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. "

Comments

problem solvers

[BoldAC]

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.

Banyan trees for home-grown homes

[G4from128k]

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.

Bleh

[SlipJig]

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.

Re:Bleh

[LaCosaNostradamus]

Oh, goody, one of the anointed. Try this on for size, chum:

The architecture of 2250AD? This is after the high-energy West falls to the current World War it has provoked and is waging against the low-energy Islam, right?

Leaving aside the lack of political reality, this is all of course the usual "heavy urban" view, as if people really want to live in Human hives under strict authoritarian controls, living lives of essential slavery while somehow the system acts to make them as confortable as possible (that was sarcasm; it doesn't). People collect into cities to find prosperity FROM the ever-present low-energy economy of the countryside, not TO some fundmental better life found in said cities. But they are robbed of their potential and simply made into slaves. In certain instances, they may be well-paid, but overall they are still slaves.

Look, like economists, architects aren't hired by the poor and middle class. They are hired by the upper class, corporations, institutions and government. Hence, architectural visions will reflect the supply side of the housing and property equation, not the demand side. In effect, architects may as well be honest and start converging on a Matrix type of social infrastructure -- with people confined to pods where they can be tapped for their energy -- since that's the most efficient way to convert Humanity into the mass of slaves that the capitalists find most desirable.

Re:Sea vs. space

[carlmenezes]

Well, seeing as how we're going to have a LOT of people by then, I think floating cities that are impervious to storms and the like wouldn't seem to be that much a stretch of the imagination. In fact, I won't be surprised if 200 years down the line, the earth looks like a floating mesh of cities and causeways

What I'd like to know is...

[carlmenezes]

the names of the students who came up with these ideas. Surely, they deserve some recognition and credit too?

Re:This is not what I'd call "useful"

[Control Group]

To quote the article: most of the teams assumed that the world would be
largely submerged in water

This certainly implies a change in the current state. The fact that more than two thirds of the planet is already covered in water isn't much of an assumption, is it? Particularly when the quote above (helpfully labelled point "a)") is immediately followed by point "b)", assuming that the atmosphere will be unbreathable.

So why don't you valet park your high horse, and at least pick legitimate nits.

Calvino

[Lord_Dweomer]

Kind of random, but if any one else here enjoys reading about different city ideas, you should check out Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. Its a VERY short book that details the trip of Marco Polo through many different types of cities with different customs and cultures, all very fascinating and out of the norm.

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.