Archinect - News

Cities Of The Future, Built By Drones, Bacteria, And 3-D Printers

2013-05-08T12:43:00-04:00

*This screed is awesomely entertaining and full of cool links, even though it’s almost entirely implausible..There’s also the occasional built-from-scratch Brasilia. So, some people might build a city like this in some central-planned, high-tech rush, before realizing that urban drones, bacteria, and 3DPrinters are fated to become as old-fashioned and pokey as swoopy, Space Age Brasilia is right now. - Bruce Sterling

As part of the Futurist Forum series, Chris Arkenberg composed some vignettes, suggestive of how urban architecture(s) could transform from than the rigid construction methodologies of today, the result being that "Architecture will lose its formal rigidity, softening and flexing and getting closer to the life we see in plants".

h/t Bruce Sterling here

Design's Invisible Century

2012-04-23T14:17:00-04:00

All human artifacts and activities — not just our objects and architecture, but also our organizations and operations, policies and procedures, systems and infrastructures — have been designed, and too many of the most critical have been badly done by professionals and politicians who didn’t know the first thing about design. While we cannot blame them for what they didn’t know or couldn’t see, the stakes have gotten too high for us to continue in this way.

On Places, Thomas Fisher, dean of the Minnesota College of Design, argues that the 21st century is poised to become the "invisible century of design" (rivaling the last hundred years, the invisible century of science). Who will be the Einstein and the Freud of the new design century? We need a revolutionary thinkers to identify and solve critical structural problems.

Deyan Sudjic's London Spacecraft, 1985

2011-12-29T12:28:39-05:00

British journalist and author (then) and now Design Museum director Deyan Sudjic's awesome London loft, designed by Ridley Scott and Stanley Kubrick. It actually itself looks like a small Design Museum itself, or a spaceship that's been travelling around galaxies, curating.

The Accidental Futurist: Steven M. Johnson's Alternate Realities

2011-08-26T14:00:46-04:00

Steven M. Johnson (b. 1938) is a former urban planner and future trends analyst from California, who defines himself in terms of Chinese astrology as a tiger "with a tendency to rush forward, defend the weak, and be foolishly brave." Since the early 1970s, he has been creating scores of alternative products and systems—on paper—that he hopes will benefit "or at least amuse" his fellow consumer-citizens.

A brief history of the pneumatic tube transport systems that never were

2011-07-22T18:32:12-04:00

Alfred Ely Beach is best known for his invention of New York City's first concept for a subway: the Beach Pneumatic Transit, which would move people rapidly from one place to another in "cars" propelled along long tubes by compressed air.