Future Frankenstein City
University of Tehran / Supervisor: Javier Sanjuan
The main purpose of this workshop was to create a futuristic city from nothing but collage pieces. Every collage that was produced at the end of the day was the result of four different collages and ideas developed by each member of the group. At first, we had a group discussion and each member explain and illustrate their ideas and then by combining the collages the final idea was created.
Day One
In the beginning, we tried to think about our city emotionally instead of rationally. After the group discussion, each person made a collage of his ideal city and then we started to combine the collages together in order to find relationships between them. We have come to the conclusion that with the advancement of technology and industry, human beings will miss their natural life and landscape, and a pleasant place away from smoke and chaos will become nostalgic for them so we came up with the idea of a two-level city. So we started to make one collage together which can represent our concept.
Day Two
Our city is defined by two main levels. These levels are different in height and quality. The lower level is the industrial part of the city with factories, a few rough buildings and so forth which are among the green spaces. The upper level of our city which is more humble than the lower part contains warmer, more residential living spaces. These two levels are connected with long vertical paths with the help of imaginary super trains. The upper level of our city is built with some modular objects coming together with different heights, sizes, and densities. We define the public and private spaces of our city by playing with the density of our modules.
Day Three
The mobility in the lower level is very much advanced because of the free space provided by moving houses and shelters to the top so there will be no traffic and performing long distanced journeys. We thought that this city could recycle the energy, for instance, hot smokes provided by industrial buildings in the lower lever heating consumed water used in higher level, and grey waters produced in higher level could help to generate electricity or be used in cooling systems in lower level.
Day Four
On our fourth day, our main challenge was to find the proper order for each of the two levels regarding that Green spaces, clean air, sufficient daylight, mobility and good circulation. The upper level (the cloud of dwellings) could cast a shadow over the ground level and on the other hand, we didn’t want houses as stacks for living. For this reason in addition to horizontal paths, voids were adjusted to the upper level to provide daylight on the ground level. The ground level consists of public areas such as shopping malls also working spaces or firms all forming a series of units scattered in the site but interconnected in an obvious way. To sum up it offers mobility, good circulation more green spaces, cleaner air (less traffic) and access to the main road.