URBAN TENT
Evolo Competition 2015
While the use of glass in skyscrapers has proliferated, contemporary skyscrapers are effectively closed off from the environment. Since its inception, the use of closed and artificially controlled interior environments have caused large strains on the planet’s resources; have made these buildings homogenous experientially; and have also caused sicknesses related to this over-reliance on air-conditioning. Modern humans now live, work, play and learn in towers with the outside as if it were wallpaper: despite it snowing outside, the occupants feel no cold; nor feel any heat during a hot summer’s day. While comfort is of importance, this comfort-craziness has driven more and more advanced air-conditioning technology creating buildings that no longer open up to the nature’s seasonal changes and are the same all year round.
A new kind of skyscraper
While the use of glass in skyscrapers has proliferated, contemporary skyscrapers are effectively closed off from the environment. Since its inception, the use of closed and artificially controlled interior environments have caused large strains on the planet’s resources; have made these buildings homogenous experientially; and have also caused sicknesses related to this over-reliance on air-conditioning. Modern humans now live, work, play and learn in towers with the outside as if it were wallpaper: despite it snowing outside, the occupants feel no cold; nor feel any heat during a hot summer’s day. While comfort is of importance, this comfort-craziness has driven more and more advanced air-conditioning technology creating buildings that no longer open up to the nature’s seasonal changes and are the same all year round.
creating multiple temperatures and different layers of interior conditions within the whole building. Consequently, occupants can then choose to be in zones of different comfort and temperatures which also creates an opportunity for co-existence of different trees and plants. People can be enjoying the winter without feeling too cold in the outer zones, or feeling warm by being inside one of the warmer inner layer fabric rooms. The outside and inside fabric work together in a way that it creates different environmental conditions and different micro-climates on the inside of the building so that the harsh outside natural environment is filtered into the building in different amounts in different zones of the interior.
Vision
Because of these varying micro-climates inside the tower, rather than completely cutting people off from nature, the tower begins to bridge people closer to nature. We feel that as technology advances, the architecture should follow suit to enhance the sense of experience and integration to nature so that the daily lives can also be equally enriched; redefining the fundamental concept of shelter in architecture to that of not only protection from but integration to nature. Owing to the design’s multiple climate zones inside, this tower is essentially mixed-use. The architecture is a new spatial experience of ephermal beauty like that of nature: it changes with sunlight, captures shadows and warps with the wind. Inside people can see the new beauty of living on a changing building, rather than that of a static normal airtight building. We imagine that this kind of design will allow for many more different kinds of activity and experiences to occur in daily life of the building as people are moved closer to nature, even in an urban environment.
