Hailey Brown A Contemporary Re-Examination

A Contemporary Re-Examination of No-Stop City BROWN

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Hailey Brown, M.Arch

Nostalgic for the Future

Both No-Stop City by Archizoom Associati and The Air from other Planets by Sean Lally yearn for a day beyond superficiality and mass consumption. Neither is caught up in the ideas for conservation or efficiency, but rather the opposite, by consuming the planet in a whole new way. Whether the reason is to reconnect with Mother Earth or to display the ridiculousness of the current state of consumerism, Lally and Archizoom propose radical new worlds that create endless cities.

Shifts in Thinking Lally poses that architecture is purely a mediator between humans and the natural elements.“…Architecture has elected to define its shape and spaces through devices of mediation (surfaces, walls, inert masses) that temper the

energies that make up the environmental context rather than strengthening and amplifying them as defining boundaries themselves.” This waste of energy by converting resources into a new form can be completely avoided if architects stop thinking about architecture purely in the traditional sense of construction materials. Rather, according to Lally, if they work with energy researchers and bio-engineers, architects can learn how to harness energy and shape it into a new type of architecture that responds to environmental and human energies.

This line of thinking is radically different from Archizoom’s No-Stop City. Archizoom doesn’t consider architecture at a building scale, but rather at an urban scale and therefore, they don’t challenge the traditional paradigm architects have surrounding what architecture is. They only challenge its necessity by taking consumption of building materials to the extreme and creating a new human crust on the planet. In both cases, the architecture recedes into the background where humans may only subconsciously notice it providing a new-found freedom for humans to have mobile lifestyles. They both also begin to develop a more horizontal social structure by making architecture accessible to all.

Architecture of Energies

In this comparison of No-Stop City and The Air from other Planets, architecture becomes an invisible energy shield surrounding the entire earth that allows inhabitants to travel everywhere and be protected from the elements only when necessary; truly a No-Stop City with the capabilities of enjoying the great outdoors. As the built environment disappears, the need for social connection grows. The continuous digital grid connects humans anywhere in the world, maintaining a strong social awareness, while providing the freedom to roam and develop social collections based on values; unlike No-Stop City in which social settlements were based on styles and consumption of goods.