Performative Patterns of High Density : Sustainable visions between architecture and landscape

Today, more people live in urban areas than in rural as our planet has gone through rapid urbanization in recent decades. This process of urbanization is affecting not only our condition of living, the social, the economic, the political, the cultural, but also the environmental. Traditionally, urban life has been perceived as an escape from natural conditions, the urban in opposition to nature. We are increasingly becoming aware that urban development has to be understood as a development within nature and in interaction with nature. This requires a rethinking of the design of our future cities. The urban as land-scape, as prosthetic nature.
Such perspective understands nature as a complex collection of environmental operations that the city has to support or to substitute like the filtering of water and air, the provision of ecological niches, the growing of food and many more. By viewing the city not anymore as a collection of independent objects of attraction but rather as a systemic network of relationships in modulation of microclimatic conditions, we can develop new approaches to our future challenges related to urbanisation.
This approach aims at improved resilience of our urban environments and the activation of cities as active generators of a balanced habitat. The exhibition showcases a series of computationally driven design speculations, exploring new ways to engage with the surrounding urban and green systems and transform these concepts into an articulated land-scape as new urban typology grounded in social and environmental sustainability. The projects display solutions to a range of aspect like climate change, environmental pollution, loss of biodiversity and exhaustion of natural resources, in close cooperation with our surroundings.
Computational design thinking plays a central role in the understanding of the urban typology as an articulated land-scape. It enables an integrative systemic design approach across scales and disciplines. De-coding site-specific systems in relation to complex synergies fosters the closing of a gap between otherwise separated fields of knowledge.
The presented design speculations result of an ongoing research and teaching collaboration of Prof. Dr. Pia Fricker, Prof. Dr. Toni Kotnik (Aalto University) and Prof. Carlos Bañón (Singapore University of Technology and Design-SUTD). They are driven by thinking in structures and systems, informed by the underlying flow of various data streams and translated in a pattern of order and interactions. However, the goal is not a technological mimicry of nature and the urban as simulation of the natural surrounding but rather a creative investigation into natural patterns of interaction, into patterns of regularity as driver for design interventions. The urban space should be a created ground that expands the inherent logic and functionality of nature and challenges the traditional understanding of densification strategies enhanced by eco-system services. Landscape and natural processes are understood as a fundamental set of transitional concepts that operate on fields and boundary conditions. Reading the urban fabric as dynamic network systems with different contextual layers, allows an analysis of patterns linked with transitional and temporal elements of lands-cape systems.