What can a city be?
“If a city can be considered a place where a group of men are born, live and die; if a city is a mother who looks after her children, furnished them with all they require and decides how they shall be happy; if a city is all this, independent of its physical and demographic dimensions, then a spaceship, which for centuries has been following a precise route towards a planet thousands of light-years away, is also a city.”
--------------- Superstudio 1971
The city is an autonomous accumulation of mobile modules which accomodates one individual per module for a lifetime. As the outer core rotates, different sectors can be reached and used. As inhabitants
connected together, the endless corridor becomes the city. It is a new urban experience.
connected together, the endless corridor becomes the city. It is a new urban experience.
Identical modules creates no social hierarchy, yet inhabitants can still stylise their won modules upon wishes.
While other inhabitants are enjoying their sleeps, the kids sneak out and play. The city becomes the secret playground for the kids. It is a place of imaginations and possibilities.
Modules sometimes are connected for festivals. The corridor is filled with game booths and decorations. When modules are joined circularly, a large temporary structure can be inflated at the centre. The city is a place for social gathering and excitement.
The usual activities that took place in current cities are now happening along the corridor. The quality of social lifes are recreated under a new context. The mode of living is redefined.
Sitting on the anti-terraforming camp, the city aims to record data of original Mars and awaiting the day to bring back her non-human nature. For generations the city have lived and witnessed the terraforming process of Mars. As other cities decayed, the ruinscape are destroyed and sent back to the mantle of Mars.
Once all other civilisations left and search for new habitats out in the universe, it s time to recompose Mars what she once was before human invasion.
Eventually, their duty in restoring Mars is completed. The final generation of the city chained and built a rocket, propelling themselves into the deep universe. Out there, they carried with them the knowledge of a million years, continue to explore the unknown space.
For every land we took to eract architcture, we took away a part of the mother nature. Forests took centuries to grow, while we only used months to destroy. The rate of city growth is far more rapid than that of nature recovery. The problem does not lie on the practicality of eco-cities or substainable cities, it is the concept of them. If city and nature has been growing in a balanced manner, the concept of eco-cities would not even exist. Therefore, maybe it is not the practicality of city structure that need modification; it is the fundamental of city nature that requires a rethink.
Now, staging Mars as the site, I question and cristicise the fundamental of architecture and city, aiming to redefine the relationship between nature and architecture, between human and architecture, and between architecture and city. If current cities are static forms composed with different elements, and intertwined into a complex system, can all city elements cluster into one module, and through the replication of it, become a complex system? Can we respect nature the same way as all other species on Earth does, and allows nature to dominate architecture, instead of architectecture overpowering it?
As technologies rapidly revolutionise the world, is the society becoming more and more terrifying as it only further encouraged individualism as the general public believed? Would the world end up to be a collection of individual modules that we live in? Or is it actually an appropriate tool to open up an entirely different living mechanism?
