Darran Anderson

You are currently browsing articles tagged Darran Anderson.

CarDesigns_01_Future_City_technology_Advancements

Anyone who lived through the horrors of Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy may have glimpsed the future.

Pre-airplane urban centers were traditionally placed on coastlines to be convenient trade-route stops for ships and boats. That was before climate change made living near the water very inconvenient. Moving forward, we’ll have to reinvent our cities to survive what we’ve wrought, especially the ones that might drown. That reality has become even more pressing over the last couple of decades as China’s radically urbanized its population, placing it in the mouth of the whale.

In a wonderfully written Guardian piece, Darran Anderson addresses the challenges ahead, including rising sea levels and other modern problems. Floating cities? Walking cities? Everything should be on the table. The opening:

Amid the much-mythologised graffiti that appeared around Sorbonne University during the French civil unrest in May 1968, one line still stands out as intriguing and ambiguous: “The future will only contain what we put into it now.”

What appears at first utopian has more than a hint of the ominous. While augmented reality creates a city individualised for every occupant, and developments in modular architecture and nanotechnology might result in rooms that change form and function at a whim, the problem lies in the unforeseen. The smart city will also be the surveillance city.

For the moment, we remain largely wedded to superficial visual futures. The likelihood is that the prevailing chrome and chlorophyll vision of architects and urbanists will become as much an enticing, but outdated, fashion as the Raygun Gothic of The Jetsons or the cyberpunk of Blade Runner. Rather than a sudden leap into dazzling space age-style cityscapes, innovations will unfold in real-time – and so too will catastrophes. The very enormity of what cities face seems beyond the realms of believability, and encourages postponement and denial.

“Survivability” should be added to urban buzzwords like connectivity and sustainability. Three quarters of all major metropolises lie on the coastline.•

Tags:

The future often happens sooner than seems possible but not as soon as we might hope, and I think nano-engineering fits into that category. I wouldn’t expect to see “living” architecture that morphs and modifies in my lifetime, not in any profound way, but there’s nothing theoretically impossible to prevent it happening at some indeterminate point. In 1956, Arthur C. Clarke, working from the theories of Richard Feynman, imagined a future full of buildings built and endlessly rebuilt by molecular engineering. From Darran Anderson’s excellent essay on the topic at Aeon:

Let’s elaborate Arthur C Clarke’s prophecy a little. Nanobots would create a programmable architecture that would change shape, function and style at command, in anticipation or even independently. Imagine an apartment where furniture fluidly morphs from the walls and floor, adapting to the inhabitants, an apartment that physically mutates into a Sukiya-zukuri tea-room or an Ottoman pleasure palace or something as yet unseen, while outside the entire skyline is continually rearranging itself. Architecture might become an art available to all.

The advantages of nanomaterials are already becoming apparent; consider the strength of graphene, the insulation of aerogel. The idea of a self-repairing, pollutant-neutralising, climate-adapting ‘living’ architecture no longer seems the preserve of fiction. Resistance to the idea of buildings that could grow (as in John Johansen’s forms) or liquefy (like William Katavolos’s designs) is almost as much a question of our conservatism as of technical limitations. But as the materials scientist Rachel Armstrong has observed, this vision of the city as a biological or ecological manifestation is not so much a leap into the unknown as a maturation of ancient Vitruvian ideals.

Every advance will have repercussions. The idea of walking through walls that simultaneously scan us for illnesses might sound promising – but what else will they monitor? Who will they answer to? What will it mean for human creativity, let alone employment, when there are buildings that can build themselves?•

Tags: , ,

I read somewhere recently that if all of contemporary America had the population density of Brooklyn, we would be able to fit everyone into New Hampshire. The rest of the country would grow wild and beautiful while New Hampshire would stink like a graveyard restroom. King C. Gillette, razor magnate and Utopian socialist, encouraged the design of something similar in the 1890s: a hyper-concentrated metropolis made of porcelain buildings. Never quite happened. From “Impossible Cities,” by Darran Anderson at 3:AM:

“The inventor of the safety razor, business magnate and socialist, King Camp Gillette had similarly ambitious plans, writing The Human Drift in which he urged a single vast city to be built on top of the Niagara Falls (powered naturally by hydro-electricity) to house the entire population of the United States of America. It would measure 135 miles by 45 and consist of cylindrical skyscrapers made from porcelain. Pre-empting Fritz Lang’s Expressionist dystopia by decades, its name would be Metropolis.”

Tags: , ,