City of the Future - San Francisco in 2108
Eager to see what your city will look like in 100 years? …you’re in luck as the History Channel-sponsored CITY OF THE FUTURE: A Design and Engineering Challenge for 2008 is happening right now, with local architectural competitions being held in Washington, DC, San Francisco, and Atlanta. The National Champion will be selected via online voting February 4 2008.
The San Francisco portion of the competition was won last week by IwamotoScott Architecture for their SF Hydro-Net proposal.
The ISAR Hydro-Net design, nicely laid out on Flickr, builds a vast subterranean infrastructure to distribute water, power, fuel and goods and people beneath the streets of San Francisco in an effort to achieve a zero-net-energy city. Water comes from aquifers and fog catchers; energy from geothermal, algae farms and hybrid bioluminescent acquaculture; transportation via hydrogen-powered hover cars in tunnels bored by auto-navigating self-drilling robots - tunnel walls are reinforced by carbon nontubes that do double-duty as hydrogen stores. …the infra-city becomes the city.
Cretans, flamebaiters, rival architects and other ne’er-do-wells might well deride the ISAR proposal as “so out there” and impractical, little realizing the double-entendre of being co-opted in the quest to expose the inadequacy of the prevailing system, railing against the canons of conformity and the irony of practising invisible architecture — in other words, we like it.
Local architects offer their visions of S.F. 100 years hence in a competition - SF Chronicle, Jan 21 2008
