It had already been four weeks, and I still didn't have a thesis. Professor Azaroff called for a round table discussion in our studio over my situation. And after I explained to the studio what I've been up to, it was all starting to come together.
What did Victor Hugo, Rudolf Laban, and Albert Einstein all have in common?
Perpetual Motion.
Perhaps Einstein made it most apparent for us to understand (after all he just came straight out and said it): that Time is relative, there is no past, present, or future. It is merely an illusion we make up for ourselves so we may cope with the changes around us.
And looking at the trends of today as well as the culture of our times, I was on the cusp of realizing what my thesis was. It was then by going back and using movement as the filter that my thesis became clear:
The effects of high dimensional laws involving spacetime will be applied on as layers of design in the 21st century, which will redefine why and how people move. These effects will be synthesized to address and accommodate the functions into a new architecture.
About the trends of today which I've inferred about a bit earlier, the space rail, which is basically an elevator to get to space, is something that is generating a lot of buzz within the last decade. Although the idea has been around for a very long time, it wasn't until recently when the discovery of carbon nanotubes can be applied to make the space rail a realization.
So why the space rail?
Conventional rocket technology is too costly compared to the costs of using a space rail to get payloads up into space. If space is made more accessible, there would be potentials to solving many problems on Earth today. Production could be faster, which could improve the response time to epidemics, world hunger, and disaster, just to name a few. Commercial opportunities would definitely spring up, as there are many who would pay to go up into space. In fact Virgin Atlantic has already begun capitalizing on space tourism by creating a Virgin Galactic, where they send people up to sub orbital altitudes to experience 5-6 seconds of zero gravity. They already have 80,000 customers, each paying a total of $200,000USD to experience this. With a space rail, it would only be a fraction of the cost.
But there may be some other darker, but possibly necessary applications with the space rail. It has been a global movement to acknowledge the threat of global warming. And in response, countries around the world are all doing something to preserve or attempt to mitigate our consequences. What if we can't really save the planet? With a space rail, if we can't cut our losses on the planet, perhaps we could just move up into space. We wouldn't have to stop the rates of production here on Earth. Overpopulation could potentially be resolved with more space in space. We wouldn't have to consider decreasing our footprints to make way for more farmland to feed the masses if we can just harvest in space.
It might be terrible to say it, but perhaps mankind doesn't have to own up and be responsible.
Competitions where the grand prize is half a million are happening just to figure this out. Scientists expect that with this exponentially growing rate of technological innovation, the space rail can be realized within fifteen to twenty years. In fact, a committee recently formed in Japan expect to build a space rail for $8 billion USD (that's cheap for something of this scale).
Whether we like this or not, its going to happen.
So what does this mean for architecture?
Since space is inevitably going to become more accessible to people, the architecture of the future will have to make the physics of spacetime easier to comprehend. There will be new typologies to accommodate this new mode of movement and will synthesize that with some of the existing modes of movement.
Most modes of transportation is horizontal relative to the Earth's surface, with the introduction of an accessible vertical mode of transportation and the consideration of time, the future of movement will be redefined. I am proposing what this looks like as an architecture.
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