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Design

Redesigning San Francisco

New exhibit imagines a high-tech future for one of America's oldest cities.

Artist’s rendering of Hydraspan

At the bottom of the San Francisco Bay, some of the world’s leading information technology companies are actively creating and marketizing the driving components of our future. We’ve shown them how much we love what silicon can do, so it’s no surprise that when we think about the future we think of their future, the one pop culture predicts, where everything is enriched with a microprocessor or a touchscreen.

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Silicon Valley and the massive economy it houses are showing no signs of retracting their influence in our lives. But just north of that, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in the heart of San Francisco, a fresh exhibit named Dissident Futures sees itself as one community of creatives’ response to the technician’s tomorrow. Twenty one artists and collaborative groups put their film, paintings, installations and more on display as individual, non-commodified digestions of the “utopian,” “speculative,” and “pragmatic” future.

It’s perfect, then, that San Francisco and Athens, Greece-based design firm Future Cities Lab plays a part in the discussion. The group, founded by Princeton graduates Jason Kelly Johnson and Nataly Gattegno, are one among a contemporary movement of cross-disciplinary experimental labs blending technology, ecology, and urbanity to answer our curiosities about the coming years.

Artist’s rendering of Hydramax.

HYDRAMAX Model from Future Cities Lab.

The Hydramax is essentially a living, “smart” pier that acts as an ecological community space, housing its own gardens and fish farms, and actively catching water from fog and rain for storage in its upper truss.

Built using Arduino microcontrollers, infrared sensors and shape memory alloy motors, the Hydramax design model detects and reacts to the presence of gallery attendees’ bodies, in order to simulate what a building-scale model will do in the face of changing environmental conditions. The feather-like components moving up and down in the video above are what the team calls “fog harvesters.” Kinda reminiscent of we’ve seen in the works of Philip Beesley with his Hylozoic series.

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This piece originally debuted at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, during 2012’s Utopian Impulse: Buckminster Fuller and The Bay Area show, but the passing of a year has done nothing to undermine the timeliness and utility of this concept.

Theater of Lost Species.

Theater of Lost Species rendering

Partly inspired by traveling menageries and the fact that every animal everywhere is dying these days, the Theater of Lost Species gives its users a chance to come face to face with digitized, interactive sea creatures which no longer grace the waters of this earth.

Future Cities Lab describes what a life-size, 16’x16’ construction will entail: “The long viewing cones focus on digital display screens that are portals to a seamless virtual aquarium. Within the aquarium, digital sea creatures swarm to the viewing cones, engaging the subtle motion of viewers. In the evening the theater will glow and pulsate as the swarms slowly navigate within the virtual aquarium.”

The group also sums the project’s purpose up rather beautifully, claiming the theater acts as “an object for collective celebration and mourning, a catalyst for conversation, philosophical debate and ecological engagement.” Dissident Futures hosts the model’s debut.

Hydraspan

The culmination of Future Cities Lab’s works, though, is the Hydraspan, which was commissioned specifically for Dissident Futures by the YBCA. The model spans the YBCA’s Mission St.-facing glass passageway, giving San Franciscans a glimpse of what would happen if an iconic local structure was given a new life.

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Imagine the Bay Bridge as a community space and residence area, where people live in units positioned among the bridge’s catenary ribbons, fresh water basins suspend near and provide to community areas, and sky pods hold fish farms. It’s a floating community perfect for increasingly populated yet overly-developed urban areas. Why not incorporate our populations into already-built urban structures than find new ways to sprawl?

We featured Future Cities Lab’s Datagrove last year, which took local Twitter feeds and atmospheric changes and reinterpreted them through LED lights and sound devices long a tesla-coil-style structure. For more innovations from the group, check out their website.

Dissident Futures runs until February 2, 2014.

All Photos Courtesy Future Cities Lab