Building Blade Runner: How UCLA’s IDEAS Lab Envisions the Future
“With futuristic responsive environments, people can walk into a room and change the size and geometry itself.”
When PC Magazine interviewed Ridley Scott at the Toronto Film Festival last year, our conversation eventually turned to Blade Runner. The director explained the famous title sequence that flashed “Los Angeles, November 2019” over a dystopian cityscape.
“I was going to put ‘San Angeles,’” Scott told us. “But the partners at the time said ‘What do you mean, San Angeles?’ ‘It means when the suburbs of San Francisco join with Los Angeles.’ ‘Do you really think that’s going to happen?’ and I said, ‘Are you kidding me? It’s already happening!’ But they thought that was too negative. So they went with ‘Los Angeles, November 2019’ instead.”
It started us thinking: that’s only three years away. Will Los Angeles look like Blade Runner by 2019? And who are the people planning the future cityscape today?
We decided to visit the UCLA Architecture and Urban Design (A.UD) department, which just celebrated its 50th anniversary, and meet the architects of tomorrow. Its IDEAS platform is off-campus in a vast warehouse in Culver City. We passed through a small door in the corrugated iron surround and came face to face with two massive KUKA industrial robots, which dominate the space caged behind strong wire fencing.
The night before, Masters in Architecture SUPRASTUDIO students showcased their final projects. Scale models, explanatory notes, and architectural renderings of the future were carefully arranged on long trestle tables. As we looked around, two of their leaders, architects Craig Hodgetts and Güvenç Özel, gave insights into emerging technology within architecture, the role of the architect of tomorrow, and whether any of their students’ work is reminiscent of the film.
Hodgetts joined the UCLA faculty in 1972, and has a long history of award-winning projects and honors throughout his career.
“L.A. is at the forefront of a new wave in architecture and how we now live,” he said. “It has to do with the shift away from the suburban house into higher-density urban housing, reflecting how people live and work in a new culture. Look at the buildings over the last decade—there’s a more cosmopolitan outlook, encompassing cafe culture with multi forms of concurrent employment. There’s a constant flux of people and volatility in L.A., and the city has always resisted being molded into a more traditional form. Now there are these flourishing new epicenters, a new format of urbanism, based on the fact that we are all connected digitally and can work anywhere, anytime.”
His students worked on a master plan for a futuristic city for 10,000 people. They used a wide range of technology, from 3D printing to the robotics lab, building scale drawings and large-scale physical models. They applied projection mapping to show social congress (how people move through the space), traffic patterns (including Personal Aerial Vehicles), and day and night usage, and they provided utilities and amenities solutions, from garbage disposals to lighting and heating.
Hodgetts is keen to get his students questioning everything. “Take roads. They’ve served a function to get people, goods, and services in and out of cities. But 50 years from now, do they still work? Maybe not. Do we still need to build schools in the same way, in a world where children with digital devices become autodidactic? It’s a huge revolution coming towards us in terms of city amenities and how they need to be reprogrammed for the way we’re going to live inside cities.”
One of the big issues in cities is the amount of precious real estate given over to parking.
“Look at Uber,” said Hodgetts. “It’s building an infrastructure with a probable future of autonomous cars without drivers, which keep circling, picking up passengers and goods, never needing to park—getting rid of redundant structures like garages, freeing up masses of urban space.”
Hodgetts walked us around his students’ projects, explaining the generational shift from “starchitects” to team-based presentations and ways of working.
“I saw a movement towards harmonious teams in my Masters’ students, which is different to previous generations. They now have to solve very complex technological [problems] that don’t require, necessarily, a top-down structure. The rise in creative workplaces with all the geeks has influenced the world of architecture — a certain amount of play and experimentation is encouraged. It’s about affinity groups, less about hierarchies.”
Almost as if on cue, one of Hodgett’s students walked in with her parents, who had just flown in from Mainland China. “Hey, I’m bragging about you!” Hodgetts said, turning to point out some architectural plans. “Dana put her future city into outer space.”
Dana’s Chinese name is Dan Zhu, but once she realized Dan is a male name in the West, she added an ‘a,’ and, rather tellingly, hasn’t decided which spelling to use as a working architect. It really all depends whether her future career takes her East or West.
Her project is called Leo Ring and is an off-world colony. We asked if she was inspired by Blade Runner, but she said it was more about current thinking. It seems Zhu intended it for humans, so it doesn’t look like any Nexus 6–style bioengineered replicants will be working alongside Leo Ring’s residents.
“My initial inspiration was our current International Space Station,” explained Zhu. “I imagined a better quality of life where they could live with their families and friends in a well-designed city. In the future, some of us will be living in outer space. There are a lot of engineers already working in this field of developing environments for outer space, and I felt it was time for architects to get involved to create better conditions that are properly designed, taking into account human factors.”
As Zhu showed her parents her work, Hodgetts pointed out that all his Masters students this year are from China and India.
“They bring a very different perspective to architecture from their disparate cultural bases, as well as being part of a new generational shift,” he said. “Their enthusiasm for the tenets of the project we were doing and their receptors were all about the global changes in lifestyle and infrastructure, particularly in the sharing economy. For example, some of their projects proposed autonomous office/living capsules, built without kitchens, centered around communal hubs which contained places for conversation and cuisine.”
Noticeably, not one of the projects contained impressively powerful status symbols like the Tyrell Corporation’s pyramid in Blade Runner. Hodgetts said architecture used to be commissioned as an expression of pomp and power to illustrate political dominance or the vast wealth of a corporation’s headquarters.
“That style of architecture is no longer needed.” he said. “Look at banks: They’ve gone from huge edifices to a kiosk in a supermarket.”
Özel, UCLA A.UD Lecturer and former Technology Director of IDEAS, jumped in to point out the emerging digital trends of the students’ work. Originally from Turkey, Özel came to the US to study, and has worked in the architecture offices of Frank Gehry and Rafael Vinoly, before setting up his own architecture practice, Ozel Office.
“I’m very interested in the intersection between the digital and the physical worlds, as we are on the cusp of living in mixed realities,” Özel told us. “I call this The Architecture of Singularity: creating interactive environments that challenge traditional fabrication techniques and spatial assemblies, bringing in virtual and augmented reality, robotics and smart space applications. Thinking about architecture as an extension or a form of artificial intelligence by making semi-autonomous systems. These are sensor-based but also have an intelligence, a capacity to self-regulate not just in heating or cooling the environment but also through movement.”
Özel’s inspirations for his students include not just buildings that think but also ones that move. He once connected the external materials of a construction to a DJ wearing an EEG headset, whose brain waves then caused undulations in the fabric of the building itself. People affecting and morphing environments is a clear theme running throughout Özel’s work. He commissioned his students to design a temporary space that could house art shows during the day and become a party place after dark and would reflect the different visitors inside.
“The building had to respond to behavior,” said Özel. “We measured the heartbeats and temperature of the people inside and panels with sensors took in and processed that data. The warmer everyone got, the more of these panels sucked out the air and sent it to increase the volume of the building’s shell. With futuristic responsive environments, people can walk into a room and change the size and geometry itself.”
It sounds as if the students at IDEAS get to play with a lot of cool toys. UCLA has many industry partnerships including HTC, which donated some pre-release Vive head-mounted devices, the Kuka industrial robots, and Autodesk, which let the future architects try out its advanced Ember open-source 3D printers.
“This year our students have been working with dynamic algorithmic simulation studies,” explained Özel. “They program the Kuka robots with computational behaviors to build something on the fly, and then they 3D printed the results in collaboration with Autodesk, our year long partner in this project.”
All of the students’ renderings were beautifully executed and carefully planned, taking into account the practicalities of modern life. Many were futuristic in style and reminiscent of sci-fi films, including, of course, Blade Runner. Hodgetts has a personal connection to the film: He’s collaborating with the great Syd Mead on a book to celebrate the 35th anniversary of Ridley Scott’s masterpiece in 2017.
In the meantime, the students at IDEAS Lab are designing the future of not just L.A. but off-world colonies too.
Read more: Ridley Scott: The Martian Is the ‘Ultimate Survival Story’
This story originally appeared on PCMag.com.
