Fast Forward Urbanism

Graduating Project: Jas Johnston

Supervisor: Gretchen Wilkins

Tags BioGraduating ProjectGretchen WilkinsJas Johnston

Healthy urban qualities are rarely associated with high-rise towers, yet expanding vertically is vital to create compact, sustainable urban centers. Vertical strategies need to focus on creating enriched vertical urbanisms not just environmentally sustainable density.

To achieve a vibrant healthy vertical urbanism this project explores the application of a sped-up urbanism that simulates the evolution of a city through identifying the underlying forces or behaviors that shape it. These behaviors are likewise constrained and influenced by the urban fabric in a form of unending feedback loop between behaviors and built form. This fast-forwarded urbanism materializes a potential way in which the fabric of the city would have evolved in response to these behaviors and impulses, folded and layered into a vertical context. This process allows for the practicalities of tower construction, augmenting the long term evolutionary development of cities, to materialize these urban qualities instantly.

This algorithmic process is employed to create an emergent urbanism that is unexpected and unsettling yet understandable, intuitive and inspiring. This contradiction is produced through the amplification and vertical augmentation of forces and behaviors that have already led to the urban spaces we inhabit understand and connect with.