront with the sea level rising of New York, Tingwei Xu and Xie Zhang from the University of Pennsylvania designed an idea for protecting certain areas against water by wearing a “membrane’. Deriving from the intelligent components, we created a surface system that can reveal a continually changing expression. The transforming surface can combine the multiple functions such as waterproof, lighting and agricultural planting. Rather than a traditional hierarchy design thinking, each component on the surface has equal essentiality. It is a irreducible integrity.

New Housing for Shanghai

The aim of this project is to explore possible solutions to housing problems in rapidly developing cities worldwide.

Shanghai was chosen as the location for this study because it is affected by extreme poverty, social segregation, and lack of housing developments.

Throughout the use of computer algorithms it is possible to generate a self-organizing urban structure of infinite complexity that responds to constant changes and urban forces. The result is a designed genotype or set of rules for a housing development, instead of a definitive product. This system can be applied to an infinite number of environments and produce radically different outcomes, specific to each location.

An ornate structural system suspending a patch of greenery high above the ground can serve as a concise explanation of the winning concept for the Taiwan Tower Competition for Taichung City. The structure will frame the semi-outdoor interior space and create an elevated urban retreat by providing a green rooftop island for the city inhabitants. Designed by Sou Fujimoto Architects, the tower is a symbolic landmark with strong sculptural rhetorics. Visible from many points throughout the city, the building reintroduces the beauty of nature into the urban fabric.

Elevated Brood by Paul D Nicholls is a masterful display of the application of nature inspired architecture. The structure is situated in London’s Hyde Park, on the bank of Serpentine Lake. Its combination of steel and polycarbonate support elements creates a striking architectural imagery.

It can be said that both architecture and urban design of the contemporary metropolises and suburbs are directly influenced by the reinvention of modes of movement such as lifts, subways, and automobiles.

As a result of such inter-twined development between the automobiles and modern urbanism, the world at large is undergoing what may be described as a ‘bifurcation’; experiencing concurrent population, technological and information shifts.