The carmaker that founded it allocated an amount of 100,000 euros for it; the slogan “Building a vision for 2030” was the challenge for the nominees for the award. Selected by the curator of the award, Stylepark studio, six architectural firms - Alison Brooks Architects, BIG, Cloud 9, Standardarchitecture, J. Mayer H. problems of urban planning and architecture, or rather, the city.
The organizers in their manifesto note the existing problems of both humanity as a whole and specifically of megalopolises - the uneven distribution of wealth among countries and regions, increasing environmental pollution, depletion of resources, population growth and associated migration. But among the initial data for creating a picture of the world-2030, they indicate the presence of a car: not necessarily in the form of private property, but certainly as an individual vehicle. At the same time, of course, emphasis is placed on the use of new types of fuel and the overall environmental friendliness of the machine of the future.
The utopian images of the metropolis, obtained by five workshops, were presented 20 years later in the Venetian Scuola Grande della Misericordia in the form of an exhibition, the design of which was made by the raumlabor_berlin bureau. The building chosen for the exhibition itself represents a contrast - between the austere brick facades and the marble decor of the interiors, and a third element was added to these two components - a bright plastic mini-city of multi-colored narrow "streets", in which in the form of models, texts, videos and renders were shown nominating for the award projects.
Each of the participants was given their own color and their own "street", but thanks to the numerous transverse paths, the overall impression turned out to be actively polychrome.
The cheerful mood, which, in theory, should have created such a solution to the exposition, fades somewhat upon closer acquaintance with the work of the Jurgen Mayer Prize laureate. Its version was chosen by the jury, apparently, due to its "realism" and "implementation" (although the judges cannot be envied: most of the participants proceeded from the same ideas and came to very similar decisions). The architect focused not on the urban environment, but on a means of transportation, which, thanks to innovations, will not somehow move a person in space, but change his perception of the world around him.
Like other participants, Mayer suggested that by 2030, cars will not need drivers: they will be able to navigate in space themselves, and much better than people. Therefore, a person will turn into an eternal passenger, there will be no need for traffic lights, street lights, headlights, road signs ("smart" cars do not need them), and the interior of such a car will become a hybrid of a social network and an interactive map with a windshield as a touch screen. It will become an "interface" for interaction between a person and the environment, an interface that can be configured in the manner required by a specific user: for a person looking for a rented apartment, on the houses visible in the windows of the car, information about the housing they are rented will be displayed, and the girl who is going to have fun in the evening will come information about planned parties, as well as the names and ages of young people passing along the street.
The architect called the city of the future Pokeville, since the contact of a person and reality according to this scheme is "tangential", without real rapprochement, like the like and poke options on Facebook. However, in this frightening reality, which has much in common with the images of Philip Dick, Jurgen Mayer sees nothing wrong: he considers the invisible digital element flowing through the city along with the continuous stream of cars as an active force of renewal.
He pays much less attention to the pragmatic aspects of the organization of the urban transport system: among his ideas are cars with electric motors, access to the city only for cars with an automatic control system, reduction of noise and light pollution of the urban environment as a result of the rejection of horns, noisy engines, powerful street lamps and headlights. Mayer himself called his 2030 concept a "fairy tale"; the jury also liked it: perhaps because it affects almost exclusively the structure of the car (not counting the intangible and therefore much less important for any carmaker's consciousness and lifestyle of the human user). The audacity and modesty that characterize this plan at the same time set it apart from the work of Mayer's colleagues, who followed the more traditional futurological path.
Bureau Cloud 9 has attracted a group of children aged 8-10 years to work on its program, that is, those who will be the main consumers of innovations in 2030. Using the membrane concept important for the head of this workshop, Enric Ruiz-Geli, they created the image of an ETFE airbag machine with flexible solar panels installed on it, collision resistance, a green engine, etc. The resulting concept car has been called “responsive car for Barcelona” (responsiveness refers to the ability to respond to changing environmental conditions).
The Standardarchitecture workshop proposed a solution for Beijing, whose urban development today is limited to the creation of new and new ring roads ahead of time, after which urban development spontaneously captures agricultural land. Architect Zhang Ke proposes to start "ahead of" not the motorways, but the subway lines in order to reduce the growing number of cars, and replace the latter with "smart" electric cars.
At the same time, the existing circumferential routes should be turned into huge "travelators" moving at an incredible speed of 60-80 km / h. Personal transport will stand on them, and not go, thereby leveling the problem of traffic jams. Moreover, it is assumed that passengers will be able to get out of cars there and communicate, and during such a parking, the interior of the car can be used as an office or a bedroom.
Bjarke Ingels and BIG see the future of the car in "getting rid" of the driver: such "green", smart and silent cars will require four times less space on the track than conventional ones (according to analysts, the first smart cars will appear in 2015). They will read all the necessary information from a special road surface, which will guide the movement of cars, pedestrians and cyclists, including anticipating them.
The same coverage, the "smart street", will generate electricity from solar energy and the pressure of the steps of citizens, while simultaneously recharging electric cars and various mobile devices. Traffic lights and road signs will be replaced with luminous pixels on the pavement. The purpose of the space of such a street can be changed several times a day: from the carriageway at rush hours to the pedestrian zone at lunchtime and recreational in the evening.
Alison Brooks is more worried about the growing size of the global car fleet at the expense of wealthy developing countries: if the current pace continues, there will be 3 billion cars on the planet by 2050. She found the potential to solve this problem in the use of large vehicles for 4 or 6 people alone, as well as in the overlap at a significant part of the traffic flow of the destination. If the capabilities of each vehicle are fully utilized, their total number will decrease, and some of the roads can be turned into green zones. Brooks sees smartphones as the future "remotes" for smart cars connected to cities' smart transportation systems. These machines will be easy to share or lease for short term. The architect chose superdense Mumbai, with an amazingly efficient public transport system, and London, with its combination of varied development around a free system of open spaces, as sample cities.
So, looking at the proposals of all the participants in the competition for the Audi Urban Future Award, one cannot but come to the conclusion that Jurgen Mayer's proposal stands out not only for its (relative) originality and "embodiment". Perhaps it is the only one of the five, the realization of which we should fear, not wish.
