FIELDSTATION: BRUSSELS
SPECULATIVE FUTURE OF THE
WORLD TRADE CENTER TOWER
WORLD TRADE CENTER TOWER
extrapolated from the possibilities of emerging technologies
And the Tower
From the inside it seems even larger. The once empty skeleton is now filled with a chaotic proliferation of emerging technologies: twisted wire intestines, ragged metal lungs, a network of digital veins, dense in one place and sparse in another, all spreading from floor-skeleton to floor-skeleton.
Structure adapting to the flux before your eyes.
Structure adapting to the flux before your eyes.
It seems as if the designers didn‘t provide even specifications for the architecture and only the most basic input data went into the core of the structure and networks of the stairs and elevators: the range of the boundary conditions and a few initial steps for the transformations. It was as if the Tower, driven by the technological fluctuations, algorithmized itself conjuring the interactions with the city of Brussels into form.
You find yourself submerging deeper and deeper into an autonomic sphere of the building, following unknown tectonics, learning the morphology of this alien space. Travelling down towards the very foundations between ever changing atmospheres of physical and digital landscape you observe the disparate fragments of the structure, shifting from one to another. Tower’s mass and installations constantly crossing paths and wires, coping, adapting and glitching out as their relationships are continually re-networked and auto-updated.
perhaps the boundaries become surfaces of catalysis rather than separation and definition
perhaps, they disappear
The towers
The Journey
The snapshots
there is no city, there is only density
Project is an exploration of possible futures of a nearly abandoned WTC Tower in the heart of Brussels. With the contemporary conditions and trends changing so fast that we can no longer make any valid predictions, so will the Tower’s structure and infostructure transform, reform and adapt.
Project was done as a part of Field Station research studio:
"(...) Field Station studio focusses on urgent issue of Shifting Borders (...). Our environment is increasingly mediated through digital technologies, eroding borders between material and virtual, while simultaneously giving rise to new geographies and introducing new borders. Many developing economies are growing, lowering poverty and providing social mobility for an increasingly large part of the world’s population. Simultaneously it is clear that our consumption and modes of production is unsustainable depleting resources, leading to ecological crisis and ethical considerations. Architecture as a discipline has a hard time operating in response to these shifting conditions. Tech nological progress, social shifts, ecological urgencies and global concerns are raising public debates about ethical boundaries."
music credits: Burial - Beachfires, SleepResearch Facility - C-Deck
