Both studios had the privilege of welcoming Chien Chung (Didi) Pei and Juan Francisco Saldarriaga for an intimate lecture in the Spitzer School of Architecture's Max Bond Center. Also joining us in the audience was John Cetra of CetraRuddy.
DIDI PEI of Pei Partnership Architects came to speak extensively about Kenneth King and Kellogg Wong's book Vertical City: A Solution For Sustainable Living, which is a proposal for a new way of life based on an amalgamation of input from experts in their field: architects, urban designers, engineers, microbiologists, transportation and sustainability experts. From the discussion, the Vertical City concept is an autonomous system that eliminates urban sprawl, thus creating an highly efficient, comfortable standard for a life of the near future. The site of this new city typology is speculated to be in China, a country whose urban population has increased 30% in only 40 years, a number that is predicted to continue growing exponentially. The studios and Didi Pei discussed the social, economic, and technical implications of realistically creating this model, in China and other regions of the world.
Conceptually the Vertical City provides an exciting new premise that would in theory provide a low-footprint, self-sustaining trove of autonomy. The question of livability and psychology of having all your needs fulfilled in towers alone was a big consideration for me, and begs the question of people ever leaving these structures. Also, it seemed the precise population's demographic has not yet been considered, a vital topic that the studios have had to research for our own projects. Coincidentally, Didi Pei brought up the importance of a multi-story and/or multi-axis elevator, as did Dennis Poon of Thorton Tomasetti. For me, having an advanced elevator infrastructure and was a deceptively obvious idea, easy enough to be overlooked, but the specifics of emerging elevator technology could have taken hours to go over (as admitted by both Didi Pei and Dennis Poon).
Can you imagine living in the Vertical City?
Could everyone find their niche in an autonomous tower?
Learn more about the Vertical City:
https://verticalcity.org/index.html
See the full Vertical City Documentary here:
Chien Chung Pei is a founding partner of Pei Partnership Architects. He has contributed to works such as the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Grand Louvre in Paris, and was Designer-in-Charge of the West Wing Extension, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, Fragrant Hill Hotel in Beijing, and the Mount Sinai Hospital Guggenheim Pavilion.
http://www.peipartnership.com/about-us/biographies/chien-chung-pei-aia/
JUAN SALDARRIAGA is a researcher at the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Columbia University, who works at the intersection of data, GIS, visualization, journalism, architecture, urbanism, and the humanities. The works he shared with us were spatial mappings of massive compilations of curated data, focusing on social commentaries being expressed in various means of representation. Juan spoke extensively about real-world scenarios where conclusions were directly affected by not only the data itself, but also how it was collected, portrayed, and how the same data could be used in different ways.
For example, Juan had compiled open-source information about taxi drivers, geolocations, and license plates. Where one could combine this data and observe trends for mundane results like travel times or pickup hot-spots, Juan gave the example of people using this information to track and stalk celebrities, in the same process of by combining the data and using those trends maliciously. It brings up the idea of data mining responsibility, appropriateness, restrictions, and privacy.
The Conflict Urbanism: Colombia project tracked the displacement and victimization of Colombians over the last 30 years. Juan's methods of portraying this data traces the decades-long mass migrations by utilizing public governmental data sets and investigating them to discover important trends. In diversifying the methods used (GIS, coding with Python, data mining, and others), Juan transformed millions of individuals' stories into an iterative map of not just relocation but also the trends of homicides and crime-reporting in relationship to this period. He answers many, and simultaneously raises, important questions about this crisis, invoking conversation about how, why, and when data was collected, and how accurately the collected information represents the real situation.
What do you think different ways of data representation says about a culture?
Do you think open-source data should be more regulated?
Go check out his interactive project site here:
https://centerforspatialresearch.github.io/colombia_site
Juan Saldarriaga is a research scholar at the Center for Spatial Research and Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Columbia University and an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Urban Planning and Architecture at Columbia GSAPP.
https://juanfrans.com/
https://www.arch.columbia.edu/faculty/323-juan-saldarriaga