Para-city
Winner of First Prize at this year’s eVolo Architecture Skyscraper design competition, Para-City was submitted by Somnath Ray [a graduate student]. The competition called for designs of the ‘skyscraper of the future’ – to which Somnath responded by creating not a new form of skyscraper to be planted on an empty plot of land [like our typical current skyscraper, occupying a footprint and the sky above it], but an organic, parasitic mass of volumes that inhabits the leftover areas between buildings.
‘With ever-increasing densities and changing programs,’ he [Somnath] writes, ‘Para-city grows in the entire three-dimensional space of its host: the existing skyscrapers of the present urban landscape’ [BLDGBLOG].
‘The system is imagined with an implicit geometric intelligence capable of being subject to or mediated by genetic algorithms to constitute evolutionary structures that enable its growth in complex environments to attain an optimum level of syntactic adaptability’ [source].
project found on BLDGBLOG – images from Somnath’s website, and BLDGBLOG
Posted: February 12th, 2007
at 1:07pm by orangemenace
Categories: architecture,my ninja, please,urban/master planning,featured ninjas,towering pagodas,competitions
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[…] expansion, what I wonder now is if the city as we know it will be overrun – such as with Somnath Ray’s Para-City- or if the pre-existing cities will fall by the wayside, becoming large scale slums as seen inFrank Miller’s vision of a future New York in Ronin. […]
arch.mnp
21 Mar 07 at 4:32 pm
[…] [image: closeup of cyanobacteria, via Green.MNP – pretty siiick looking, right? Reminds me of this project.] […]
photo du jour 06.11.2007 at architecture.MNP
6 Nov 07 at 11:44 pm