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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!
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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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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.
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the names of the students who came up with these ideas. Surely, they deserve some recognition and credit too?
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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.
Last I checked, viruses weren't really alive (they're borderline) and they don't grow. Instead, they infect cells and force the cells to produce more of them- generally wrecking the cell in the process.
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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
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.
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.
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