System City Infrastructure and the Space of Flows

by Weinstock, Michael

• ISBN13: 9781118361429
• ISBN10: 1118361423
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2013-08-19
• Publisher: Academy Press

Summary

A radical shift is taking place in the way that society is thinking about cities, a change from the machine metaphors of the 20th century to mathematical models of the processes of biological and natural systems. From this new perspective, cities are regarded not simply as spatially extended material artefacts, but as complex systems that are analogous to living organisms, exhibiting many of the same characteristics. There is an emerging view that the design of the thousands of new cities needed for an expanding world population are to be founded on intelligent and inhabited infrastructural systems or ‘flow architectures’ of urban metabolisms. The physical arrays of the flow architecture of the city are intimately connected to the networks of subsidiary systems that collect and distribute energy, materials and information. They animate the city, and should therefore be intimately coupled to the spatial and cultural patterns of life in the city, to the public spaces through which people flow, and should unite rather than divide urban morphological and ecological systems.

Featured architects: AMID(cero9), Buro Happold, Foster + Partners, Groundlab and SOM.

Contributors include: Joan Busquets, Kate Davies and Liam Young, Mehran Gharleghi, Evan Greenberg and George Jeronimidis, Marina Lathouri, Wolf Mangelsdorf, Daniel Segraves, Jack Self, Ricard Solé and Sergi Valverde, and Iain Stewart.

Author Biography

Michael Weinstock is Director of Research and Development and Director of the Emergent Technologies and Design programme in the Graduate School of the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. He has taught at the AA since 1989 in a range of positions from workshop tutor through to Academic Head. Over the last decade his published work has arisen from research into the dynamics, forms and energy transactions of natural systems, and the application of the mathematics and processes of emergence to cities, to groups of buildings within cities and to individual buildings. Whilst his principal research and teaching has been conducted at the Architectural Association, he has published and lectured widely, and taught seminar courses, studios and workshops on these topics at many other schools of Architecture in Europe and in the United States.