79 GROHE Magazine 7 SMART CITIES Cities have always been smart in the sense that they foster opportunity and encourage innovation For good or ill our presence in the city can now be traced through means such as CCTV and public transport use But digital technologies can also make cities more enjoyable and efficient Buildings can predict their own cycles of power and water usage with benefits for managing infrastructure Logistics can be optimized with movement of people and goods coordinated in a seamless flow making the best use of space in all trans port and storage systems road rail pedes trian and conceivably with aerially operating drones As we move through an urban envi ronment our smartphones can identify every opportunity it offers for its relevance to us as individuals at least as based on our previous habits in a simulacrum of emotion and pos sibility mixing as T S Eliot put it memory with desire 8 BUILDING TECHNOLOGY The division of labor between designers and makers which began in the Renaissance is dis integrating in the face of digital programming printing fabrication and assembly Robot arms will replace both cranes and workers on building sites the only operatives left will be computer watchers rather than laborers or artisans Even more importantly our physical environment and how we perceive it will change fundamentally Mario Carpo the Bartlett s Reyner Banham Pro fessor of Architectural History points out that traditional linear mathematics determined how spaces could be represented and how materials can be used All scales from nano and micro to macro will stem from the same source The flow between design construction fabrication and materials will be seamless and inseparable If every piece of information is in one register and follows one mode of production there may well be implications for the creative process itself Shifts from one mode to another for ex ample from drawing to model making have long been an integral part of creativity helping to move beyond apparent dead ends or to throw fresh perspectives on ideas 9 REUSE Much has been promulgated about the need to move from a linear to a circular economy In ef fect we need to consider our own consumption of all resources as a stage in a process where everything is reused On some occasions there is a long gap between different uses on others re use may be simultaneous This is especial ly true of buildings and infrastructure If their time in use possibly different use can be dou bled or tripled so much the better Take Joseph Bazalgette s Embankment in London part sew er part Underground railway part road and in places a provider of public open space A more contemporary example is BIG s waste burn ing power station in Copenhagen In addition to its primary purpose it provides an elevated sloping public park in a flat landscape which in winter turns into a ski run Energy too is part of this cyclical process It may not be worth mak ing a short life building highly energy efficient if that involves using a great deal of energy in its construction including manufacture and transport of materials 10 VIRTUAL WORLDS Recent advances in virtual reality are contrib uting to new types of representation rather as the innovation of linear perspective did in the Renaissance But the implications of VR are more far reaching Their verisimilitude sur passes perspectival or trompe l oeil imagery giving seductive certainty to buildings so far unbuilt or even unbuildable The data used to construct the VR experience performs the role that ideas once played of the connecting tissue between imagining representing and making ScanLAB for instance animated a BBC history series on Ancient Rome with com pelling sequences of what it was really like or at least what the available data implies it was really like including sewage and water supply They could bring the same level of veracity to a city that has no physical existence Mean while architects have a powerful new tool for design and communication Headsets are becoming lighter and more comfortable so decreasing distraction that suspends illusion while increasing focus Matthias Kohler of ETH Zurich at the Norman Foster Foundation suggests future possibilities in computation material science and fabrication ScanLAB Projects animated Ancient Rome in Rome s Invisible City a BBC television series P ho to s p 7 8 O bi e O be rh ol ze r p 7 9 To m K aw ar a S ca nL A B P ro je ct s

Vorschau G7_Layout_RH_v5 Seite 79
Hinweis: Dies ist eine maschinenlesbare No-Flash Ansicht.
Klicken Sie hier um zur Online-Version zu gelangen.