The Living Tower – revisited
An upper-pool studio project I did about 6 months ago with my design partner Mike Sharp just got listed for the Colorbond Student Biennale prize. whoohoo! There was alot of unfinished business with this project, so Mike and I decided to rework it up for the second stage submission. check it out:
The Living Tower is a proposal for a new kind of living in the Melbourne CBD, one which proactively engages inhabitants to imagine and change for a better future. Embracing a concept where ‘sustainable’ is not enough, architecture becomes a catalyst for giving back to the urban and natural environments. Wind, water, solar, and geothermal resources are harvested not only to create better living environments, but to generate algae production, generating energy for the building and back into the power grid.
Sustaining current urban tower practices is no longer an option. We must proactively engage users to imagine and change for a better ecological future. The projection of rapid prototyping technologies allows us to imagine a new kind of urban tower – one which lives and breathes to provide life and inspiration to its inhabitants.
Conceived as a living Klein bottle, with a continuous skin folding from the inside to out, a street level bio-cube harnesses the cooling effect of a temperate mirco-climate, passively controlling the climate within the tower. Above the bio-cube, pods are inserted into the bottle skin, organised through a recursive aperiodic tessellation. An algorithm for growth and decay, with mathematical properties related to phi, the tessellation creates distinct spatial properties, as well as a strong organic quality to the architecture.
Sustainability as we know it asks for minimal damage to the environment during construction and inhabitation. Future technologies will allow us to fabricate servicing into non linear structural walls. Mass customization will allow form to be liberated to work with the natural flows of the elements around us. We are able to imagine an architecture which not only utilizes the natural flows of our changing climate, but attempts to negate the affects of carbon emissions by producing algae based biofuel as a parasite to its own climate control system. A temperate micro-climate, passive lighting and cooling systems, recyclable components, waste recycling, food and biofuel growth systems, creates an adaptable, ecologically innovative tower of the future.
