What If New York City....Competition Winners
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 02. 8.08
The results are in from the What if New York City... competition that we covered last year, and the 10 winners are a collection of well resolved, workable, mostly modular solutions. However some of the other entries that didn't win but were selected for notice are ingenious, elegant and inspired.
Ostap Rudakevych and Studiolindfors would let people stay close to home in airborne soalar powered homes, tethered above their former community in a floating layer of provisional housing.
Studio Lindfors developed CLOUD CITY. Because of its population density and
concentrated infrastructure, the City is not well suited for traditional post-disaster housing, such as mobile homes.
CLOUD CITY is literally an uplifting experience that will allow communities to remain intact as they pull themselves out of the rubble. The homes can be rapidly deployed with minimal site preparation. They are intended to ‘plug in’ to existing utility services, and can be deployed by a team of four workers in roughly an hour. Once airborne, the floating homes allow construction crews below to work unimpeded, speeding up the recovery effort. This in turn reduces cost overruns and unnecessary delays. ::Studiolindfors
Jason Tax learns from an accordion;
John di Domenico builds on scaffolding above the existing neighbourhood;
Benoit McNamara makes shipping container housing beautiful;
and who wouldn't want to play with building-scaled lego blocks. The Mega-blocks people should knock this off too. By Margarida Castro of Porto, Portugal.
See them all at ::What if New York City...
the shipping container entry at top is nice, and feels do-able, the balloon idea scares me - even the thought of trying to live in something like that... while rare, New York is exposed to hurricanes. the accordian idea is also nice. but building on scaffolding on existing structures - how would that affect the light and other living conditions below?! And the lego-style idea just looks fun, but i don't understand how it would be fully practical.
y'know, we shouldn't be too quick to label the Lego entry as a joke. Think about it, the great thing about Lego has always been the flexibility of the medium. I'm not talking about the new "outer space" or "wild west" iterations that do all the imagining for you but the old-school 2-4-6-8 multicolour blocks with the rare (and therefore valuable) angled "roof" blocks.
We need a light, inexpensive, building media with built-in structural elements that can be used in emergencies and then disassembled and moved to the next site. If it could include the durability and flexibility of Lego, even better.
-Bob