It was the History Channel’s “Engineering an Empire” vagaries which sponsored this spectacular fest in three big cities: New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles projected as case studies to seers how the future of those is, with ten grand buck acts as the prize. The competition itself a little pushing, the participants was given one week deadline to imagine their vision of the city 100 future years, present it with anything they can do: renderings, models, and text.

Yet the three winners was pocketed their $10,000, if they also want more $10,000 they should win the next round by competing each other and prepare to achieve a national honor.

Vanes are above the New York sea flood

New Yorker has Architecture Research Office. Global warming threats New York, causing emerge of artificial archipelagoes. Manhattan’s low-lying neighborhoods suffer great lost as it floods caused by the loss of the earth’s polar ice melts. The only space can be build by architects is upon the flooded public streets. Solution to the problem is a new building type they named Vane which rises between skyscrapers. It substitutes the useless streets, recovering the city’s activities. Vanes expand through the Inundation Zones, allocating homes, offices, shopping arcades, parks and gardens for people. The thin wall gives warm daylight and affords natural ventilation. With form similar to pier, it creates dynamic relationship between the riverfront and the luminous evaporation towers nearby inside the city. The context of vanes is to support New York City and gives question to people about life, also to appreciate environmental setting. Skyscrapers are only 20^th century history in New York. From bird eye view, vanes look as if New York’s streets in 2106 reveal its true self than ever before.

More water everywhere

Chicago doesn’t desire to be left behind, with its UrbanLab claims the “water, water, everywhere” to their own city. In 2106, water will be the the new oil. UrbanLab’s project, “Growing Water,” focused on increasing demand for decreasing supplies of fresh water. UrbanLab’s idea for Chicago evolving into a model city for “Growing Water” by devising a series of Eco-Boulevards, a giant “Living Machine” spread inside the city. It will handle 100% of Chicago’s wastewater and stormwater naturally using natural filters, say it micro-organisms, small invertebrates (snails for example), fish and plants, closed-looping the city’s water circulation. Treated water will be harvested and/or returned to the Great Lakes Basin. Their daydream is realistic and suitable for Chicago because the city comprises several big park and water-engineering projects as precedents.

Build it in the unexpected way, Moss

Eric Owen Moss Architects led by Eric Moss, director of the Southern California Institute of Architecture, designed a plan to revitalize the eastern corner of downtown LA. Eric categorizes city in four kinds: the city as instinct, the city as method, the city as redundancy, and for his Los Angeles, he describes it as an infrastructure. While melting glaciers just waiting time to flood Los Angeles, the team’s looked it through a social lens perspective. The freeways, tracks, power grids, and concrete rivers originally designed to connect a horizontal city, but in fact deliver the opposite: the piecemeal city, where infrastructure is an obstacle to unite the city. The solution is to rethink the city by multiplying the purposes of its infrastructure: build over, under, around, and through the freeways, rivers, power grids, and tracks, to use the existing rights of way as the foundations for new, innovative construction.

Build over the concrete-trapped Los Angeles River a waterway for recreation, beauty and agriculture. Place three dams across it, each one housing a hotel. Raise parkland and a light-industrial zone over the railroad tracks on each side of the river. Build huge water towers to capture the sun’s heat and convert it to usable energy, and dot the cityscape with giant Times Square-like electronic signboards. Add housing on both sides of the river, merging the historically Latino Boyle Heights with a growing downtown. Leave the freeways as they are, but use their margins and the airspace for housing and other needed structures.

“Los Angeles has always grown laterally, but you can’t do that forever, you use the city you have ~conserve the infrastructure, and build on it,” Moss said.

Me? I vote for Moss, but surely Indonesian can’t.

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