S4. Encrypted Rome » castelli

Trashtopia

Shashank Shahabadi — Tue, 17 Mar 2015 11:20:33 +0000

Our society is going into an absurd direction. On one hand we consume and consume – and therefore we need more and more production. On the other hand there is even more produced than actually consumed. And in the end what is left is trash – tons of trash. But what happens with all that waste? Where is it going?

So far Castelli seems like a harmonic site at the edge of Rome where suburban and agricultural area merge. But there is already a mismatch. Agricultural production is there to feed the city of Rome while the trash is emerging from there, being piled up in landfills around the belt.

We tried to imagine what might happen if we keep going on like this. We created a future where the waste is not abandoned anymore but embraced. We abused a Processing script to bring the trash to life and let it grow by itself. The script generated an independent structure that would take over the site of Castelli.

Everything turns sooner or later into trash, even buildings. But why not going the other way around? Can the trash have another life again? Can it create a new habitat, a new urban structure? If we cannot change our habits, can we maybe live with the results?

Encrypted Rome || HabiLAB

Marina Lazareva — Thu, 12 Mar 2015 21:55:23 +0000

Habitable Laboratory

As you can see nowadays, all the big cities in the world are facing the same problem which is the rapid growth our urban infrastructure which create “urban sprawl”.

We believe that in the future, all agriculture landscape in Castelli will be occupied by this urban sprawl too. We would like to propose the concept of how can city and agriculture can grow and merge together at the same time while still keep producing same amount of product or even more. Our question is “How can the city define itself as a high performance laboratory for agriculture”

By using the method of Spider-Web Bio-mimic which has the initial sense of “habitat, producing and consuming”. We create the Spider Web that can connect between global scale to micro scale, from city-city, city-building, building-building, building-urban furniture. By avoiding to destroy all heritage buildings in Castelli, we integrate by using Spider Web that work as multi-channel of water, soil, light and air to grow laboratory agriculture in suitable Micro Climate that can grow all type of plants all over the year and besides of the much amount of agriculture production, we believe that our proposal will create the new social interaction into this territory and improve the life of Castelli’s citizens.

Layered Growth

Jinyang Han — Sun, 01 Feb 2015 07:27:22 +0000

Here what is going to be presented is our vision of the future city of Rome.

The territory is part of metropolitan area of Rome. According to the study of history and the analysis about this territory, we’ve learnt that the city is growing, the population is growing, and the city is expanding in space. Although they would live in areas that now are farms and fields, but for sure their lifestyle would be like a citizen, they need more food, more energy, more transportation, better connection to other areas, etc,. In a word, bigger demand of food and energy. The site now is impressing with its product provided by nature, but can the nature also solve the problem of over population in the future？

Group member: Ayaan, Angello, Jinyang

The territory is part of metropolitan area of Rome. Since the world population is growing, and taking into consideration the limitation of Rome city center, it’s not hard to predict that there would be more people living in the metropolitan area out of city center and they would occupy a bigger part of city population. although they would live in areas that now are farms and fields, but for sure their lifestyle would be like a citizen, they need more food, more energy, more transportation, better connection to other areas, etc,. In a word, bigger demand of food and energy. the site now is impressing with its product provided by nature, but can the nature also solve the problem of over population in the future？ perhaps we need to find a way to make the land even more productive. now most of this area is occupied by agriculture, so in the future, to meet the increased needs, we need to improve the efficiency of agriculture, increase the area of agriculture, at the same time make more spaces for residence and energy generation. the concept is to take to take the element that could be found in this territory, and rebuild them in a technical way. By lifting some points of ground, more artificial hills are created.

So basically, the point here is to increas the surfaces for agriculture.

We already have beautiful landscape here, we have soft curves of land, and amazing hills covered by buildings and feids. We would like to continue the landscape, and to make some new artifatial hills for people. We used a script to simulate the process of how the monts would grow and change with time.

The logic is that growth would start from some points where more people gathere. First layer would be put here, and according to further growth, more layer would be above. So the monts will start to grow from some certain points, and then expand and influence neibouring area.

So finally there might reach the end, where there gathering more needs, there is more layers and higher monts. The curved surface would be occupied by crops.

Group member: Ayaan, Angello, Jinyang