City 2.0: Defining A New Urban Reality is a thesis that explores and interprets the emerging 'digital city,' a virtual entity that can be defined as a synthesis between the Web and the built environment.
The culmination is an architecture that manifests a relationship between physical and virtual. The programme is an embodiment of the city in that it combines an experience of conventional architectural delight (expressed through the structural, environmental and tectonic strategy) with a hypothetical, 'augmented' experience that uses curated artefacts from the virtual to enhance one's perception of the physical. Both architectures enable communication with the city whether through direct visual means, by way of framed views, or real-time augmentation of city-wide digital audio/visual or spatially-mapped analytical data.
Elsewhere the programme houses an urban monitoring station, which acts as a technocratic hub to the city, as well as a planning chamber that draws on streams of acquired data. Interspersed are a series of gallery and event spaces which are more bespoke than inherently flexible; instead they are linked and described through a Web-based spatio-temporal database that is capable of actively re-programming events throughout existing public or private space within the city.
Published in Blueprint Magazine [Sep 2010] and BD Online.
