* NANO_CITY *
> odesco & axel killian >
Michael Fox, Juintow Lin, Andrew Todd
(OdescO) in Collaboration with Axel Kilian
> Concept >
“Nano-City” is the physical counterpart to a story that is based on the original story written in 1961 by the Italian Group “Superstudio” called: Seventh City, Continuous Production Conveyer Belt City. The concept behind Nano-City” is that technological advance and ecological responsibility are not necessarily a contradiction in terms. (Please read the STORYLINE below) This project lives in the world as “science-fact” and not “science-fiction” and conceptually demonstrates that although many of our ecological equilibrium disparities are a result of our misuse and misunderstanding of technological advance, many of them can be brought back into balance with appropriate technological focus. Our aim is to make the point that technological development from within the fields of design and architecture can be focused to transcend ecological equilibrium; to have positive embodied energy assessments, material reductions and even change living pattern trends.
This project plays a role in a larger body of work dealing with interactive systems. Specifically, applications of intelligent responsive kinetic systems for extending current techniques and technologies used to accomplish sustainable design in architecture and “environments”. Sustainable solutions using kinetic and transportable systems in architecture are explored for their inherent advantages in responding to changing environmental conditions. In particular, the means by which issues of energy efficiency and environmental quality of buildings could be technologically enhanced to be more efficient, affordable, and reach a broader audience of users.
> Particulars >
The aim of this piece is to conceptually convey the Nano-City storyline. An installation on the back wall of the wind tunnel building emphasizes the verticality of the room. A continuous cycle of creation and destruction allows the visitor to witness an artificially created take on nature. The theme of the cycle is interpreted through one mechanism that creates and one that destroys on a continuous conveyor belt that travels up the wall held in place by two drums. But destruction means to return to its default state from which new things can be created again closing the cycle. The installation will operate at a relatively slow speed allowing the visitor to observe changes over a long time only and encouraging them to spend time watching as the piece slowly evolves.
>
Storyline >
Nano-City
"The head of the city resembles a massive mechanical cathedral but would fool anyone who examined it for too long. For all of its apparent symmetrically flaunting oppressiveness, it is nonexistent. Indeed at any instant it does exist but it is ever changing, morphing, melding, destroying and creating. Itself. For the city itself is in fact one and the same with the landscape that it ploughs through. The city moves across the planet without regard for the forests, the seas, the deserts and the glaciers. For any and all landscapes is fuel for its growth. The city is a momentary composition of tiny machines, so tiny that they operate at the atomic and molecular level. The machines are just as invisible as the atoms they are composed of. Essentially the entire city is composed of nano-sized robots. There are gatherers, sorters, transporters, assemblers and dis-assemblers. The assemblers work endlessly immersed in a bath of parts or molecules that have been gathered from the landscape, sorted and transported, along a nano-conveyor belt system to the point where they can be reassembled and bonded to the new molecular structure of a part of the city. A tree in the forest is disassembled to the molecular level and transported to the other end of the city and reassembled into the city. On and on it goes, tearing up everything in its path and creating paths where there are none for the sake of creating the city. The city rolls out from the back of the head like a perfectly geometric beaver’s tail: houses and parks and playgrounds and streetlights and furniture and food and even toys. The people of the city find homes but they never grow terribly attached to them because everyone understands the temporal frailty of the city. There is no money and no one seems to care what others have because the city is constantly churning out new designs for the urban fabric. Everyone simply migrates towards the head of the city because that is where the newest of everything is to be found. Of course they also must constantly move towards the head because the rear of the city is always disintegrating literally from beneath the citizens’ feet. It is not so drastic as that, and a house may take upwards of three years to completely disintegrate but it does indeed keep the people moving. On the macro scale then, as a result of the nano-scale, the city operates as a conveyor as well. The disintegrating city is reconstructed into the forest, or sea, or desert or glaciers. Where once was a mountain a new one was built in its place. Everything stays in balance; natural resources can replenish themselves as fuel for the next time the city rolls by and the citizens never tire of the scenery."
*This story is on the original story: Seventh City: Continuous Production Conveyer Belt City, by the Italian Group “Superstudio” written in 1961. We have substituted optimism for pessimism.
> bios >
OdescO
short for Ocean Design Collaborative, is a multidisciplinary architecture, design and consulting office led by principals Michael Fox and Juintow Lin. Odesco continues the early pioneering work of the Kinetic Design Group at MIT investigating the design and application of interactive and behavioral kinetic systems in architecture.
Axel Kilian
Ph.D. Candidate in Design and Computation, Department of Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge USA, Axel Kilian holds a professional Architecture degree from the University of the Arts Berlin in 1998, and subsequently completed a Master of Science after being awarded a Fulbright scholarship to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He currently is a PhD Candidate in Design and Computation in the Department of Architecture at MIT and focuses on the application of programming in design. His particular research interest is the notion of bi-directional design models that allow for iterative design moves between domain specific representations. In parallel Axel Kilian has been teaching both as a Teaching Assistant as well as a Co-Instructor workshops in the application of parametric and generative techniques.
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