One day, the curving bridges and soaring towers Brooklyn might be part-biological and part-technological, swarming with soft, smart vehicles that look more like blood cells than cars. One architecture firm is trying to make it happen.
Mitchell Joachim, founder of Terreform ONE, has been one of the biggest advocates for biological architecture for years now, and he's always working out new ideas for an ideal, futuristic Brooklyn, where he lives and works.
For one thing, he'd like to see buses that look like squid blimps. They'd be designed to actually move through the city landscape without blocking traffic. As he reimagines the city as something more survivable than what we have now, cars are a central focus.
Joachim told The Culturist in 2012:
The Soft Car project has always been exciting for us. The idea of creating a soft vehicle that will change the way we move about in cities is quite monumental. Vehicles should not be shiny, precious metal boxes of any kind. They should be designed for parking, which is what they do most of the time anyway. Bringing in moving flocks and herds of soft, intelligent vehicles connected by a self-linking network to a municipal grid will absorb the population's mobility, particularly in cities, in the future. So that's something that's still radically exciting.
Here's a solar fuel station for the future Brooklyn's carshare.
And this is the soft car up close.
Yes, Joachim's ideas sound radical and weird, and that's the point. He's trying to come up with futuristic possibilities that challenge how we imagine the future of cities.
Brooklyn is key to Joachim's vision. He told The Culturist:
Unlike Manhattan, Brooklyn has quite a bit of potential for growth. We feel the borough's problems just as much as other residents, so we work openly and freely with folks in the area. And we do it without taking private money to produce solutions in neighborhoods that are novel and unique without having to deal with the silly constraints of selfish individuals or individual corporations . . .
Staring outside my building in Brooklyn there's a lot of practical brick lump buildings everywhere. Practical is all good and fine, but there also needs to be some motivation and thought about how we make things in the future. So we conduct research. Research is not supposed to be practical in one sense. Instead, it should answer, or at least first create questions, identify problems and look for the missing brick among a wall of knowledge and then find new and novel solutions.
On Inhabitat, you can see more details about his city plan, and how these soft cars would fit into the new biologically-enhanced Brooklyn.
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