Arjun Bharat
U_NEX (Urban Nexsentient)
Every system of periodisation reviles a period of history by creating something unique to its present. Architecture is the collective representation of the city’s character, and the city is the
embodiment of the people in it. This makes architecture the medium of showcasing the collective voice of society. As we move through the Anthropocene era, the globalisation of humans has unified their interests and character. This can evidently be seen in the evolution of cities.
The future of urban life on earth will face the impacts of rising pollution levels, and the rapidly increasing population. The current urban structure is forming a clear distinction between the built and unbuilt, which adds strain to the process of integration with nature.
As we move well beyond the conception of post-modernism in the early 21st century to an era of meta or proto-modernism, there grows the need for present day architecture to evolve beyond perfecting human settlement due to the increasing dominance by factors external to the enclosing society. This calls for a new architectural language of dualism that combines the advancements in science and modern-day cultural values into a singular style.
U_NEX is an urban plug system that analyzing the existing built environment on the bases of user interactive parameters and generates a new 3 dimensional zoning layout. This generated pattern would in-turn would be used as the backbone for a growth algorithm which would hold the characteristics of new united architectural language that would grow over the existing buildings, creating a series of urban corridors. This would open new avenues for real estate, urban connectivity and eco-structures that would be incorporated within the connecting systems. It would also impact the existing ecologies by incorporating active and passive systems into the newly introduced corridor spaces which generally would need large parcels of land to be deployed actively.
The project takes inspiration from the hypothetical concepts of Lebbeus Wood’s urbanism and tangible concepts of cellular intelligence and biomimicry architecture, and looks towards exploring a way to connect the built environment with surrounding nature. This is done through a “Protopian” progressive approach that combines the advancements in science and modern-day cultural values, demonstrating how a united architectural language can reconcile the various goals and challenges facing architecture in the near future.