The Seven Curiosities of the City, Bartlett UD3 23 Nov. 2011

1. the Cities born to be twins

I worked in  Liverpool Pavilion of Shanghai EXPO last year, and found the twin cities extremely similar with each other in fashion. The bund of Shanghai was once a copy of Liverpool's waterfront, while Liverpool nowadays is imitating the skyscrapes of Shanghai, and the construction of Wirral Waters, UK's biggest project in the following 30 years, is under way. In addition,  Shanghai Tower, the upcoming tallest building in China as well as the highest tower in Northwest of England are about to share the same name. In my beloved Pavilion, once there was a giant picture showing the prefect combination of the cityscape from the two cities, and people could barely figure out where the boundary lay.

2. Labyrinth

Not all cities are like Paris or New York with forms of geometry. On the contrary, there are many cities on this side of creation, especially medieval towns, were built like a chaotic labyrinth whilst the inner logic still exists.

3. From the views of the Little 

There are many stories about the life of little people, whose size is no bigger than a thumb of us, and those tales offer us a good chance to look at our world and the built environment  from a tiny spot. Even a lawn could be regarded as a forest while a little cup might be used as a floating boat. Through this kind of observation, we are able to view things on the basis of miniature by using some objects nearby as a yardstick, and avoid being lost when tackling a project with a gigantic scale.

  
4. Let's set our houses in motion

I was always wondering whether there would be a day down the line when we could journey with our elegant houses and get settled at various dreamy wonderlands, forming different neighbouring communities everyday. I weaved the idea into my Patchwork City while such a notion has been exposed several times in movies like Howl's Moving Castle and Up. However, it remains to be a conceptual description,  for it is still beyond our ability to will it into a solid reality.

5. Living with Nature

Here follows a project of sustainability, guiding us how to create a nature-friendly eco city:


Tar Creek Supergrid


For his thesis project at the University of Toronto, Clint Langevin, in collaboration with Amy Norris, proposed "repurposing abandoned mines as renewable energy infrastructure in the U.S."


The architects specifically propose "a structure that raises the solar energy infrastructure off the ground [and] creates the opportunity to host other activities on the site, as well as to remediate the polluted ground and waterways. The concrete structure, pre-fabricated using waste rock material from the site, is assembled in a modular fashion from a kit of parts that accommodates a variety of programs."

6. Nature Worship

Nature needs to be respected, and we shall build our cities without severely disturbing it, or dig up a way to live harmoniously with it. Otherwise,  the conseqence for us to suffer will for sure be great. The UK pavilion of Shanghai EXPO 2010 is a not a chamber of man-made wonders, but a sacred cathadral of thousands of seeds, a true respect to nature. 

7. Nature breaches

Here comes a vivid look of how nature would breach into the World of Man as a way of vengeance if we were continuously gnawing it greedily. The illustrations of TokyoGenso (a.k.a. Tokyo Fantasy) depict a post-apocalyptic Tokyo devoid of people and overtaken by nature.