The Transcendent City

Richard Hardy, a recent graduate from the Bartlett School of Architecture in London, has produced a couple of very interesting movies exploring the future of our cities.

This one, featured on BLDGBLOG, is called the Transcendent City, and speculates on the question whether the conception of artificial intelligence has been a necessity in human evolution and if we therefore should embrace emergent technologies to engage with problems of sustainability and the city. The video shows a dreamy world, a forest with artificial flowers dancing in the digital wind and amazing constructions that somehow remind us of a mix between Archigram’s Walking City and the fantasy world of 3D movie Avatar.

“The Transcendent City is an autonomous artificial machine that extends across the earth adapting to the natural eco-systems it encounters while deriving its energy from the renewable resources available at each particular site. The systems desire is to maintain homeostasis within itself whilst maintaining homeostasis within the greater system, Gaia. Its processes are engineered on the molecular scale by nano technologies controlled by molecular computers that monitor and analyse the environment.”