In the project “Imagine Green Urban Futures”, the lala.ruhr initiative and the Places _ VR Festival want to work together with innovative urban designers to discover new possibilities for making cities, streets, buildings and open spaces better and more sustainable. With the help of augmented reality technology (AR), they want to show on site how a city can change positively. Apply now with your idea, become part of the “Imagine Green Urban Futures” project, receive €1,000 and implement your 3D model that visitors to the Places _ VR Festival can test and experience it in AR! The deadline for applications is July 11, 2021.
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Competition for Urban Designers
The initiators of the project and the competition are looking for tech-savvy (landscape) architects, urban planners, designers and innovators of all kinds to develop their vision for a 120-year-old street in Gelsenkirchen based on existing 3D data. The 3D models will then be converted into an AR application by technology partner cityscaper and can be explored by visitors to the Places _ VR Festival (Sept. 17 & 18, 2021) via smartphone or tablet.
Procedure
- You submit your application with the selected street section of Bochumer Straße.
- A jury of experts selects three participants/teams.
- You will receive an allowance of 1.000€ and will work on your vision for one month.
- Visitors of the Places _ VR Festival can experience your vision live in augmented reality on 17 & 18 September 2021.
What is lala.ruhr?
lala.ruhr – the laboratory for the landscape of the ruhr metropolis – is dedicated to an integrated view of the transformation of the urban landscape of the Ruhr region, where people, buildings and landscape are symbiotic, resilient and sustainable, offering a high quality of life. A creative laboratory space is being created in which ideas and innovative concepts for the future of the Metropole Ruhr are discussed and developed under the guiding principle of a productive landscape. They promote exchange across geographical and intellectual boundaries and bundle and network the region’s potential in an international context.
For more information and how to apply – click here.
Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, unlike the other two Baltic capitals is not a port city. Located deep inland on a hilly, forested landscape with two rivers piercing its urban centre, Vilnius scores high in many rankings for the green vs urban area ratio. Even though Vilnius can be proud of the quantity of green and biodiverse environment for its residents, at the same time this layout results in an expansive urban structure that leads to intense car use and decreased air quality. In contrast to its metropolitan role as the most important cultural, political and economic city in the country, Vilnius has also, to this day, preserved many unique qualities of a countryside.
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Built at the confluence of two rivers, the city is famous of its oldtown – one of the largest surviving medieval urban fabrics in Northern Europe, listed by UNESCO as a world heritage site. During the Industrial Revolution, which spurred the growth of many European cities, Lithuania was under the rule of the Russian Empire. Its capital Vilnius was a provincial centre at the periphery, therefore the urban development of that period was rather slow. Although it sounds disadvantageous, it allowed Vilnius to preserve its meandering, somewhat accidental medieval oldtown street structure as a foundational ground for the future character of the city – diverse, spontaneous and organic.
Intense, often chaotic urban structure
Highly multicultural due to its history, Vilnius was often the place where the interests of various countries and political groups collided. Even in the short time span between the end of the 19th century and the present day, given that Vilnius is almost 700 years old, the rulers of the city changed multiple times. Some of the reigns were too short to leave a mark on the city’s development; nevertheless, the implementation of sometimes drastically different policies and a succession of divergent cultural ideologies have brought forth an intense, often chaotic urban structure characterized by the merging of unfinished visions as much as the clash of various architectural periods.
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From top-down urban planning to unregulated urban sprawl
The close proximity of historical heritage, dense urban environments, rural settlements and almost untouched natural landscapes is what makes Vilnius different from other European capitals. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, which over a period of five decades had expanded the map of Vilnius with large-scale industrial andoften monofunctional developments common in the era of socialist modernism, the city started a new chapter of its evolution. During Soviet rule, cities were shaped through a top-down urban planning practice, but after gaining independence, Lithuania went into the opposite direction. Now urban processes were driven by the neoliberal principles of government deregulation and a free market economy. Controlled urban growth was replaced by unregulated urban sprawl, spontaneous developments and in general a lack of urban planning.
Full of unexpected and sometimes perplexing juxtapositions
As a result, since the 1990s the urban character of Vilnius as a city of contrasts has deepened. Given the lack of experience in controlling the forces of capitalism and due to weak democratic resistance to the influence of investors, empty plots were filling up with new architecture as if the urban fabric was a Baltic forest where growth happens rather accidentally. Although this kind of urban development brought about negative consequences, it also further saturated the existing identity of Vilnius as a multi-layered and heterogeneous social, cultural and architectural fabric. The city is full of unexpected and sometimes perplexing juxtapositions that enliven as well as jolt the viewer’s consciousness.
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This urbanisation that followed vastly contrasting ideologies, philosophies and cultures has resulted in a patchwork, leaving accidentally preserved gaps of countryside, natural landscapes and wild forests in between newly developed neighbourhoods and historically formed areas. One may find oneself in the middle of a cobbled street surrounded by wooden houses that resemble rural living while the high-rises of the central business district dominate the background; it is possible to enjoy a vibrant oldtown with still intact local communities and to walk into a lush natural forests five minutes outside the centre.
Identity of imperfection shaped over centuries
When the lockdowns caused by the Covid-19 pandemic imposed unheard-of restrictions on citizens’ personal freedom, Vilnius proved its resilience precisely through its abundance of open spaces to be enjoyed by its residents. For the past several years the city’s urban strategy has been slowly returning to textbook urban planning, aiming to densify the central areas and increase the overall efficiency of the city. In the process, abandoned, leftover, post-industrial patches have been revived and opened up in the attempt to unite the disparate urban structure into a continuous cityscape and correct the mistakes of previous developments. Nevertheless, while there is an understandable rush to catch up with the efficiency and density of Western cities, Vilnius should proudly be aware of its unique qualities and stand by its identity of imperfection shaped over centuries. Those who make the decisions on the future of Vilnius’ landscapes as well as built environment should be careful not to systematically remove the contradictions, unconventionalities and provocations that come with the patchwork.
Find out more about Vilnius in topos 114.
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AFTER PARTY is a Lithuanian architectural practice founded by Giedrius Mamavicius and Gabriele Ubareviciute. Giedrius and Gabriele graduated in Architecture and Urban Design in 2012. In 2016 both joined OMA Hong Kong where they lead large scale masterplanning projects as well as architecture projects in China and South East Asia. Prior to that, they worked at BIG Bjarke Ingels Group in Copenhagen. Creating value through the means of sustainability, conscious design and social awareness is the fundamental principle of Gabriele ̇’s and Giedrius’ work.
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All Images © Andrej Vasilenko
Rintala Eggertsson Architects have designed FLYT, a Bathing installation at Fleischer brygge (Fleischer Park) in Moss, Norway, which not only promises relaxation and wellness in an urban and industrial setting, but is also a work of art in itself.
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The project is the outcome of an art-in-public-space competition that the municipality of Moss organized in 2018 to revitalize a former industrial area west of the city centre as a part of their 300 year anniversary. The competition was won by Rintala Eggertsson Architects with the proposal FLYT – with several bathing installations placed on floating piers in the sound of Moss. After negotiations with landowners, the project was moved to a nearby location where two of the installations were redesigned to fit with pre-existing piers. A third installation was placed inside the adjacent park to house secondary functions, to strengthen the axis towards the city centre, and to give the park area a more human scale. The third pavilion is set to be realized before the summer of 2021.
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Bathing Installation: Inspiration from industrial structures in the area
The bathing installations consist of two strucures; a) the diving tower with a lookout platform and a light installation, and b) the sauna both of which will be open to the public year-round. The installations have drawn inspiration from industrial structures in the area: cranes, chimneys, silos, gantries, etc that have defined the cultural landscape around Moss harbour for more than two centuries. Therefore, the solution was therefore to expose the loadbearing components and separate them from walls, floors, and ceilings in order to make them stand out as visually comprehensive to the public.
Spectrum of colours into the top of the diving tower as a reflection
As the project was developed in connection with the 300 year anniversary of Moss municipality, it was important for the design team to mark the relationship with the history of Moss that was significant in the first steps towards independence from Sweden and subsequent development of democracy in Norway. The Moss convention between the two states was the beginning of a development that ultimately led to parliamentarianism and the multi-party political system that now dominates public policies in the country. The architects wanted to add that as a layer to their installations by projecting a spectrum of colours into the top of the diving tower as a reflection on how governments come and go, sometimes represented by left-wing politicians, other times politicians from the right-wing, and often times by coalition governments of different sides of the political spectrum.
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A visual and haptic experience
The installations are made out of a series of wooden modules that play with the idea of repetition similar to shipping containers, but is a system that also invites people to think of the installations as toy blocks that are being stacked, almost like an invitation for the public to play with.
The installations by the waterfront will, in many ways, function as physical barriers to the sea, but are interactive as they will also function as gateways to the sea, a threshold defining the edge of the seaside promenade. Therefore it was important to give them a distinct scale and an architectonic expression different from the surrounding blocks of flats and closer to human proportions. The design team found it natural when working with functions so related to the human body to use more organic materials with texture and physical character that would offer the visitor a haptic experience of the installations rather than merely a visual one.
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The outcome is a functional, yet visually compelling set of installations that make outdoor bathing in the central area of Moss much more accessible to the general public.
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PROJECT INFO
Location: Fleischer brygge, 59.436374, 10.656793
Client: Moss municipality
Construction period: 10.04. –15.12.2020
Construction budget: NOK 4M
Art committee/competition jury: Hanne Tollerud, Trygve Nordby, Eva Talberg, Torunn Årset, Silje Hobbel, Berit Kolden and Thale Fastevold
Curator: Thale Fastevold
Project management: Moss municipality; Berit Kolden
Design: Rintala Eggertsson Architects
Engineering: Multiconsult
Lighting design: SML lighting
Text Credits: Rintala Eggertsson Architects
It is timely in the Anthropocene, and even more so during a global pandemic, to search for a non-anthropocentric mode of reasoning, and consequently also of designing. Adapting to a post-coronavirus world means re-designing our society from the point of view of the viral ecosystems that are now inhabiting it. From this new perspective, nature appears as disconnected from its picturesque image and becomes hardwired into the complex infrastructures and non-linear digital processes that drive organisation in contemporary cities, the so-called Urbansphere. How does green technology evolve in a creative framework unburdened by dualistic or picturesque notions of the human and the natural?
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The current rush of many cities to develop blue-green plans dealing with future threats of climate change is a testament to the obsession of our society with searching for ‘true’ answers within a problem-solving framework. The current global pandemic, however, highlights the urgent need for a new perspective to design innovation capable of engaging the systemic nature of the urban landscape and its architecture. Architects and planners often rely on a ‘sanitised’ and therefore highly aestheticised vision of the world’s ecosystems, exemplified by the very notion of green planning and its focus on greening cities. This notion may be one of the most enduring aspects we have inherited from modernity. And if bacteriological control was at the origin of its sanitation efforts, modern architecture and urban design turned it into a style; in other words, modernity did in fact embed sanitation into an aesthetic value system. The contemporary paradigms of green cities and green tech are the direct consequence of the evolution of that value system. However, urban systems today are non-linear and composed of billions of interlocking feedback loops, they are an Urbansphere. Waste production, pollution emission, food and water contamination are some of the most intense processes within the Urbansphere and a critical part of its contemporary metabolism. These processes often constitute the dark side of urban ecology, a side that is often invisible to the human eye; it is confined to restricted zones of our cities and it is often transferred to poorer regions of the world. And, most significantly, it is erased from the consciousness of most urban dwellers in our developed world.
Microbiological landscapes
Reassessing the dark side of urban ecology implies bringing to focus a new aesthetic of nature and, consequently, of the urban landscape. This new aesthetic of nature projects the design practice into the realm of urban “waste”, the byproduct of urbanisation, where micro-organisms such as virus, bacteria and fungi become protagonists. These creatures induce fear because their tactics often elude our comprehension; however, their intelligence endows them with exceptional properties. For example, they can turn what we consider waste and pollution into nutrients and raw material. This realisation has pushed the cutting edge of green design innovation today to work directly with the living urban micro-biome. Among the most promising micro-organisms, cyanobacteria certainly stand out as one of the favourites among researchers and bio-designers alike. In the work of design innovation practice ecoLogicStudio, for example, algae emerged as a design medium already in 2006. Early research focussed on bioinspired computation, essentially developing new digital techniques to draw biological patterns, as well as the mapping and simulation of key environmental factors affecting the urban realm. In other words, researchers were trying to draw the invisible, giving form to the kind of forces that often escape the tectonics of architecture but that are nevertheless spatial. The urban heat island effect is a good example. At the urban scale, it is the product of the interplay of anthropic emissions, urban morphology and local microclimatic forces; as such it is a complex system that can only be explored with the support of high-resolution satellite monitoring and digital thermal modelling. At the local scale however, people intuitively adapt to its manifestations, for instance by changing clothing or moving towards shade or greener environments. Integrating sensors give buildings similar abilities. Soon, however, it emerged that plants have exceptional abilities to register and respond to these gradients as, for instance, many species are phototropic. In addition, with their metabolism, they can affect these fields, for instance through evapotranspiration and oxygenation. In other words, plants could function as integrated sensors as well as actuators and, since they are living systems, they could do that efficiently within their own metabolic energy budget. But just how efficiently? Researchers discovered that micro-algae, or mono-cellular cyanobacteria, could be on average ten times more efficient at photosynthesis than large trees by unit of biomass. Also, their microscopic nature offered another interesting opportunity.The team at ecoLogicStudio, in an academic partnership with the Synthetic Landscape Lab at Innsbruck University and the Urban Morphogenesis Lab at the Bartlett UCL, was able to design artificial growing habitats and very efficiently integrate them in the built environment, even in very dense urban conditions or over existing buildings. Cyanobacteria such as Spirulina platensis then became one of the most exciting media to actualise computational environmental drawings and simulations into the physical realm of architecture, essentially by evolving into living bits of bio-digital information or into “bio-pixels”. In the years to follow, ecoLogicStudio built a long series of urban algae gardens, creating biological maps of light and radiation intensity in the urban realm, and more recently also of air pollution and carbon dioxide emissions. In all of them algae respond, activating photosynthesis and growing new biomass. What can be considered – in the computational realm of environmental engineering – a simulated abstraction of the real, actualises in ecoLogicStudio’s installations into a complex bio-digital assemblage. From this perspective, cyanobacteria are the perfect organism to interface efficient engineering, aided by advanced computation, with the beautiful designs of the living world, thus short-circuiting the ethical and aesthetical imperatives that fuel most of green tech’s desire to innovate. Designing living “bio-pixels” promotes the emergence of a broader notion of “pixelated nature” in the urban realm and the emergence of the concept of synthetic landscape. At this level of abstraction, nature appears as disconnected from its picturesque image and becomes hardwired into the infrastructural and digital processes that drive organisation in cities and in the Urbansphere. In the Anthropocene age, this new perspective on nature and its aesthetic value system has a crucial role to play in the innovation of the disciplines of architecture and urban design. Aesthetic here is intended as a form of meta-language enabling a deeper level of communication between multiple ecological systems.
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Deep Green
This crucial realisation has recently gained significance within the international debate. For many years the focus of design research has been firmly on the conception of new biomaterial systems. Recently however, their aesthetic actualisation has gained much attention. This is not so much in connection to traditional ideas of style, or provocation through image, but rather in connection to the notion of intelligence, of ecological intelligence. In many living systems, the patterns that they exhibit, which we often recognise as beautiful, are essentially a manifestation of their internal organisation, or the way they deal with material flows and how they optimise their metabolism. They are evolutionary traits emerged out of their interaction with the environment. The same can be said of contemporary green technologies. Developing a specific bio-digital language is a way of enhancing intra-systemic communication. A communication that is not just digital or verbal, but is enabled by a visual language that people as well as non-human species and intelligent machines can read and reproduce. It may be a provocative language to many, since it questions their assumptions about the concept of nature, or the relationship between nature and technology in the Anthropocene age.
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Green tech and urban planning
What does it mean today for architecture to be green and sustainable? And what does it mean to be green for the technology we use to design, built, feed and power our cities? Contemporary researchers strive to have an impact. Today there is certainly more urgency. That urgency however should not let us forget that to have a positive impact, innovation needs to go through a profound cultural transition that technology alone cannot support. Hence the importance of design aesthetics, to open a window into the unknown, or a window into the natural world that, as we are now realising, we have collectively been misunderstanding for most of modernity. Significant questions for example arise in places where it is impossible not to see and not to face the reality of the landscapes of the Anthropocene. ecoLogicStudio has recently been involved in a research project on the application of Artificial Intelligence to urban re-greening in collaboration with the United Nations Development Program. The project focussed on several test cities, one of them being Guatemala City. Guatemala City is situated on a complex and highly unstable terrain surrounded by mountains and volcanoes, some of which are still active. Its ecosystems, originally rich in biodiversity, are now made fragile by unchecked urbanisation and, given the region’s climatic zone, the effects of climate change. In Guatemala City this scenario is exacerbated by a serious lack of waste management. The Guatemala City garbage dump is the biggest landfill in Central America, containing over a third of the total garbage in the country. Ninety-nine per cent of Guatemala’s 2,240 garbage sites have no environmental systems and are classified as “illegal”. Consequently, the terrain of Guatemala City is today a synthetic landscape composed of several layers of plastic and other man-made contaminants interlocked with layers of soil, rock and living vegetation.To unpack the complexity of this scenario, ecoLogicStudio created an interface registering and connecting the bottom-up processes of self-organisation, such as the many local waste recycling activities that are emerging out of necessity in the areas closer to the dumping sites, with the strategic decision-making that occurs at municipal, national and international levels. The aim is to find new synergies and direct investments where they have the most potential to engender positive change.
Read the whole article (including references) in topos 112 on green technologies
