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2250 AD: A Nautical Odyssey
desoumal writes " In the blog 2250 AD: A Nautical Odyssey
published in WorldChanging,
which covers a recent challenge presented to the student teams from 80 Indian colleges that entered in NASA '04 (National Association of Students of Architecture's annual design
event), held in Mumbai, India, by Hiray College Of Architecture,
Rohit Gupta writes about the highlights of the event - a city based on a giant
question mark, a city inside a giant genetically-modified tree trunk, cities that grow like viruses, cities that look and function like holes made by earthworms...
my personal favorite amongst them being a city with a photovoltaic dome 'designed so that it literally followed the path of the sun round the year, to maximize the solar energy, down to individual housing units'.
Damn cool. "
My brain hurts from reading that incredible run-on sentence summary. Remember boys and girls, the period is your friend. Read on for even more punctuation pointers!
It is ironic that one of the proposed structures (see the picture in TFA) is a giant city-structure in the shape of a question mark!
Urge to post... fading... fading... RISING!... fading... fading... gone.
most of the teams assumed that the world would be largely submerged in water, that the atmosphere would be far too polluted to be breathable, and energy would be scarce, b) the designs took little note of human nature or costs and c) almost all of them approached growth vertically.
Why would these guys assume that the majority of the world would be under water? Surely, I can believe that the air might be too polluted to be breathable...
However, if society can figure out how to place entire communities of people under water... certainly we can figure out how to clean some air.
Honestly, I love contests like this. We used to have them when I was in college. You are given a scenerio then you find all the potential losses and gains around this situation, you think of solutions, and then you write a detailed plan around the best solution.
The majority of the winners that I remember from my ole college days have come true. We explored internet growth, viruses, loss of fossil fuels, and such...
Oh, those were the days.
One of them, Vishal, told me why they had constructed a city in the shape of a giant question mark, floating on the water, just off the coast of Marine Drive, Bombay. "It represents the invisible actual, and metaphorically, the unknown perfect design that will stand there in 2250 AD. Obviously, this is not that working design but only a notion of it. Only the question remains.."
WTF? Somebody care to translate. Please?
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cities that grow like viruses, cities that look and function like holes made by earthworms
I think this is analogous of most cities in America, no? I like the genetic tree drunk idea - a bit like the elven wood city of Lothlorien...
Take a close look at the URL *before* you click - those are not gmail invites but penisbird trolls.
How fscking lame.
I've always thought that Banyan trees would make a good basis for organic architecture. By weaving the dangling prop roots, people could make walls, doors, halls, rooms, etc. The tree could grow with the family.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I'd build a city that floats on clouds. It would be called, oh, lets say Stratus. We'd enslave those who remained on the earth to mine the minerals we would need to survive (always a good idea).
Oh, and the women would wear these top thingies that looked like the bandoliers on Mexican bandits.
Am I the only one that thinks a nautical settlement is less likely for the future than space settlements? If I had to guess, the circumstances that would drive us to inhabit a new frontier would likely make the seas uninhabitable as well.
As one of those whiny former architorture students (studied it for four years), these contest submissions remind me of everything I hated about the subject. Namely: lots of pseudo-intellectual babble, and a propensity to design buildings based on arbitrary objects with no eye towards function. For example, my classmates used to do things like base the building design on a "found object" (piece of junk) from the site, or maybe on some random patterns generated by a pet with a marker. The fact that this rewarded is incredibly frustrating to someone who demands any kind of rational justification for their own design ideas.
I should state that I don't have these objections to the profession of architecture itself (I have other ones); just the way it's taught. My wife is a licensed architect, and she suffers from the scars inflicted by a typical architecture school, but from few of the goofy delusions enjoyed by its students.
Read my keyboard review.
Shiver me timbers, they stole me bloomin' idea! Now I has t' come up with some other way t' hide me secret lair from scurvy lubbers who feels like snoopin' around.....
Staying away from Pod 6 though.
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
the names of the students who came up with these ideas. Surely, they deserve some recognition and credit too?
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
This has to be one of the worst descriptions ever. Firstly because it's one big, incomprehensible run-on sentence, but more importantly because it doesn't even give a summary of the challenge,despite going into some detail about the variety results.
Both the original author and Hemos deserve to be sacked. I mean, come on, I know they're not going to catch every mistake, but they're called editors for a reason and if they're not going to even bother to fix a horrible description like this then they're just not doing their job.
"In nxt 250 yrs cncpts of sustnblty'd mk us thnk'f dffrnt apprches for svng energy. Wstge of papr and ink'd be rducd thru chnging th way v wrte. Th wrds v use rgulry'd b wrttn in shrtst possible way" Or, we could continue to move towards soft copies and remove ink and paper completely. I have to wonder what influenced that entry. I suppose there is a chance that the submitter's world region is simply less progressive...
What was the newest land use trend 50 years ago? Relatively low density, automobile-oriented suburbs. Today, the suburbs dominate the urban landscape, though not to the exclusion of older built environment patterns such as denser urban neighborhoods.
What's making the pages of urban planning-related publications today? Gentrification, urban infill, and new urbanism, along with semi-rural exurban sprawl. Expect to see more of that, along with "kinder, gentler suburbs"; traditional lower-density suburbs with higher-quality architecture, low-profile signage and plentiful landscaping in commercial areas, and so on.
Cities are organic, living entities. Planning to shape and guide the development of existing urban areas is a Good Thing; without it, most urban North Americans would be subject to Houston-like chaos. However, contemporary cities planned from the start tend to be sterile and lacking in character; Canberra, Brazilia, planned industrial cities in the former Soviet Union, and sylvan 1970s-era New Towns in the US, for example.
cities that grow like viruses
You mean like Houston?
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
For a minute I wondered if this was the other NASA's contribution and they meant following the galactic path of the sun through interstellar space.....
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
A question mark? What possible advantage does building a city in the shape of a question mark have? Shaped like the human body? Why? If the reactor becomes unstable, dump it in the ocean? What?
Not to mention the ridiculous assumption that most of the world will be covered by water...I realize burning fossil fuels creates water, but WTF?
Looking at cities worldwide today, it seems fairly clear that they accrete over time in whatever fashion is most functional as they grow. Form following function. This seems to be exactly the opposite, "build it and they will come" on a ridiculous level. That doesn't even work for professional sports venues, much less for entire cities.
Which, incidentally, is the problem I always have with proposals to build cities on the bottom of the sea, or on the surface of the moon, or any equally-remote location. You can't just "build a city" there, it has to develop there. Cities grow where there's a reason for people to congregate. Along trade routes - roads and rivers (as a US-centric parenthatical, I wonder if, after the apocalypse, new cities would gradually grow up around the intersections of interstates, assuming they survived...which would mean mostly where the cities already were). If we want to have a city under the sea, we have to have first, a practical and relatively inexpensive way for people to get to and from there. Second, a good reason for people to want to live there (crowding would have to become pretty bad to make living under the sea more appealing to most people). And third, a revisiting of the laws governing who owns what parts of the sea (IIRC, "territorial waters" extend 20 miles off the coast of a nation; that's not enough space to both populate with cities and maintain the buffer zone that the current "territorial waters" area provides), though this last could easily happen after population started moving there.
Oh, and: the one idea in the article that was kind of neat was the sun-following city...but without any implementation details, it's still not real useful. I mean, I could propose a city that harnessed the awesome power of zero point energy, and it's really cool, but not too helpful.
OTOH, all my problems with it could be a function of the writeup that was linked, rather than of the event itself.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
How is this much more than an art project? I mean, there's no practical reason for a city shaped like a question mark and a plethora of reasons why it's impractical. And even the artistic rationale for its symbolism is really bullshit: "It represents the invisible actual, and metaphorically, the unknown perfect design that will stand there in 2250 AD. Obviously, this is not that working design but only a notion of it. Only the question remains."
A few of these designs are more successful artistically, but most of them still fail practically. How about this, I'd like to form a city in the shape of a giant toilet to symbolize that society is going down the crapper.
That would be the most unusual sight in India.
If anyone is interested, this post was made by a guy who goes by the nick of 'mikealkav' or 'malkav' on the undernet irc network. he posted a link to this story less than 2 minutes after he made it in a linux help channel and he's always joining and attempting to harrass it/us in new, moronic ways. I should hope that anyone who wants to will feel free to join undernet (eu.undernet.org or us.undernet.org) and let him know what you think of his post. i hope he isn't too disappointed about the demise of his anonymity.
2250 AD is going to be post technological singularity. Given that, probably the most accurate description of a city to house 5000 people would be a 1 meter by 4 meter by 9 meter featureless solid black rectangle.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
i'm sure ;)
Hate to inform you buddy but more than one person pastes links using that address. Note the fact that there is a username query string on the end ot the URL?
You just outed the wrong person!
You sure are a stand-up guy, man. I had you figured all wrong, huh? I'd thought that only an oblivious imbicile like the malkav would post such tasteless garbage on here, but apparently I'm mistaken. Kinda makes one wonder why such a nice, stand-up type of guy like you would make such a post in the first place as well as why you'd defend someone you claim not to know and such (considering it would be taking the heat off of you).
The Japanese built a Western society in Japan. The Thai are laboring to build a Western society i Thailand. So are most Eastern Europeans.
So far, the Indians have not accomplished what, even the Thai, have accomplished. If the Indians can solve this biggest problem, the Westernization (i.e. modernization) of India, then I will be impressed. Who cares whether some Indian techie can plan a city that looks like question mark? It might be worth some bonus points on the final exam at the Indian Institute of Technology but is worth nothing to the millions of underemployed Indians begging for the chance to flee to the USA.
By the way, to understand the serious and deep-rooted nature of the Indian problem, note that the ratio of male to female babies in Indian is about 1.20. It is just as high in mainland China. The ratio in Thailand is 1.05, which is normal for a human society without targetted abortions and without infanticide.
Exactly.
Everyone likes to bemoan the United States' dependence on foreign oil, and somehow blame the auto industry. Th real culprit isn't the cars, it's the zoning.
We live in a car culture, not because of some rugged American individualism, but because that's the way we've zoned it. We've made it impossible to live without a car (except in Manhattan -- possibly the only place in the US where a car is a liability.) People can talk till there blue in the face about public transportation, but it just doesn't make sense when the population density is below a certain level.
While I agree cities are organic, they can be zoned to grow in the proper way. The way to end foreign fuel dependence is:
1) Zone higher density residential.
2) Zone commercial within walking (or 5 minute bus) distance.
3) Stop building roads 'to reduce congestion' -- new roads lead to more traffic not less.
4) Stop building parking lots.
[5) Profit]
(I must also note that along with dependence on foreign oil, this suburban sprawl zoning has led to the evil growth of the mall and superstore.)
Funny how you, "penisbird of the GNAA" seem to hold the same opinion of Linux as this malkav guy who continually joins and harrasses us. Also funny is the fact that #politics (a channel that is repeatedly spammed with colors and racist slurs in our channel as well), along with #gnaa, both seem to exist on the undernet. what a coincidence that all channels in question reside on undernet and the mikealkav guy is hanging out in both the #politics AND #gnaa channels. maybe he's a good friend of yours?
You can hold your views of who malkav is and isn't, its immaterial to me as I know that I am penisbird who posted those links but did not invade your IRC channel.
Laugh all you want, but I could care less if someone wants to bother your shitty channels. You are getting more attention that way, trust me. You should be thanking him for it.
There are a number of languages which are written in a similar manner (Hebrew is a good example). Perhaps one of the students on that team writes one of those languages. I don't think that a change in writing of this manner is really desirable for English ("pck'p th bt? Do y'mn boot, boat, bat, bet?") as the shortest possible way in general is highly non-regular.
However, I can think of a way to change English writing which would have huge savings - make it actually phoenetic! Imagine cutting a year off the time it takes for every child to learn how to read and write. Wouldn't that be worth the cost and bother of a change? Of course, we might need new letters for th, ch, and sh, but isn't it worth it to get rid of the current spelling of "through"? Think how much time kids spend learning how to spell - why shouldn't they be able to spell any word they have heard? The non-phoenetic spelling of English makes learning to read and write English twice as hard as it needs to be.
NOONE will be thanking you for any of the thoughtless stupidity you vomit everywhere, nor does anyone require the form of attention you might incur. Please refrain from making such absurd posts & comments and find something to do with yourself other than be a moron, eh?
Or what? You'll out me on Slashdot, except hopefully you will identify the person correctly the next time? Ha!
PS, YHBT YHL HAND.
From the article:
The only far-fetched assumption I found in the design of the contest itself was
the assumption that in 2250 A.D., there would still be a social entity called family...
We've had families for thousands of years. Why would we suddenly get rid of them? I think the only way to get rid of families is by cloning people, and that is not a good idea.
-- Cheers!
Putting your brain in a defensive pod would protect it from TB--it only attacks the lungs anyway. Eventually we'll see just how the thalamus hosts consciousness and do away with the brain too. Then take vacations to the center of the sun and be fine!
-I am an elective eunuch.
Yeah, Pod 6 is jerks. I'm moving to Sparkopolis.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
Supposedly, the author was writing about all the various sub-areas of Venice, and each little area became a city after being given a deeper, extropolated look.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
In my college years I would have agreed with you. People like you make bad architects. Architecture is issentially the fusion of creativity and problem solving. The goal of those design classes was to get you to think outside of the box, thus we dont have more re-invention of roman classism, or some other over burdoned style but somethign true and unique. eg.
http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/Gugg
http://www.greatbuildings.com/cgi-b
http://www.greatbuildings.com/cgi-bin/gbi.cgi/N
I think the true success of an architect is to solve a problem efficiently nd functionally, but at the same time in a truly creative and unque approach. It doesn't take a jeniious to design a barn, or montachello (sp)
I can see the headlines now.. "Ampersand City Officals Face Interecetion Chaos, While Question Mark-tonians Are Left Wondering Where The Road Ends" Ahh..the future..the meek inherit the earth, but its the clowns that run it!
As others have said, the world is already mostly covered with water - Not a bas assumption it will remain.
As to the city in the shape of a question mark, if you'd read the article, you'd have seen that the student did this as a statement that he also had no freaking clue as to what the perfect city of 2250 would be like (Nice cop out answer.)
I agree about the human body one though. Odd.
As for 'form following function', dispite what you think, there ARE cases in the world right now, where the city was built for a function - Canberra, the capital of Australia, for example, was built to be capital, as opposing to growing in to the role.
Damn cool.
This second sentence is pretty short.
an ill wind that blows no good
What fuckin' planet are you on? It isn't her friend for about 3/28ths of the month (her reckoning), which translates as 21/28ths of mine once side effects are accounted for.
(wassat?...oh, he means a full-stop. oh... jeez, thish beersh good, giss' another....)
In China they use bamboo for scaffolding - or they did.
They still do as of 2 years ago. I've even seen 50 story buildings in Hong Kong covered in a mesh of bamboo. It's both scary and amazing because the entire structure is only bamboo poles and tie-wraps. It makes for fast assembly and disassembly, but I'm sure a U.S. or European building or job-site inspector would have a heart attack.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Washington D.C. is a designed city.