Oct '13 - Mar '14
Recently, this roaming city project by Spanish thesis student Manuel Domínguez featured on ArchDaily got me thinking about the trajectory of relocatable cities throughout recent history. Archigram’s Walking City is an obvious parallel, but what is interesting about Domínguez’s project is that it isn’t necessarily purely conceptual; his calculations ostensibly demonstrate that the project is structurally feasible (which Herron’s certainly is not).
But I also thought, is the idea of a roving city really that radical? What of cruise ships, that house thousands of people and many of the necessary accouterments for a more-or-less urban life; movie theaters, swimming pools, shopping malls and theaters? Navy vessels function similarly as a floating city, with a more efficient approach...
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Read the rest of this post, and posts from other MIT Architecture students, over at Arch Kiosk
A window into MIT's M.Arch program and other goings-on in the Boston architectural community from the perspective of an incoming student.
2 Comments
it IS funny that architects are so provincial that we can ignore something if it doesn't look like a building. 'that's a boat! not a city.' architecture seems awfully conservative when you look at the things that are designed these days and how they're conceived, developed, and produced.
think of the design opportunities if more of us looked more broadly at the things that get produced outside of architecture offices and learned how they come about! is it our resistance to thinking of our work as 'product' that keeps us from learning from product design? is industrial design only something that happens for things that need to be made in the 10,000s?
zaha was criticized for the bespoke yacht published a few months ago, probably because it's going the wrong direction. architecture needs to learn more from boat design (or other product design fields) than those designers need to learn from us.
Great insight Steven! I agree that it is productive for architects to re-consider our scope. After all, aren't we supposed to be masters of the built environment?
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