the Living City

LIVING CITY life@thelivingnewyork.com

A Project by The Living, Van Alen Institute New York Prize Fellows

Through hands-on design and prototyping, we investigated three parallel tracks of research and three definitions of the Living City.

LIVING CITY: A platform for the future when buildings talk to one another

In the future, buildings will talk to one another. In the era of ubiquitous computing—as sensors disappear into the woodwork and all kinds of data is transferred instantly and wirelessly—buildings will communicate information about their local conditions to a network of other buildings. Architecture will come to life.

Living City is an ecology of facades where individual buildings collect data, share it with others in their social network, and respond to the collective body of knowledge.

LIVING CITY: An exploration of the vitality of the city through new forms of public space—air and facade

In the future, public space in the city will be everywhere. Air will be public space. Building facades will be public space. Both will belong equally to everyone in the city, no less valuable than the traditional fixed public space of parks and streets. At the intersection of air and facade, public space will be distributed and dynamic. Architecture will come to life.

Living City is a definition of air as public space and building facades as public space.

LIVING CITY: A prototype facade that breathes in response to air quality

In the future, walls will breathe. Construction materials and systems that have been inert for thousands of years will respond in real time to the dynamic conditions of their surroundings and to a larger network of data. Buildings will host public interfaces to air quality and make visible the invisible conditions of the environment. Architecture will come to life.

Living City is a full-scale building skin designed to open and close its gills in response to air quality.

Buildings talk

From the old model of local input with local output … to the new model of local and global input with local and global output

Ubiquitous computing

As computing disappears into the woodwork, cheap modular sensors can be deployed as wireless sensor networks by individual citizens on the street or by individual building owners.

Ubiquitous Computing

Public space

Our platform allowed us to explore air as public space and building facades as public space.

Ecology of building facades

With the facade as a location of data sensing, of communication, and of responsive performance and display, the city acquires a new layer of interactivity.

Prototype 1

As proof-of-concept, we created a prototype with two wireless sensor networks and a building facade that breathes in response to air quality data.

Easy-to-deploy wireless sensor network

In our initial phase, we deployed one sensor network on the facade of the Empire State Building.

Empire State Building talks

We created software to collect and share the data from each wireless sensor network, allowing any participating building to talk to others and take action in response. The first conversation was between the Empire State Building and the Van Alen Institute building.*

Facade breathes

Building off of our previous development of Living Glass, we created a thin, transparent, lightweight building skin that breathes in response to air quality and moves to create an interface to important information.*

Living City A Project by The Living, Van Alen Institute New York Prize Fellows

Tags: architecture, facade, innovation, interaction cities, sensor networks

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 26th, 2009 at 1:10 pm and is filed under artworks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

the Living City

Leave a Reply