3/4 Review

With the exponential growth of technology, man’s relationship to space, matter, and material is continually evolving, giving rise to the mobility of the collective mind as an extension of the physical body.  However, in this translocal extension, architecture has not yet taken a fully active role.  We have effectively created a new typology of public space - the nonlocal -  which is currently limited to the virtual electronic realm.  This proposal is an attempt to instantiate the nonlocal public space with a clear physicality, with emphatic importance placed on matter and material.  With the development of intelligent shape-changing materials we have the capability to distribute space across the globe, effectively transmitting architecture in its physicality.  Interaction between user and environment moves beyond typical interactivity, eradicating the oppositional dialectics of mind-body and virtual-actual, so that the individual physically becomes part of the space, the space part of the individual.  Fundamental research draws from nonlocality and entanglement in quantum physics, genetics and synthetic biology, cybernetics and robotics, as well as chemistry and nanotechnology, coupled with a strong link to anthropology.

As Marcos Novak posits, “Urbanism as we know it will be altered; our cities will become our interfaces […] so that we will be able to reach out and touch someone across the planet as far as our transmissions allow.”  This proposal seeks to formulate an architecture where an individual may be physically present in multiple locations simultaneously, using the Olympic games as a vehicle for the telematic event. Through productive linkages between the source and projection connected by the peripheral, a wider cultural exchange is projected as a result from the complex texturing of systems and inhabitation.  This calls for the fundamental restructuring of perception and sensation through edges of communication.

Due to the global nature of the project, site selection will encompass a specific section of what has the potential to become a vast and wide-spread network of transmissible architecture.  This can be accomplished by analyzing the inherent spatiality and modes of participation for Olympic sports, and by determining which cities have the infrastructural capacity to support such needs.  In one potential scenario there is the national scale, with specific cities in the Netherlands linked at a distance.  In another scenario, focus zooms to the city scale with Istanbul, Turkey, a city historically predicated on global connectivity through its position on the Silk Road, as well as its location as a bridge between Europe and Asia.  With the recent construction of two new sports venues located in areas of projected urban growth, these are prime sites for meaningful local physical instantiations of nonlocal urbanism.