Mankind is rethinking how we build the structures we live and work in – and that, in turn, is changing the way our cities look and feel.
Using striking technical breakthroughs in complex computation and highly sensitive manufacturing, designers are moving closer to making lightweight buildings that can move, and perhaps even think and feel. Instead of hard, polished building faces, emerging prototypes from some of the world’s research centres suggest future cities might begin to resemble artificial floating forests.
Rather than a civic plaza made from polished stone, new public gathering spaces could be softly layered, their resilient woven fabrics arranged in multiple hovering skins. Instead of clear skies and open air, our atmosphere could be filled with lacy meshwork that filters air and renews the environment.
Technical crafts made possible by new research in thermodynamics are now presenting remarkable new opportunities for architectural designers to work with air, gas and fluids as building materials. Yale mechanical engineer Michelle Addington has vividly documented control systems for dynamic plumes of heating and cooling air that enclose building surfaces, and has demonstrated that similar convection patterns occur around human bodies. Addington’s vision implies that tangible air currents and gaseous concentrations of carbon dioxide and oxygen around the buildings we live and work in could become practical building materials for tomorrow’s architecture.
