Thursday, March 5, 7pm

W.M. Keck Lecture Hall

COOP HIMMELB(L)AU's "Dynamic Raumplan" in the SCI-Arc Gallery is not an object but a spatial installation that operates like a machine, designed to communicate a new urban vision for the future. In this installation, the city is seen as a complex system whose complexity increases constantly due to the intensified inter-connectivity of its components and continuously emerging new parameters. This dynamic approach to urban planning demands a shift from linear cause-and-effect thinking that attempts to offer fixed solutions to a problem, to employing new tools that work with feedback loops, taking a vast number of parameters into account to arrive at possible future scenarios that don't predict but rather serve to orient the future.

The installation proposes energy as a critical, new parameter for urban planning of the 21st century, a catalyst for a new city morphology, a major paradigm shift similar to the impact the automobile had on cities in the 20th century. Dynamic energy lines derived from the sun, wind, water, the earth and green will now replace building lines forming three-dimensional fields of potential for new urban typologies in an attempt to generate an energy self-sufficient urban district.

The installation can be read in several scales, from a city block to a city district and an urban region. In a sequence using two simultaneous projections, one by one the energy lines forming the energy potential of an imaginary site are displayed. Later, these envelopes are slowly filled with possible urban volumes, "...rigid yet constantly transforming, designed yet loosely defined, standing yet slowly moving, adapting always to the current needs of the system. Like the brain. Like a cloud. Like a city."

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