Rafael Luna, Contributor and Advisor at Urban AI, is an assistant professor at Hanyang University and co-founder of the architecture firm PRAUD. He received a Master of Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Luna is the award winner of the Architectural League Prize 2013, and his work has been exhibited at the MoMA, Venice Biennale, and Seoul Biennale
While the narrative of a distributed, decentralized society emerged with the internet of things, the physical manifestation of this decentralization became more apparent with the pandemic disrupting the contemporary way of life. Online methods for learning and working had to be adopted to account for the partial closures that occurred in traditional offices and school environments. At the same time, the space between home and work, the third space, was annulled due to social distancing. The third space, a term coined by Homi Bhabha to express a post-colonial society, is a space of encounter and exchange, for dialogue and interconnectedness; an in-between space for cultural hybridity [1]. In cities like Seoul, where public transit accounts for the majority of commuter ridership, social distancing forced a shift back to the personal vehicle as a safety mechanism. Aside from commuting, the personal vehicle provided a compartmentalized space for alternative social uses, which presents an opportunity for exploring how advances in AI technology and smart autonomy could be pushed further due to the immediate need for compartmentalization, social distancing, and decentralization while trying to account for new conditions for socializing or an alternative to the lost third space. The continuous research on autonomous vehicles could further explore ideas of social distancing as already a driverless mobile pod allows for a compartmentalized space for a limited group of people. Companies like Bosch and IDEO have already explored this concept for the future workplace. Conceptually, these will no longer be autonomous vehicles, but autonomous rooms. This will have the ramifications of mutating architecture and the urban space into a new era of transformable responsive environments based on movable rooms.
East Asian cities, which thrive under high density, already exhibit the phenomenon of compartmentalizing social spaces through individualized rooms. The mass densification in highly urbanized contexts like Seoul has driven the idea of using distributed rooms in the city as an extension of the home, commonly referred to as the bang, meaning room, in Korea. As homes get smaller in size, urban room typologies like jimjil bang (Sauna Room), DVD bang (DVD Room), norae bang (Karaoke Room), manhwa bang (Cartoon Room), pulse bang (Playstation Room), pc bang (Computer Room), study room, among others, become what Michel Foucault would describe as heterotopias, spaces of escape from the reality of the mundane life. These typologies serve as barometers of the current social-spatial needs as they emerge from an open capitalist market system, indicating their importance. If the autonomous vehicle becomes an autonomous movable room, the room programs could be adopted as a new generation of smart third spaces.
While the starting driver for this speculation emerged from a pandemic narrative of distanciation, it is important to envision how the reality of autonomous vehicles will potentially affect the spatial social construct of urban settlements. There is a correlation between the evolution of mobility and architecture, especially when focused on the personal vehicle. Suburbanization was made possible by the personal vehicle allowing for workers to live further away from the city center. As a machine, the car was left outside the home until the car garage allowed for the integration of the vehicle as a new room for the home. Le Corbusier, famously, raised the entire home on pilotis in Villa Savoye (1931), allowing for a place for the vehicle to exist between the ground and house. The invention of larger-scale parking garages would allow for multiple cars to park under the building, on the rooftop, or inside the building.
New vehicular typologies emerged that integrated the vehicle as part of the formal logic of the building like the 1920’s Lingotto Factory which was a hybrid car factory and test track for Fiat in Turin, Italy. Drive-in and Drive-through typologies emerged as the convenience of the personal vehicle integrated more with urban retail and entertainment experiences like the Helicoide in Caracas, Venezuela, which in 1958 showcased a spiral road that would form a drive-in vertical shopping mall. Advances in construction and propulsion technology have allowed for a more integral connection of the car to the architectural experience. With the autonomous pod, new architectural adaptations will emerge to occupy idle urban spaces. Programs that already exist as mobile and compartmentalized services can be integrated into the autonomous pod such as mobile clinics, mobile markets, deliveries, pop-up stores, street food, among others. This notion would propagate a further smart decentralization of the city, its services, and amenities, putting us at a point where we can have visionary speculations on the way that our cities can mutate. Just as in the 1960s the “Critical Utopias” from Archizoom, Archigram, and Superstudio faced drastic global challenges that demanded new visionary proposals for cities, we find ourselves at a similar crossroad between a global pandemic, political and economical unrest, and at the same time in a fourth technological revolution propelled by AI. Looking back at the critical utopias, Archizoom’s 1969 “No-Stop City” already envisioned a total decentralization of the modern city caused by a gridded propagation of technology. Archigram’s 1960’s “Plug-in City” envisioned the city as a machine where plug-in units would dock onto spatial frames. Superstudio’s “Continuous Monument” suggested an equitable urbanity through a singular global megastructure. These are still contemporary narratives that apply to contemporary urban needs for a distributed social equity, and a decentralized society powered by technology. The autonomous movable pod would allow us to re-envision some of these critical utopias as a 21st-century condition. These are some examples:
Instant City 2.0: Archigram originally proposed an Instant City where dirigibles would air-deliver a variety of programs to a “sleeping city” in order to transform it into a vibrant cosmopolitan city [2]. Abstracting the aim of this project for the contemporary city, urban voids coil be tackled through programmable autonomous mobile rooms. These could deliver services and amenities producing instant events and transforming underserved neighborhoods. For example, food deserts could have instant market pods that deliver fresh food autonomously based on schedules and locations determined by big data. The same can be said for supplying instant educational programs, or even instant entertainment.
Vending City: With the aid of smartphones, citizens could request the autonomous convenience pods to deliver goods as needed. The city would have service centers that supply the pods with goods like a convenience store, and these would just drive around the city. Already there are test pilots for autonomous deliveries by Amazon, but instead of just getting purchased goods, citizens would be delivered an array of services in this manner.
Distanced City: In the wake of the pandemic, pods would deliver experiences rather than simple goods or food in order to control social distancing. Rather than going to a restaurant, a piece of the restaurant comes to you as a movable room for example.
Go City: As mobility focuses more on a global positioning system, urbanity would no longer rely on grids but on swarm formations. This would disvalue traditional zoning, and the idea of zoning a city would be obsolete as programming becomes more movable and customizable.
The conceptualization of the autonomous vehicle as a movable room not only has urban implications, but also questions architecture through its elements, systems, and forms. At the architectural scale, buildings will be able to mutate as a transformative responsive environment. New architectural attachments or prosthetics will be needed to allow for the integration of these movable pods to serviced and static spaces in all axes (X, Y, Z). This means an integration with industrial elements such as mechanical lifts and cranes, which will eventually become more sophisticated and integral in the design. Traditional elements such as walls, doors, windows, floors, might be questioned as whole rooms become movable and detachable.
Programmatically, there is also the implication of exploring architecture as a pixelated space, where a diversity of programs can exist three-dimensionally. Already architecture has moved from a cartesian to a topological conception of the world, yet programmatic mixing is for the most part supplied through vertical layering. The skyscraper was perhaps the best typological invention in the 20th century as it solved issues of density. Rem Koolhaas, fascinated by the skyscraper as a social condenser, theorized on the layering of unrelated programs that would produce metropolitan events through their proximity and condensation inside of the same building. The idea that rooms can become movable, detachable, and reprogrammable, can challenge the concept of programmatic layering that occurs in a skyscraper and replace it with programmatic pixelation. As pods are able to supply any program, the architectural space will only gain a particular use or characteristic from the movable rooms that attach to it, replacing the third space with a flexible x-space.
[1] : Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 2004.
[2] : On this topic, you can check our article Programmable Cities: Using Roboat to Create a responsive Autonomous Infrastructure in Amsterdam, By Tom Benson, Stephan Van Dijk and Michael Batty
By Rafael Luna
Rafael Luna will give an online lecture about this contribution on December 2nd. To register : https://www.eventbrite.fr/e/urban-ai-conversations-tickets-190867859907?fbclid=IwAR29MvP0BjRgcL6ruO-7_V-Lcbqwe5P2CsyQ1So7NiUrH576jhvIdBMLoro
