chlorofilia 2106
Chlorofilia 2106 … a mysterious title for a fascinating project, a gaze into the long term future of what we call cities. The reason why I blog about this is threefold, since the project deals with:
- ways to visualize a possible future by means of images and story
- organic systems & organic metaphor as a lens through which to look at and act within/upon the world
- contemporary architecture
The History Channel recently held a competition inviting architectural teams to design a city of the future, to envision Los Angeles, New York and Chicago a hundred years from now.
One of several fascinating and inspiring entries from a futurist’s perspective was the work of the Xefirotarch team (Hernan Diaz Alonso and colleagues) who did a marvellous job envisioning an organic future for Los Angeles. In 2106 Los Angeles became Chlorofilia, it became a “self-sustaining, self-protecting natural ecology, used converted highways as aqueducts and dispersed nutrients into an adaptable organism that continuously adjusted itself to changes in demographics and housing requirements.”
Together with the renowned motion graphics office imaginary forces, the architects introduced a new Los Angeles by means of a future-scenario video set in 2106, interviewing a person looking at the city in retrospect, how it came to be, how society is organized differently, how mobility is differently (although perhaps not ‘that’ much), how communication takes place via ‘cloud’-technology instead of phones etc. As such they touch upon a variety of aspects of the city and city-life in the future, in a changed and ever-changing context. As experience has taught us, such portrayals are powerful and effective means to convey a multi-perspectival, contextualized image of the future to a large audience.
While in an aesthetic sense the world of architecture has always sought inspiration in the natural world (e.g. gothic cathedrals and forests, proportions, art nouveau, etc.), adding the dimension of time and taking into account processes of growth has led to a revival of the organic metaphor. It opens up a different way of seeing the city as well as the act of designing and building in a more systems-based view. D’Arcy Wentworth-Thompson, the biologist and mathematician who wrote the seminal work ‘On growth and form‘, continues to inspire many. Yet in today’s world also new insights in genetics, nanotechnology and synthetic biology drive an increase of man’s grip on processes one could previously merely observe but not recreate or control. Combined with a heightened interest in biomimicry a new reality might slowly be on its way. Already today crops are being genetically modified to ‘grow’ medicines instead of fabricate them, organic tissue is being grown into predefined or scaffolded shapes in labs etc. The path towards growing our architecture might still be long, yet remains inspiring.
Several architectural practices such as those of Greg Lynn, Makoto Sei Watanabe, Celestino Soddu, Kas Oosterhuis, Kolatan-MacDonald and many others have explored the possibilities of game theory, chaos, dynamics, genetic algorithms, insights sprung from the field of artificial life and artificial intelligence and used them in the field of architecture to generate building designs, ‘grow’ urban planning schemes from the bottom up etc.
The organic metaphor’s versatile as nature itself and goes way beyond the mere form aspect. In a sustainable future, the whole notion of lifecycle of a house might just become a true life’s cycle. Imagine buildings being born, growing and dying.
Also check out Archilab, arborsculpture.
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