City of the Future/Atlanta Exhibition
August 12 – September 4, 2008
A Design and Engineering Challenge
The History Channel 2008
Ernest G. Welch School of Art & Design Gallery
Georgia State University
Atlanta

Sponsored by A&E Television Networks, the national competition offered participants the opportunity to develop inventive visions of Atlanta 100 years from now. These visions were presented through a written statement, a visual display, and a 3-dimensional construct assembled within a 3-hour period in Underground Atlanta on February 4, 2008. Project summaries and images of the temporary public displays were then posted on www.history.com/cityofthefuture from February 4 to May 5, 2008, when the Grand Prize Winner was determined based on the results of public online voting.

EDAW | Praxis3 | BNIM | Metcalf & Eddy
City in the Forest
2008 Regional First Place and National Grand Prize Winner

Even during the second driest year on record, rainfall in Atlanta produced 75 billion gallons of water. The city maintains over 1,900 miles of pipes to collect, combine with wastewater, treat and pipe storm water downstream. Climate change, growth, and sprawling impervious surfaces continue to degrade this outmoded, costly system.

2008 marks "The Dawn of the Restorative Era" by overturning the infrastructure logic of the past. In the City of the Future, storm water resurfaces to flow naturally across the land. Freed from use, existing underground systems act as aquifers, preserving scarce water for long term use.

This simple shift underground, in turn, transforms the landscape above. The rigidity of the urban grid yields to swaths of green and waterscapes. Settlements cluster along ridges and water catchments, participating in a sustainable, living system. Corridors of open spaces spread to link communities in an organic form and fully reclaim The City in the Forest.

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EDAW | Praxis3 | BNIM | and Metcalf & Eddy concentrate on addressing the complex issues of the contemporary city and the creation of public space in an information-based society. Their multi-disciplinary approach to design focuses on integrating the built and natural world to provide innovative and wholly sustainable solutions.

Georgia Tech
LWARPS - we can reverse sprawl
2008

Atlanta’s development pattern has depended on cheap oil, water and land. Future shortages will shrink and densify Atlanta’s footprint. A prosperous future for all relies on:

• Green Infrastructure: network of 1000’ streambed buffers harvesting stormwater in new reservoirs; parks; intensive agriculture; and tree farms producing cellulose biofuel and wood pellet energy, establishes eco-acres that sustain Atlanta’s growth
• Mobility Infrastructure: evolution of Atlanta’s abundant transportation infrastructure with expanded transit modes and zoning changes to connect people to people, people to places and places to places
• Eco-Acre Transfer: development rights transfers from Green Infrastructure to Mobility Infrastructure – provides the ecological and economic logic to convert un-sustainable low-density development to sustainable-density development at nodes and along existing corridors.

By evolving wasteful infrastructure and linking new development to investment in eco-acres, Atlanta can go from chopping down 51 acres of trees a day to replanting them.

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The Georgia Tech team drew on the expertise of the Architecture Program in sustainable architecture, urban design and retrofitting suburbs while assembling the individual Atlanta-based research projects of the volunteer faculty and students into a collective vision. Designers included Ed Akins, Tristan Al-Haddad, Richard Dagenhart, Ellen Dunham-Jones, Janae Futrell, Michael Gamble, Ryan Gravel, David Green, Frances Hsu, Jude LeBlanc, Cassie Niemann, Miharu Morimoto, Gernot Riether and Jen Yoon.

The HOK Planning Group
Bio-Inspired Design

Planners, architects, strategists and designers from across the globe, in partnership with the Biomimicry Guild, created this optimistic, bio-inspired view of the city’s future. In 2018, Atlanta functions more like the ecosystem of a forest than a sprawling metropolis dominated by a landscape of concrete, steel and smog. The futurist, yet humanist, city is made of dense, dynamic multi-centralized cores surrounded by urban villages with abundant open space interlaced with urban agriculture. Diverse and layered transit options relieve traffic and recapture valuable land for people and life systems.

Birthplace of the Civic Rights movement, Atlanta will become the home of the Ecological Rights movement. Goods and services long squandered by old industrial models of production, consumption and disposal will be liberated and revitalized. Built and natural systems will become interdependent partners, creating truly healthy and vital places for people. By correcting the CO2 in the atmosphere, the restoration of Atlanta’s ecosystems will transform shortages to surpluses of clean water, fresh air, free energy and rich soil—a better place for everyone.

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Founded in 1955, HOK’s expertise includes architecture, engineering, interiors, planning, lighting, graphics, facilities planning and assessment and construction services. Through its network of 26 offices worldwide, HOK serves diverse clients within the corporate, commercial, public and institutional markets. HOK is committed to developing resources and expertise to help lead the world toward sustainable communities and building environments.

HOLLWICHKUSHNER (HWKN)
MeTREEpolis

Our concept is based on projecting real developments in the field of genetic manipulation into the future. Technological advances will allow the integration of a photosynthetic molecular complex with a solid-state electronic device, effectively turning modified plants into energy producers – we call POWER PLANTS.

By 2108 a majority of Atlanta’s downtown buildings have been retrofitted with POWER PLANTS, taking the whole city center off-the-grid. ADAPTIVE building typologies have expanded into the suburban metropolis, mainly providing housing. Street infrastructure has been eroded and replaced by a layer of bio-renewable moss. Swarms of pod vehicles stream through the landscape instantly determining the most efficient routes. Above the city a new datum has been grown that creates a landscape for recreation and leisure.

Atlanta adopts a natural growth building code that follows the organic model of forests. Density is evened out across the metro area as POWER PLANTS take advantage of sun exposure, water access and soil. Landscape evolution replaces conventional urban planning tools in creating a city predicated on density and sustainability. A MeTREEpolis.

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HOLLWICHKUSHNER (HWKN) NYC/Switzerland is an architecture and concept design firm established by Matthias Hollwich and Marc Kushner. Their work exists at the intersection of client, user, brand and nature. Whether in teaching or in practice, in all their projects, they strive to inspire and create innovative and responsible man-made environments.

NOX, NYC + Rotterdam
ÜberAtlanta

Our ÜberAtlanta reinvestigates previous futurist, if not utopian, city models – Constant’s New Babylon, Friedman’s Spatial City and Lissitzky’s CloudHook skyscrapers – to project an Atlanta one hundred years from now. A 3D-city as a spatial system of vertical, diagonal and even horizontal skyscrapers that interconnect to create an immense density of life. ÜberAtlanta consists of five main levels: 1. Beaker Level: at the top huge beaker-like structures collect precious rainwater and store it in large basins; 2. Park Level: the rain water is transported to a park-network in the sky that filters it into drinking water; 3. Interaction Level: the city in the sky mixes residential, leisure and office areas to create short travel distances; 4. Old Ground Level: the beakers and the 3D-structure protect the ground from a harsh 110ºF average to create a cool Arcadian climate; 5. Underground Level: a hanging city completes the three dimensionality of the network.

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NOX/ NYC + Rotterdam is the architecture & art studio in Rotterdam of internationally acclaimed innovator, Lars Spuybroek. Since the early nineties he has been researching the relationship between art, architecture and computing and received international recognition after building the Water Pavilion (HtwoOexpo) in 1997, the first building in the world fully incorporating new media. Lars is a tenured Professor and the Ventulett Distinguished Chair of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

Perkins + Will
A Global City in the Trees

In the 22nd Century, underground ultra-high speed conduits carry people, goods and resources throughout the world. Atlanta secures construction of the first Mega-Hub and to get anywhere, everyone "must go through Atlanta." Economic growth, infusion of a world population and the city's rich existing character make Atlanta a world destination.

Along with advancements of a global transit system, new architecture of organic material and kinetic structure is developed. Atlanta, acknowledging its possibilities but respecting its past, freezes most development through its historic neighborhoods. The in-between spaces, forgotten fabric and obsolete infrastructure are designated as high-density districts bridging once-divided neighborhoods. In exchange for neighborhood preserves, Atlanta utilizes organic, kinetic architecture to create the "new city" poised between the terminals of the world transit system.

Atlanta's preserved neighborhoods, stitched together by high-density arteries connecting back to the "new city" on the world's transit system, make Atlanta a global "city in the trees."

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Perkins + Will is recognized internationally for design achievements in the arenas of corporate and commercial and civic, healthcare, higher education, K-12 education, and science and technology. Through their commitment to sustainable design, they achieve their clients' vision by creating ideas and buildings that honor the broader goals of society.

Plexus | CDM
ReGenerative Atlanta

By the 22nd century, metropolitan Atlanta could be approaching 20 million people. This staggering demand, if accommodated through low density sprawl and medium density infill, will result in the collapse of a viable and satisfying lifestyle. Sprawl amplifies unsustainable demands on the environment, exponentially exacerbating water and energy shortages, increasing air pollution, and threatening the erasure of Atlanta’s regional ecology and unique urban identity as characterized by its lush canopy of trees. Sprawl compromises our ability to live freely and at peace with the natural systems that sustain us. Filling Atlanta’s green voids in the suburban metropolis isn’t the answer.

We can avoid the dominance of the architectural over the ecological through a rethinking of metropolitan order. Embracing and preserving natural ecosystems by concentrating new growth in a series of hyper-dense, low-impact infrastructure nodes located on multi-modal transit arteries will engender a vibrant metropolitan galaxy as opposed to a ubiquitous megalopolitan singularity.

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plexus r+d is a multi-disciplinary design studio organized to explore the manifold relationships between culture, ecology and design through the mediums of planning, architecture and interior design. We are interested in heightening the cultural relevance of architecture and design by creating environments that stimulate the imagination, inspiring each observer to become an active participant in the construction of experience.

CDM is a consulting, engineering, construction, and operations firm delivering exceptional service to improve the environment and infrastructure, working in partnership with public and private clients worldwide.

Team Dewmac NYC Engineering Firm Collaborative
urbanSMARTpulse

The year is 2108 and Atlanta has transformed its infrastructure to create a SMARTpulse for the city. These vertical veins of ecologically friendly infrastructure play off Atlanta's early landmarks to create a new, centralized management system for the city blending economy, technology, and the environment into a closed cycle.

The urbanSMARTpulse [ur-buhn–smahrt–puhls] is: (1) n. a space, compactly and sustainably designed utilizing self-sufficient structures, for public and private use that is connected over, under, around, and through roadways, tunnels, canals, and tracks; (2) n. an urban plan that redefines Atlanta's culture, economy, infrastructure and transport system by strategically unifying an economically diverse group of citizens and creating a higher standard of living with renewable systems, microchip technology and communication; (3) n. an innovative city with public and park spaces that include an elaborate and intricate recyclable infrastructure system and a series of deep water wells that both heat and "grow" water.

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Team Dewmac NYC engineering firm collaborative located in New York City, is a team of four women Denise Pieratos, Radhi Majmadur, Owiso Makuku, and Sarah Williams who have collectively received numerous awards in architecture, planning, and engineering. Team Dewmac is associated with Dewhurst Macfarlane and Partners, a creative design engineering firm established in 1985 with main offices in New York and London.