SYNTHETIC FIELDS Spring 2023
Synthetic Fields presents a near-future, utopian urban vision of downtown Los Angeles predicated on the adoption of large-scale nuclear fusion energy. The project manifests as an urban microgrid centered around a central fusion core. Program is distributed through the grid as disparate totems, carrying their own character and likenesses.
The interstitial space of the collective towers is imbued with sythetic biomes, formed through the generation of endless energy. These biomes serve as a response to climate change and urban activities as these spaces can be transformed instantly to house a variety of natural and unnatural entities. Elevated paths form a ubiquitous ground plane that connects the towers, weaving between the new urban conglomerate.
Architectural Characters
As an urban assembly, the new microgrid organized around the fusion reactor deploys towers housing one main program. Architecturally, the towers are read as follies; totems of an existing paradigm that begin to form a new reality.
Programs such as the blockchain center, representing a decentralized, online currency, still require extremely dense physical infrastructures to support them. These physical instantiations of future technologies echoes what much of this project aims to achieve; a representation of a future that speculates on both where architecture is and where architecture, as a component of our collective social and economic zeitgeist, may go.
Fusion Energy
The advent of large-scale fusion energy generation marks a new societal paradigm based on abundance. When clean energy becomes a viable, distributable resource the urban space will become inundated with physical new infrastructures. To facilitate the organization of a urban microgrid, a central fusion reactor placed in the grid allows for connected receptacles to power various building and public functions.
These fusion receptacles also form the main public aseemblages on the ground level, inundating people with this technology at an urban scale. The connection of these receptacles form an extended ground plane, filling the interstitial spaces of other built infrastructure.
Programmatic Residue
A persistent tower typology of the future is live/work. However, in a society marked by the advent of abundant energy, what does ‘work’ mean?
In this schema, the organization of the building is able to be more polluted by various, and more ambiguous, functions. Spaces that are largely open and unprogrammed give way to technological substrata that allows various leisure activities to occur. Typical ways of working also give way to communal digital envrionments that still necessitate a physical space.
Synthetic Biomes
On the ground areas of energy-imbued, climate-controlled biomes serves as urban infill. The newly elevated public pathways slice though the once gridded streets and allow for pockets of forests, glaciers, and hotsprings to become typical member of this new synthetic urbanism.
