Perspective rendering of "future outdoors" building

Focusing on projecting new living conditions circa 2085 in the Netherlands, “A Wonderful World” master class with Wiel Arets at the Berlage Institute Postgraduate Research Laboratory, challenged participants to rethink the proposition of living in a metropolis, high-rise building.  Researching and redefining the map of the world, all of the continents were being projected to be within a 288 minute radius with a maximum travel distance of 72 minutes between continents.  The basic question put forward: How will the city develop within our extremely exciting, complex, but shrinking world?

The Future Outdoors team shared with us their research and proposal to this question.  Follow the break for a description and drawings.

Project Team: Juan Carlos Aristizabal, Gabriel Cuellar, Silvia
Gioberti, Samia Henni, Ivan Nasution, Githa Ong
Photographs: Courtesy of Future Outdoors

World map in year 2010

Future Outdoors

The basic premise of how we occupy space, and its quality, have been
revolutionized continuously since over 12,000 years. The great
revolutions of humanity correspond not only to production and
technology but the very mentality of space–spatial revolutions.
Despite this continuous realignment of space, a general dichotomy
arises that serves as a basis for architecture, the city and our lives
in them: indoors and outdoors.

World map in year 2085

Prior to 10,000 BCE, humans built campfires and sought out food and
pleasance in the outdoors. This ancient culture describes a sort of
“state of nature,” before introducing the dichotomy of indoors and
outdoors for our lives. The first spatial revolution corresponds to
the Agricultural Revolution. Representing the first large leap into
the sedentary, our ancestors saw this as an escape from the wild into
civilization, a shift from the outdoors into the indoors. The second
spatial revolution corresponds to the Industrial Revolution. From then
on, we understand the city as a interior, a congested closed place,
that lacks the fresh air, wildlife and “wellness” that the apparent
“natural” landscape offered. The third spatial revolution corresponds
to the 20th century and is well-described in Reyner Banham’s essay, “A
home is not a house,” where we become subject to the “virtual.” The
fundamental relationships of the indoors, outdoors, climate and
geography, are obliterated, as we watch nature shows on TV and enjoy
21C temperature year-round.

Generations and their technology

The latest spatial revolution corresponds to the Information
Revolution, when virtual space, transmitted from ubiquitous wireless
hubs, orbiting satellites, and portable devices connected to the WWW
constitute the new global “indoors.”
Just as the “indoors” of the pre-modern city were understood as
unhealthy and crowded and prompted creation of public parks, we see
today in medical research that the “indoor” world of wi-fi is harmful
in different ways. One claim is the constant anticipation, related to
stimulation of dopamine, of incoming e-mails and SMSs uses up brain
power, leaving people unable to “be fully in the moment” and deprived
of “downtime.” The electromagnetic radiation itself may also have a
harmful effect on the body.

Future generations of society, who by nature live in the wireless
world, will physically and mentally need an outdoors that responds to
the electromagnetic dimension of life.

* * *

Considering that all of these conditions will be heightened to the
extreme in the future, the task of the project is to not shape the new
indoors, but rather invent the new outdoors as the next spatial
revolution. Our project therefore is based in the premise that the new
outdoors is precisely outside of the ubiquitous and pervasive wireless
dimension, a sort of inversion of conventional understanding, a
heterotopic carte blanche, unshackled from mobile devices.

Wi-fi protocol history; new building form in function of wi-fi

In 2085, we will see digital infrastructure achieve a total coverage,
all people participating in global wi-fi communication which
eliminates the traditional geographic differences between the urban,
the natural, interior, exterior, etc. Taking a parameter from
electromagnetivity, geographically overlapping areas become defined by
“electronic terroir,” the specific and compatible GHz frequency ranges
for the millions of wi-fi users in the city.

Material properties' effect on transmission of wi-fi signal

At the same time, the new megapolis will be transformed to work
alongside computers and the wireless dimension, the “e-space” city.
Surface areas, floating platforms in the open air, within the new city
are parametrically organized, efficiently providing for all programs.
Whereas the outdoors was traditionally designated by “mother nature,”
and the indoors was conceived by man, the inverse happens in the
future–the outdoors is designed by man and the indoors is planned by
computation. Just as we heard of wi-fi hotspots by word-of-mouth in
the 1990s, in the 2080s the new outdoors becomes a discussed, socially
activated realm.

New city wi-fi geography

We know that the thick walls and materials of current buildings
obstruct wireless signals, like gigantic Faraday cages, and embody the
20th century notion of indoors and outdoors. Thus, we invert this
relationship and allow the new indoors to reign, by radicalizing the
architecture material palette and disintegrating building components
into space and climate. On one hand, the surface areas of the city
reflect electromagnetic signals like a Hall of Mirrors, providing
complete coverage of the wireless connectivity. On the other hand, the
envelope of the new outdoors is characterized by new materiality that
nullifies wi-fi signals.

City/"e-space" section drawing

The future outdoors is the absence of wi-fi connection. Specifically,
the new outdoors is a logic to “un-plug” areas of the city. When the
city is designed by computer and wi-fi, the spatial agency people have
is to subtract, to “un-plug” area, and create outdoors spaces from the
“e-space.” This is achieved by enveloping and joining together a
quantity of the city’s surface areas.

City/"e-space" plan drawing

The architectural model of 2085 elaborates the Semperian Hut. What was
the outdoor hearth becomes the wireless signal, what was an interior
room becomes the carte blanche. Architecture that reacts to the real
dimension of the time.

Perspective rendering of "future outdoors" building