Rohit Gupta writes:
Bombay, India -- Create a foundation for a perfect world in the next century (2250 A.D.) that would sustain life and habitat in the future but would not interfere in the surrounding eco-system. The structure should have basic functional areas catering to 5000 families.
That was the challenge presented to the student teams from 80 Indian colleges that entered in NASA 04 (National Association of Students of Architectures annual design event) hosted this year by the Hiray College Of Architecture in Bandra (East).
(Most of the media ignored it, except an enthusiastic piece by Nina Martyris in the Times Of India. A City On Mars, And Another 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea 17th September, Page 2 in this convenient e-paper. Registration is free, but required.)
On Friday afternoon I visited. The exhibition was already over, but I was
patiently received and shown about 30 of the 116 entries. Three things were
immediately obvious: a) most of the teams assumed that the world would be
largely submerged in water, that the atmosphere would be far too polluted to be breathable, and energy would be scarce, b) the designs took little note of human nature or costs and c) almost all of them approached growth vertically.
An accompanying friend commented on seeing a map of largely submerged Bombay, "So, essentially you are using (inevitable) disaster as a rebuilding opportunity."
These were the highlights:
1. Question Mark: (see picture) This was an entry by students from the host college. One of them, Vishal, told me why they had constructed a city in the shape of a giant question mark, floating on the water, just off the coast of
Marine Drive, Bombay. "It represents the invisible actual, and metaphorically,
the unknown perfect design that will stand there in 2250 AD. Obviously, this is not that working design but only a notion of it. Only the question remains.."
2. Orbital colonies, fractal architecture and chaotic growth patterns, a city inside a giant genetically-modified tree trunk, cities that grow like viruses, cities that look and function like holes made by earthworms, cities that are constructed out of a city dump, and cities that use no particular metaphor or analogy but seem to make sense, a city built like a helical spring, cities based on and beneath expanding and contracting geodesic domes, cities inside the core of the earth. Phew!
3. This was tucked away in the center of a giant presentation:
"In nxt 250 yrs cncpts of sustnblty'd mk us thnk'f dffrnt apprches for svng energy. Wstge of papr and ink'd be rducd thru chnging th way v wrte. Th wrds v use rgulry'd b wrttn in shrtst possible way."
4. Man-City: One city had been planned like the human body, with the administrative section where the head should be. And I started thinking of citadels, and what the concept of being "centrally located" means. Is being central is simply a choice of symmetry and distance, but not of process? I learned something. The design also proposed that city's skin is the envelop of atmosphere that keeps the unwanted radiation or toxins out.
5. Heliocity: The photovoltaic dome of this city was designed in a mind-
boggling way. The matrix was designed so that it literally followed the path of the sun round the year, to maximize the solar energy, down to individual housing units behaving in the same fashion, like a city of static sunflowers.
6. Sea-horse: I stared at this plan for a good half hour. First you are shown a
sea horse, with an arrow indicating its moment of inertia and how it stays upright, it's anatomy and vehicular study. Then the design slowly morphs across the chart into a stable structure, which is then blown up into a giant Sea-horse City, designed to chill around India's Lakshwadeep Islands. The intricacy was heart-breakingly beautiful. At the bottom of the horse's tail, a small extension supported a balcony called 'spiritual pod'.
7. Nautica: There was this flat design in two layers, constructed over a
geodesic structure. Ground floor is people and commerce, and the top floor is
industry. Submerged in the water is the nuclear reactor that powers the city.
Funnily enough, the design proposed that if the reactor gets unstable, it is
detached from the bottom, or literally dumped. It falls into the marine darkness, perhaps into a trench, and explodes while the city floats to another
safe location.
The only far-fetched assumption I found in the design of the contest itself was
the assumption that in 2250 A.D., there would still be a social entity called family...
