Exhibition - Urban Gallery
Urbanization is one of humankind’s most successful and ambitious programs. We remain committed to a global project of extrusion upward and repetition outward in an effort to provide shelter that is safe, healthy, and uplifting. Underway on a scale never before witnessed, urbanization is the triumph of the unnatural over the natural, the grid over the organic. The unceasing growth of our cities leads to the unavoidable responsibility to manage all terrain - and the ultimate opportunity to reinvent our relationship with nature.
The urban room is designed to be an immersive visual and audio experience - a six-screen, five minute video is continuously projected onto a 56 ft. long cityscape sculpture while a voiceover encourage a different view of the city and our increasingly urbanizing world. As you go through the room five questions are presented on transparent globes. Is urbanization our unspoken belief system? How can we provide shelter for the entire world? How can cities be sustainable? Does density offer hope? Where does the reach of the city end? Designed to be optimistic and encouraging the urban video begins to address the five questions and is filled with stories about green design, sustainable city development, vertical growth and land use, affordable housing designs, greenroofs, and how looking at the entire world as one urban system can change how we design things.
This shows one of the five globes containing questions in the urban room and a shot of the video projected on to the cityscape. Created by Jill Murray, the urban video took months of research, photo clearance, script writing and storyboarding. Video editing and the technical help to project evenly on to a 3D surface provided by Rafael Santos. Photos courtesy of Institute without Boundaries and Vancouver Art Gallery.
As the starting point of the show the urban room touches on topics that are explored in more detail in later rooms - from cradle to cradle design to Hernando De Soto’s work to redesign property law - the designs being highlighted cross ‘design’ boundaries. Also included in the urban room are stories about William McDonough and the China-US Center for Sustainable Development who are working on sustainable city models for China; and sustainable city design ‘in practice’ as shown by the City of Chicago who’s goal is to be the greenest city in North America.
The urban room looks at affordable housing and how examples like the Murray Grove Apartments, a modular housing project in the UK, the Dwell house, a modular house design, and the Glidehouse, a pre-fabricated home incorporating sustainable design, are providing scalable solutions for the future. Photos courtesy of Institute without Boundaries and Vancouver Art Gallery.
Designed to challenge the way we think about the city and it presents the idea that the city is the ultimate success story.
“My suggestion is you stop thinking about the city and the suburbs and the exurbs and the rural area as separate entities and you really consider them as united ecosystems.”
-Michael McDonough, architect and owner of the e-house 2000
Audio Commentary by:
Bruce Mau
Jill Murray (IwB 2004)
Explore the Exhibition:
Exhibition Introduction
Urbanization
Movement
Information
The Image
Markets
Energy
Materials
Military
Manufacturing
Living
Wealth & Politics
