sci-fi architecture
It’s common knowledge that the planet is warming, ice caps are melting, and water levels are rising. The international scientific community predicts that a temperature elevation of 1°C will lead to a water rise of 1 meter, resulting in massive land loss and the displacement of millions of people world wide. Vincent Callebaut, a visionary Belgian architect, is responding to this inevitability with his proposal LILYPAD, A Floating Ecopolis for Ecological Refugees.
Zorlu Ecocity is a Llewelyn Davies Yeang project located in Istanbul, Turkey. It’s a mixed-use development located at the southern extremity of Buyukdere Street in Istanbul. The plan is conceptualized as a “city within a city” and conforms to the city’s planning strategy to multiply the number of urban centers throughout the Marma region to relieve pressure on Istanbul’s historic core. Zorlu Ecocity will have 588,850 sm (6,338,329 sf) of accommodation, which includes office towers, residential towers, two hotels, apartments, and resort-style elderly units above a three story retail complex. In total, we’re talking about 14 towers ranging from 8 to 26 stories.
Zorlu Ecocity is a Llewelyn Davies Yeang project located in Istanbul, Turkey. It’s a mixed-use development located at the southern extremity of Buyukdere Street in Istanbul. The plan is conceptualized as a “city within a city” and conforms to the city’s planning strategy to multiply the number of urban centers throughout the Marma region to relieve pressure on Istanbul’s historic core. Zorlu Ecocity will have 588,850 sm (6,338,329 sf) of accommodation, which includes office towers, residential towers, two hotels, apartments, and resort-style elderly units above a three story retail complex. In total, we’re talking about 14 towers ranging from 8 to 26 stories.
Historically in art, The Three Graces have been viewed as a symbol of lasting unity that represent joy, beauty and charm. NOX | Lars Spuybroek has designed a family of towers called The Three Graces in Dubai which emulates that very dynamic. The family of towers, which are currently in progress, will be interconnected by a footbridge that will reduce footprints on the piers. The symbolism of unity will make The Three Graces appear as a gate to the harbor on which it is situated.
To deal with the lack of fresh water in Dubai and other Arabian nations, Italian architectural firm Studiomobile created the Seawater Vertical Farm to cool and humidify greenhouses. This innovative concept produces adequate humidity to convert seawater into fresh water, necessary for irrigation.
The new city center designed by Dutch architects MVRDV for Gwanggyo, a city coming up 35 kms from Seoul in South Korea seems to be something taken out of the sci fi movies. Expected to be completed by 2011, the city is sufficient enough to hold 77000 inhabitants and has a design envisioned with two centers which is a mix of housing, culture, office, retail, and leisure and education spaces. Various atriums are created in the towers catering to various categories, with box hedges being planted on the roofs and terraces which in turn improves ventilation and reduces usage of energy and water.
We’re huge fans of conceptual, futuristic architecture. The NASA Ames Research Center’s renderings of space colonies from the 1970’s come to mind. As well, the work of the influential Italian architectural group superstudio. Check out the latest from Vincent Callebaut Architects, a group who regularly produce far reaching architectural concepts. Their latest proposal is an ecological self-sustaining vertical farm to be located on the southern tip of Roosevelt Island adjacent to New York City.
Annie at Ballistic Media (no strangers to the blog with their extremely gorgeous books on digital art, which you can see on our webstore here) kindly drops me a line to say that the winners of the NVArt digital art challenge – this year with the theme Art Space: Architecture and Landscape Digital Arts, the second in a worldwide series of digital art competitions – have been announced by NVIDIA and the CG Society. “We invited artists to stand on the shoulders of giants like architect Frank Gehry and gaze into the far reaches of their imaginations,” said Mark Snoswell, president of CGSociety, a global organization for digital artists. “Our artists have created wonderful places that are pure art, where one can wake each day to marvel at the play of light through fantastical spaces and at vibrant fusions of light, color, and texture.”
Frederic Chaubin, who was born in Cambodia of a French father and Spanish mother, is chief editor of the French magazine Citizen K, and also a photographer who has been attracted by strange architecture in the former Soviet Union. The photos he takes in countries like Lithuania, Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and Georgia, reveal an extraordinary, almost sci-fi world. Today, PingMag takes you to the world of Soviet style architecture with Frederic Chaubin himself.
