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Client:
GardenLab
Design: Michael Fox, Axel Kilian, Andrew Todd, Steve
Joyner, Tina Pezchkpour, Juintow Lin
Fabrication: Michael Fox, Andrew Todd,
Steve Joyner, Tina Pezchkpour, Juintow Lin |
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Nano
City:
"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 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. The concept behind
Nano-City" is that technological advance and ecological
responsibility are not necessarily a contradiction in
terms.
Storyline:
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 |
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