The Scalable City


'Sheldon Brown Sheldon Brown

The Scalable City is a speculative built environment created via a data visualization pipeline. Each step in this pipeline builds upon the previous one, exaggerating the artifacts and patterns of algorithmic process.

Within The Scalable City are 5 major components: Landscape, Roads, Lots, Architecture and Vehicles. Each component is created by a process where real world data is subjected to algorithmic transformations before being redeployed as elements of a new urban condition of software I/O. For instance, the landscape (a complex natural form) is transformed by a simple algorithmic process of: duplicate, rotate, copy and paste; creating a new landscape form which retains naturalism in its details, but with a high level of algorithmic decoratism in its larger scale structure.
Space filling road systems are “grown” into this landscape, located via computer vision analysis. The resultant decorative forms are evocative of nouveau iron grates, illuminated texts and oriental space-filling spiral patterns.
Vehicles, lots and architectural forms follow similar paths of manifestation—each demonstrating the effects of the embrace of software forms as the current script of spatial experience.

Throughout this environment, a variety of computer concept buzzwords take on imagined physical form, providing the basis for social interaction amongst them. All processes encode their results with artifacts that express their virtues and shortcomings. Culture has been undergoing a transformation from analog to digital forms and methods for several decades. These transformative moments produce tensions between speculation and anxiety. In The Scalable City, the aesthetic gestures embody the tension between exuberance and foreboding, neither embracing nor rejecting an algorithmic world view, but inspiring its expressivity while cautioning about its own internal logics becoming the dominant determinate of its outcomes.
http://crca.ucsd.edu/sheldon/scalable/

Project team: Alex Dragulescu, Mike Caloud, Joey Hammer, Erik Hill, Carl Burton