Bryant Rousseau of Architectural Record interviews William Mitchell, Professor of Architecture and Media Arts and Sciences at MIT and director of MIT’s Design Laboratory, author of fascinating books such as e-topia: Urban Life, Jim—But Not As We Know It and ME++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked city. Mitchell speaks about future challenges for our cities, for the architectural profession, etc. Check out the video and/or read onwards.

Not only are sustainability or urban security in a globalized world challenges as such, major issues to tackle lie in the trade-off between the two, between being efficient with respect to sustainability and doing it in such a way that security, resilience, etc. can be guaranteed.

Together with GM and other partners, Mitchell is working on new mobility concepts for the city. In the City Car project (part of Smart Cities), the vehicle we think of as a car becomes a lightweight, folding and stacking (cf. shopping carts), electric mobility tool. The necessary technologies, business models, urban models to make it happen are almost in place. Basically it is all about finding the right partners now, before we may spot them in urban environments within 2 or 3 years.

The use of smart cars brings about several positive changes in terms of cities’ energy consumption:

1. small, lightweight, efficient electric vehicles consume less in general
2. they charge continuously while they are parked which irons out peaks in the electric grid, transforming it as to match better with the qualitative nature of more sustainable energy sources (cf. solar, wind, which have problems with peaks))
3. cars are networked computers on wheels enabling more intelligent, hence more efficient driving behaviour and navigation leading to energy savings as well.

Furthermore, in the Senseable City Laboratory, among other things, Mitchell and his colleagues look into ways to activate public space by integrating elements of nature, people, technology and physical spatial elements. For the Spanish city of Zaragoza, for example, a historical city with many plazas and fountains, a digital waterwall was designed which responds to incoming digital information as well as direct user interaction (e.g. proximity sensing).

Since architecture deals with the fundamental organization of daily life and its qualities, it has a profound impact on our society and culture, as it seeks to translate integrative solutions into the physical world by matching technological possibilities to changing or newly emerging cultural demands.

Mitchell emphasizes the value of and need for visionary architecture, which stimulates people to debate about their physical surroundings and as such the organization of their lives etc. As such, architectural design has a major role to play in terms of giving a view of and enabling discussion and shaping of possible, potential futures.

In terms of preparing the next generations of architects and urban planners, Mitchell notes the need for design and architecture education to find ways of breaking out of the traditional box of thinking, to develop much stronger, more profound interdisciplinary connections and expand the boundaries of what gets conceived of as the traditional design and architectural disciplines.

Image courtesy of Franco Vairani

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 25th, 2007 at 11:09 and is filed under design, future, sustainability, technology, visionary, visualization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.