Make me a Mountain!

Liam Young, 20 04 09

The role of landscape is evolving. Developing from a historical position based in conservation and preservation the ‘nature’ of ‘nature’ can now be seen as both generative and dynamic, offering the potential for new ways of engaging with the environment. The distinctions between technology and biology or the natural and artificial are dissolving to the point where they have now become outmoded terms.

Developing from Tomorrows Thoughts Today’s urban proposal ‘City Zoo’, ‘make me a mountain!’ is a standalone infrastructural landscape project.  Whether deployed in a backyard, on a football pitch or a fragile wetland the building mutates from its context to create a habitable ecosystem that (e)merges into and out of its site. More a wilderness than an architecture, ‘make me a mountain!’ operates as a synthetic organism, reinforcing the metabolic and symbiotic conditions found in the surrounding landscape.

In its first iteration the project is tested as a Bathouse, Visitor Centre and Research Station for a London Wetlands site. Like a scuttled ship molded fiberglass shells containing observation, education and research spaces perform as an artificial reef. Glistening from within the rough and lively rock of the artificial mountain is this intertwined set of sinuous and smooth public spaces. This is a dark, discovered, augmented wilderness embedded with technology for remote virtual bat viewing and arranged for intimate but unobtrusive onsite observation. (more…)

…Where The Grass is Greener!

Darryl Chen, 06 04 09

In the outer suburbs of London, a population has voluntarily separated themselves from the rest of society, and has taken up the mantle of sustainability in an extraordinary way. Driven by a set of ethics that places them in sometimes radical opposition to the rest of London, they have adopted a lifestyle that effectively makes them a carbon sink for the remainder of the city.

Postcards bear witness to how existing geographical patterns have been consolidated to create a giant infrastructural ring containing a series of productive and social programmes. Comprised of terraforming, hybridised architecture, natural obstructions and electronically surveilled barriers, this sophisticated urban crust is a new kind of urbanism - a fortress that protects a community of carbon-positive altruists, and reserves a place within the disorderly fabric of suburban London for pure ideology… where the grass is greener.

‘…where the grass is greener’ by Tomorrows Thoughts Today will be published in full shortly.

Specimens of Unnatural History: the Silk Factory

Liam Young, 08 12 08

The third installment of an ongoing project.  Chapter 3: the Silk Factory.

Pulled by moths an automated nomadic silk factory is spinning its glistening web under a lonely streetlamp. (more…)

Specimens of Unnatural History: the CO2 Scrubber

Liam Young, 02 11 08

The second installment of an ongoing project.  Chapter 2: the CO2 Scrubber (more…)

Barbicanism and its Errant Child

Darryl Chen, 27 07 08

Barbicanism and its Errant Child refers to the critical process of urbanism as the city makes and remakes itself, and more specifically to the Barbican as a potent reference point. This project is for the Bishopsgate Goodsyard, a long vacant site in London’s inner city. The Barbican’s own ideals, aspirations and current state of post-pubescent maturity indicate how one might go about developing a large brownfield site on the fringe of the highest concentration of financial capability in the world. (more…)

City Zoo

Liam Young, 21 07 08

Contemporary cities are no longer just accidental homes for animals that have been displaced from their natural habitat. They can now be seen as hotbeds of evolutionary change, shaping the adaptations of their resident fauna and providing an ideal theatre in which to see behaviour evolving at a pace rarely seen in the wild.

As we begin to view our cities as worthwhile ecosystems this project investigates the possibilities of a symbiotic relationship between two different systems of organization- technology and nature. (more…)

Barcelona and the satellite city

Liam Young, 21 07 08

Barcelona and the satellite city. Rethinking growth: Hyper-density and relational equilibrium

The project has recieved an honorable mention in the AA Prize for Unbuilt Work 2008

 you can view the reults and other entries here

This international architecture competition entry responds to a call for the rethinking of growth given a projected migration into the Barcelona region of 400,000 people over twenty years. Outcomes of the speculation are demonstrated into specific sites in Barcelona and the satellite city of Amposta, 2 hours from Barcelona by very fast train.

(more…)

Dublin Docklands Mixed Use Tower and U2 Studio

Liam Young, 21 07 08

view from river

Design competition for a residential / commercial tower, podium and U2’s new studio. The project was imagined as the centre piece of the Dublin docklands regeneration. With Jennifer Chen and Andy Chen.

view the project online at IrishArchitecture.com

It was proposed to fold the city streets, the public spaces and parklands of the docklands campshires, from an active engagement with the river, up through the height of the tower. The trajectory between the river and the stacked program of the tower is facilitated by a continuous ramping. The network of precast ramps provides circulation between the floor plates and is utilized to transfer loads to the structural skin. The spiralling public route, which facilitates programmatic exchange, forms the silhouette and image of the buildings as a new marker on the skyline. The vitality of the tower is seen through and across the buildings own ’songlines’ and provides a fitting notation for the collision of future aspirations and industrial working heritage within the docklands regeneration. (more…)