Tag: architecture

Shimizu Dream

TRY 2004 is a conceptual “city in the air” designed to make the most of nature’s blessings, including wind and sunlight, and to serve as a home and workplace for 1m people. A megatruss structure, which also serves as a platform for infrastructure facilities, makes it possible to create a huge, livable pyramid city measuring 2km high. The basic structure—an assembly of regular octahedral units composed of shafts made from lightweight materials such as carbon fiber—is designed to meet the needs of residents and the surrounding environment at the same time. The megatruss construction method allows flexible, unrestricted structural arrangement of the facilities, eliminating the need to build massive foundations. The city’s basic construction units, each measuring 350 meters per side, contain office buildings, residential complexes, and other facilities, held aloft by structures that provide support from all directions. With each unit capable of enclosing an entire 100-story building, TRY 2004 represents a project of unprecedented scale and proportion.

i like their megaengineering dreams: Creating Lakes in the Desert, Space Hotel, a m people pyramid, floating archeologies.

NYC by Robert Moses

I present my Google Maps version of the proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway and Mid Manhattan Expressways. (I didn’t know how to draw maps to look like Google Maps but it’s pretty easy.) Now there have been maps showing these proposed highways before (they are included in my Unbuilt Highways Map of NYC) but the point of doing it up to look like a Google Map was to put these highways in a modern context (also I’m sure there are plenty of people who didn’t even know about these). We have become so accustomed to viewing the world through Google Maps that I feel like these maps are starting to shape our view point of the city.

Wait, whaaaaaa?

Seasteading

man i hate the schlocky, sophomoric writing at wired.

The purpose of the Seasteading Institute—and of this gathering—is to figure out how to make aquatic homesteads a reality. But Friedman doesn’t just want to create huge floating platforms that people can live on. He’s also hoping to create a platform in the sense that Linux is a platform: a base upon which people can build their own innovative forms of governance. The ultimate goal is to create standards and blueprints that can be easily adapted, allowing small communities to rapidly incubate and test new models of self-rule with the same ease that a programmer in his garage can whip up a Facebook app. “You could roll your own government out of pieces copied from all the societies around you. Google set my standards for how fast something should grow. This has potential to exceed those standards—if we make 1 seastead, there’s room for 1000s.”

Offshoring Audacity

Look abroad: Whole cities are planned, built, and inhabited in less than a generation. Artificial islands, indoor ski slopes, and the world’s tallest this-and-that are being constructed, not in the West, but in the Middle East, China, and beyond. The result: a sense that the West’s cities are falling behind and, increasingly, watching from the sidelines.