Participated in the History Channel’s City of the Future Competition for Team Protostudio. We were selected as one of five architectural firms to compete, design and display Chicago in the year 2106 for the History Channel Series ‘Engineering An Empire’. Team Protostudio’s idea was that in 100 years, the east and west coasts and the south along with their large cities will be underwater after so many years of global warming, melting ice caps and rising sea levels, leaving Chicago IL as a single metropolis multiplying in size. Chicago being a mid-western city is surrounded by all of the future crops of the U.S., keeping our commerce and farm land growing. Our Design included a space cable (currently being developed) that allows civilians to both travel to space and collect energy using solar farms along the space cable. Hydro Farms will be built and utilized throughout Lake Michigan expanding our farming capabilities and allowing the city to increase in size. Attractions embedded into the center of the city will lure tourists and hold the concept of Bertrand Goldberg’s Marina City Towers as a ‘city within a city’, an ideal utopia, and an all inclusive city center. Also included is the idea of a biological facade for buildings. This idea can open and close like flowers budding to create shade or let in sunlight, helping to insulate buildings and improve air quality. The facade will also collect energy to be reused in the building itself.
We were given one week to complete our ideas, giving a statement, creating a physical model at 4’x4’ including smaller models at various scales of important aspects of our project, images portraying the future of Chicago in a “post-apocalyptic” world and a 6 minute animation riding down the space cable towards the city center and displaying all the features included in the text above.
