Abstract
Today, more people than ever live in the metropolises of our world. The tension between the explosively growing metropolises and their satellite cities, and between these interconnected regions and the diminishing rural communities, present immense social and economic challenges that require entirely new ways of thinking about and materialising architecture if the twenty-first century’s urban adventure is to succeed. And this is expressed in the most radical way in Flight Assembled Architecture.
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References
The project Flight Assembled Architecture is based on a collaboration of Gramazio & Kohler and Raffaello D’Andrea in cooperation with ETH Zurich. It represents the first architectural installation assembled by flying robots and was demonstrated in 2011 at the FRAC Centre, Orléans, France
Gramazio, F., Kohler, M., D’Andrea, R.: (eds) Flight Assembled Architecture. Editions HYX, Orléans: Editions HYX, pp. 15–17 (2013)
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Willmann, J., Gramazio, F., Kohler, M., Langenberg, S.: Digital by material: envisioning an extended performative materiality in the digital age of architecture. In: Brell-Cokcan, S., Braumann, J. (eds.) Robotic Fabrication in Architecture, Art and Design, pp. 12–27. Springer, Vienna (2012)
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See Kiyonori Kikutake‘s idea of a Tower-shaped Community (1960) that featured a joint core system, holding up to 1,250 living units for over 5,000 inhabitants. Koolhaas R, Obrist H-U (eds) (2011) Project Japan—Metabolism Talks…, Taschen, Cologne, p. 360
See UN Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT), Report 2008
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This is reminiscent of Christopher Alexander’s notable essay A City is not a Tree (1965). Where Alexander describes the growth of a city, not in the sense of tree-like natural structures, but rather through semi-lattices—overlapping sets and spatial arrangements—and identifies these as the key generative principles. Early on, Alexander points to the formation of different territories and describes them as diagrammatically generated aggregations. Even if today it might be proven that the experimentation using such theory can hardly suffice to understand the city in all its complexity, Alexander deserves credit for having at least explored a comprehensive system and methodological consideration of urban dynamics. For The Vertical Village, it is particularly significant that Alexander’s description of fine-grained, almost rhizome-like self-organising strands and structures representing an abstract structural relational order, which is however associated with specific structured and tailored spatial and architectural situations (Alexander later famously refers to these as “patterns”). With this he argues once again that the city is an “open” structure, whose individual elements are related to one another in the most different ways, much like that in The Vertical Village.
Saunders, D.: Arrival City: How the Largest Migration in History is Reshaping Our World. Knopf, Toronto (2011)
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See Kisho Kurokawa’s tourist development project for Umm Al Khanazeer Island in Baghdad (1975). Here, it is remarkable that Kurokawa not only designed a metabolist building structure but also developed a concise strategy of how this could be built up and assembled from its parts. Koolhaas R, Obrist H-U (eds) (2011) Project Japan—Metabolism Talks…, Taschen, Cologne, pp. 622–623
An additional feature is the robot-based fabrication of the modules in an adjacent yard. The variously curved, multifunctional glass facades are assembled here in small series, and the overall structure and individual interior configurations are made. For the construction of The Vertical Village the modules are to a certain extent manufactured according to market dynamics, following supply and demand as required. This has a corresponding effect on the development of the overall structure, for this is similarly dependent on the possibilities and requirements of the particular social, economic and constructional circumstances. It is for this very reason necessary to give the modules “robust” dimensions, to allow for various adjustments not just in their use but also in their production
The “diagonale du vide” (diagonal of emptiness) is an area of France that stretches from the North East of the country through to the South Western regions. In the history of France there have been many efforts to upgrade this low-density zone with infrastructural measures. A bizarre illustration of the inability of political measures to address the problem of low density present in many regions across Europe, even the introduction of a TGV line could not revive this area’s economy
Gramazio, F., Kohler, M.: Digital Materiality in Architecture, pp. 7–11. Lars Müller Publishers, Baden (2008)
Mirjan, A., Willmann, J., Gramazio, F., Kohler, M.: Designing behaviour: materialising architecture with flying machines. GAM 10, 236–247 (2014)
Tönnesmann, A.: Monopoly. Das Spiel, die Stadt und das Glück. Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin, pp. 85–126 (2011)
Gramazio, F., Kohler, M., Willmann, J.: The Robotic Touch—How Robots Change Architecture, pp. 383–384. Park Books, Zurich (2014)
Acknowledgments
This essay is settled on a publication by Fabio Gramazio, Matthias Kohler and Jan Willmann with the title The Vertical Village in Gramazio F, Kohler M, D’Andrea, R (eds) (2013) Flight Assembled Architecture. Editions HYX, Orléans: Editions HYX.
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Willmann, J., Gramazio, F., Kohler, M. (2015). If Robots Conquer Airspace: The Architecture of The Vertical City . In: Rassia, S., Pardalos, P. (eds) Future City Architecture for Optimal Living. Springer Optimization and Its Applications, vol 102. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15030-7_1
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