An Ocean Based Arcology Concept
In Film the arcology has made an appearance in Blade Runner, the massive hyperstructures make up some of its sweeping exterior shots. More recently The Matrix featured a human arcology burried deep within the earth.
An early designer and archology theorist was Paolo Soleri. Born in Italy in 1919 he later set up a studio in Arizona. It was from this studio that he created a number of concept drawings that were fantastical, massive, elegantly designed structures that had as small of a footprint on the earth as possible. Dark Roasted Blend has an excellent article on him that is worth checking out.
The Shimizu Mega-City Pyramid concept is a more contemporary concept. The discovery channel ran a special on it and it also has its own wiki entry. The men behind the project admit that it is still pretty theoretical at the moment, that is unless you know where we can get a large supply of carbon nanotubes?
Old School Arcology
The pyramid is not something that we are going to built right away so in that sense it is a dream, but by pushing this dream we are pushing the progress of technology as well.
Crystal Island by Fosters and Partners in Moscow
One could argue that the Foster + Partners massive Crystal Island structure comes near the definition of an arcology. Holding 30,000 people with commerce, schools, parks, 3000 hotel rooms and other public venues. There has been a fair bit of discussion about this project and the blogosphere is debating whether or not the project would qualify as an archology.
The creation of a number of these mega tower projects that contain all these functions does however raise the question of how close are we to moving to, or into one of these massive structures. Are they the way to help house the ever growing populations of the world without spreading too far across it? For now arcologies in the true sense of the word as hyper structures are still theoretical, but they may not be such a pipe dream.
In the not so distant future, it is predicted that as much as 80% of the world's population will live in urban areas and, by 2050, the population of the world will increase by as many as 3 billion people. Three billion people require a fair bit of food and current farming practices are unlikely to be able to provide the needed supply. Dr Dickson Despommier suggests Vertical Farms.
