Typology: Idea for Future City
Project: M.arch Design Studio, Architecture for complexity
Year: 2020 Winter Semester
Location: Hunter Valley | Australia
Supervisor: Dr. Alisa Andresek
Team: Paarija Saxena , Akash Vazirani , Jitesh Sapra, Liam Kuhnell
Architecture System: Rehabilitation of Mining Site for Future City Planning (Group Project)
Softwares | Plugins Used: Rhino 3d, Grasshopper (Eddy, Bison, Wasp), Enscape, Twinmotion, Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign
Workflow: Site Analysis, Conceptualising Rehabilitation Plan (city) based on site-specific issues, Design development.
Studio Brief: Australia has over 60,000 abandoned mining sites. By engaging in the architectural terraforming of industrially terraformed sites, we will be seeding prototypes for future design projects at a planetary scale. Since contemporary Ai systems are more akin to large land-scapes, with distributed sensing and vast expanses of data, the quality of architectural agency introduced to those sites could also be understood as distributed robotic and cognitive fields, at high resolution and intricacy. They are not yet fully formed, crystallizing into life-supporting architectures for the Anthropocene.
Site Introduction
Location Map | Lidell Coal mine
Site Introduction: Liddell Coal Operations (LCO) is an established open-cut mine located at Ravensworth, approximately 25 km northwest of Singleton in the Upper Hunter Valley of NSW. LCO is operated and managed by Liddell Coal Operations Pty Limited, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Glencore Coal Pty Limited (Glencore), on behalf of a joint venture between Glencore (67.5%) and Mitsui Matsushima Australia (32.5%).
Cities must be sustained to adapt to the
new information age, and to generate its own resources.
We took a small part of the land and started building on it. The component is designed for habitation, circulation, and leisure which can be connected in multiple ways according to the connection rules that we worked out using a grasshopper plugin called "wasp".
Housing Units
Housing Units
Connection Units
High Resolution Units
All the different components are built on the site in a way that they are aligning to the wind direction vectors that we fed as a rule to the aggregation chunks in order to provide thermal comfort in the hot weather of Hunter valley. There are multiple Vineyard tasting events from the vineyards on site and also all the building blocks are made of timber.
Reflection: The Elysian Field outlines an alternative to the current model of a self-sustaining city. Leaving behind an excessive production and environmental exploitation of the last 150 years, it embraces key concepts of pre-industrial labor (such as a highly skilled workforce, sustainable scale of resource harvesting based on local availability, clustering into self-sufficient production hamlets, avoiding over scaling the production rate) and updated with the current possibilities of Industry 4.0 (automation which enables mass customization) and the phenomenon of digital craftsmanship. There is hardly a more problematic industry in regards to resource exploitation, environmental devastation, and recently automation-induced job loss than industrial mining.
Hospiality Industry | Wine Tasting Festivals
Food Production
Bots building With Timber
