(Abitare) Designing Urban Future

7/27/2019 (Abitare) Designing Urban Future

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Throughout human history, we have been dependent onmachines to survive. Fate, itseems, is not without a sense

of irony.

... Free your mind.Morpheus,in the movie“ e Matrix”

Imagining and designing the future city has always been a maerof nding consistence between fairy tale and the reality. People

from any given time in history have deliberately done so, and, as aconsequence, making themselves fall in love with the future blueprint. As time goes, however, our own cultivation consciously resists such imagination, the future vision becomes outdated vision before future draws near.is is the dialectics of the fairy tale: onceit is created and xed, it becomes old too soon. As that qual ity of the fairy ta le makes it hard to transcend, we may only start from thereality and approach the point where future is almost tangible, yet we avoid dening and xing it , in order that it doesn’t slip away from our own hands.Curated by Stylepark, Audi Urban Future Award invites six remarkable, and by no means stereotypical, architects andrms todesign the 2030 urban future. Mobility, architectural and urbandevelopment are particular issues addressed in the designs. Oenconcerning living situations in mega cities, the participating architects explore new energy forms and mobility strategies ina empt to draw a blueprint of the urban future. A er three monthsof development, thenal exhibition of ve architects andrmspresents very diverse approaches. Alison Brooks Architects (UK) employs compact electric cars andsmart phone-based digital dashboard for more personal andrelaxed driv ing experience, and thereby releases spaces forcommunity development in the city.e architect takes megacity Mumbai as a case, and proposes a sustainable urban extension based upon an existing transport infrast ructure, integrating culture, infrastructure, political and social institutions in an orderly construct.Bjarke Ingels Group (Denmark) prophesies a future of driverlesscars in 20 years’ time, based on a study of the Kurzweil curve.e

cars will drive us, each supervised by an omniscient transportsystem that enables best optimalow without causing interference between cars and with pedestr ians.is take on mobility optionseems to go at the future in a doing-it-once-and-for-all fashion.Cloud 9 (Spain) invites a group aged 8 to 10, the future urbanleaders so to speak, to join the process.ey present four core values, clean renewable energies, buildings as power plants ,hydrogen technology and fuel cell and lastly smart grid, and insertthem into urban prototypes, in a way not without fairy taleovertones. Houses with stems shooting out, automobiles andairplanes cast in bubbles are just some examples of this happy project.Standardarchitecture’s Zhang Ke (China) consider the “roadrst”city development model, practiced throughout China, to beoutdated, and proposed a “subway rst” model for the existing Beijing urban sprawl. Zhang Ke envisions a city circling the now Beijing, supported by vast subway infrastructure and containing extremely high density hybrid living and working spaces, the“meta-mountains”. In the inner city, he adopts trac belts forindividual and collective transportation, allowing more freedomand community activities even on the road.e roads no longer inuse, recently freed spaces and facades of buildings are renderedgreen: the agricultural culture strikes back.In answer to the aitude toward future, Zhang Ke claims that 2030is rather tangible and 2030 in China may be the equivalent of 2060or even 2090 in western countries, for China wil l have to gothrough more dramatic transformation. Standardarchitecture builds upon a realistic base of current problems and challenges of the future. e future may be partly predicted with a id of statisticsand deduction, the other part is leto uncertainty--an earthquake,for example, could prove to be a chance for a city to redevelop itself.

Alison Brooks Architects

BIG - Bjarke Ingels Group

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7/27/2019 (Abitare) Designing Urban Future

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J. MAYER H. Architects

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Alison Brooks Architects

BIG - Bjarke Ingels Group

is uncertainty factor, however, may well be where the architect’sfuture vision and fairy tales are set apart.e last project, by German architect Jürgen Mayer H., also the winner of Audi UrbanFuture Award, tellsingly a fairy ta le. “A.WAY” assumes that theindividual is a node in an augmented reality system of the city, which not only allows trouble-free mobility, but also integrates allthe information from user’s hobbies to habits in its intelligence, andmake possible, in turn, for the user to interact with surrounding buildings and environment. Automobile becomes the ultimatesensorial experience machine, a platform of constant informationand knowledge exchange.e concrete reality is brought to ourngertip, at the same time its form is challenged, altered by the

layers of augmented reality at play.e digital augments but couldalso potentially replace physical forms.

e prize winning of this project stirred a certain degree of distress.Do we want to hand out our future to an omniscient informationsystem? Do we feel comfortable with our cities possessing no xedform and being a construct of data and information? Is physicality any relevant? Confronting these serious questions, Jürgen MayerH. answered me later, smilingly: You know, the idea of a fairytale is that, A , it might be a pedagogicaltool, B, highlights somethings that is exactly not reality, is afairyta le. So, I am very surprised that almost everybody read my project as my vision of the future. It is not. It is meant to highlight atendency we see now, we live now, and project that one into somemore years to come. By telling this story we can become morecritical of the situation now, and make decisions that might help usto create a beer future. this whole “cars are electric and will driveautomatically”, and “sustainability and social media is the new big thing that wi ll change society”, is such a general rhetoric, that seemsnot to be discussed or questioned at all (think about what are the

interest groups behind this, the green bubble, and network empires),and our project takes this common agreement to a level where it becomes so obscene that it helps us to establish arguments now tounderstand beer what really is going on. In the end it is a lso a wholenetwork of lobbies, interest groups etc., so, our pokeville story is areading tool for today!

e award winner is the only participant who has succeeded indistancing himself from the pitfall of dening a future. Following atof upset, his lile fairy tale proves duly heart-warming. Whichreminds us,Truth is born of disillusion.e real is born of lack of imagination.(Jean Baudrillard)

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