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THE CHALLENGE The 18th Interuniversity Charrette TRANSMUTATION is inviting young designers to question and explore the future of Montreal in an age of information technologies. The goal of the project will be to imagine a city reflecting a saturation of technology, its augmented perceptions, and an ever-growing integration of information: from digital billboards, GPS tracking devices, Smartphone applications, communication interfaces, to participatory networks, open-source platforms, and responsive environments. Potential urban phenomena related to wireless technologies, numeric interfaces of all kinds, as well as the emergence of new lifestyles reflect the necessity to develop a vision that is both speculative and critical of our urban future. Students and recent graduates are invited to express a scenario of an augmented reality of Montreal half-a-century from now as saturated by information technology and showing a possible advancements and influence of those technologies on the social, cultural, and physical evolution of the city. Using visual techniques such as, but not limited to, diagramming, mapping, and multi-dimensional modeling, submissions can range in depth and breadth with proposals for digital applications to built urban systems. SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS Groups of students and researchers may explore issues at any scale on which they are to produce a diptych manifesto. Panel 1 must address a scenario regarding the future of the city describing existing or speculative technologies that would potentially transform our human environment. Groups are invited to use any form of visual and/or textual material. The panel must include a title, and a maximum 250-word summary of the manifesto. Panel 2 must illustrate the way this scenario will transform Montreal as a test-ground. Here the team is invited to express this transformation on the basis of a single image. This image can be a collage, a photomontage, a diagram, a map, a perspective, or any other visual expression of the city. The image should cover the entire surface of the panel. THE CITY AS A SYSTEM The image of the city has long been a subject of investigation among architects who have always interpreted, visualized and simulated the complex behaviors governing its evolution. These explorations are always confronting, super imposing, and rendering the synergetic forces and evolutionarily parameters that prevail in the city; natural or artificial, physical or virtual. With ever-increasing developments in information technologies, our image of the city is shifting: one from physical representation and formal expression, to one of systems capable of conditioning the emergence, sustainability, and growth of the city. Urban experiments produced over the past fifty years show a fascination by architects in defining and redefining the image of the city as an environment where information is considered as the common currency for the unfolding of urban phenomena. This is evidenced by Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Map, François Dallegret’s Environment Bubble, Yona Friedman’s Floating Cities, Paul Virilio’s Information Bomb to more recent projects propelled by research labs such as the MIT SENSEable City Lab, Google Research, and IBM Smarter Cities. The city as a system – as an evolutionary system, or as an organism in mutation – has also been a constant obsession among architects, artists, and scientists. From Giambattista Nolli’s Plan of Rome to Guy Debord’s Psychogeographic Guide of Paris, Archizoom’s No Stop City and more recently Thom Mayne’s Combinatory Urbanism, architects gradually acquired the conviction the city is a foremost a complex system shaped by human activities that are now intensified under the influence of our technological knowledge. And it was certainly so at the opening of the Montreal Expo in 1967. Presented on this occasion were two seminal projects that marked this critical position on the image of the city: Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao’s geodesic dome for the US Pavilion, and located on the other side of the fairground, the West German Pavilion by Frei Otto. Beyond their delicate forms and skillful constructions, these two projects announced the advent of information systems capable of reconfiguring our perception of the environment. With the motto “The Man and the World”, the Expo exemplifies the commitment to reconsider the city as an entity formed by technological machines where information penetrates and circulates onto the surface. The proto-realist environment of Expo ’67 prefigured a spontaneous and harmonious cultural arrangement in which the collective gave way to the connective, the casual event to the ubiquitous fiction, and the rigid structure to the open system. The critical experiments that took place in Montreal in the 1960s and 1970s marked the emergence of new modes of representation surrounding the city and its ability to adapt, transform, and mutate according to economic transactions, social distributions, and political actions. TRANSMUTATION proposes to revisit this topic while projecting the future of Montreal fifty years from now. Whereas architects at the time of the Expo ’67 observed the city from a human viewpoint, technology today propels an augmented reality of the city relying on large statistical databases (Statcan), satellite imagery (Google Earth), simulation engines (Mapquest), user recordings (Flickr), and participatory databases (YouTube) among others. The objective of the 2013 Charente is to exploit these formidable sources of information in considering the future of Montreal.
REFERENCES G. Teyssot and S. Bernier-Lavigne (2012), “Forme et Information. Chronique de l’Architecture Numérique”, in Action Architecture, Guiheux A. (ed.), Editions de La Villette, Paris, pp. 49-87
Morphosis INABA MIT SENSEable City Lab MIT Media Lab: Changing Places Group Columbia University C-Lab IBM Smarter Cities Google Research The Bartlett Center for Advanced Spatial Analysis Archigram Superstudio François Roche Philip Rahm Philip Beesley Mark Linder Neil Clavin Moritz Stefaner
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