We visited the UCLA Architecture and Urban Design (A.UD) department to meet the architects of tomorrow.
When PCMag interviewed Ridley Scott at the Toronto Film Festival last year, our conversation eventually turned to Blade Runner, and the well-known director explained the famous title sequence that flashed "Los Angeles, November 2019" over a dystopian cityscape.
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We decided to visit the UCLA Architecture and Urban Design (A.UD) department, which just celebrated its 50th anniversary, and meet the architects of tomorrow. Its IDEAS platform is off-campus in a vast warehouse in Culver City. We passed through a small door in the corrugated iron surround and came face to face with two massive KUKA industrial robots, which dominate the space caged behind strong wire fencing.
The night before, Masters in Architecture SUPRASTUDIO students showcased their final projects. Scale models, explanatory notes, and architectural renderings of the future were carefully arranged on long trestle tables. As we looked around, two of their leaders, architects Craig Hodgetts and Güvenç Özel, gave insights into emerging technology within architecture, the role of the architect of tomorrow, and whether any of their students' work is reminiscent of the film.
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Hodgetts is keen to get his students questioning everything. "Take roads. They've served a function to get people, goods, and services in and out of cities. But 50 years from now, do they still work, maybe not? Do we still need to build schools in the same way, in a world where children with digital devices become autodidactic? It's a huge revolution coming towards us in terms of city amenities and how they need to be reprogrammed for the way we're going to live inside cities."
One of the big issues in cities is the amount of precious real estate given over to parking.
"Look at Uber," said Hodgetts. "It's building an infrastructure with a probable future of autonomous cars, without drivers, who keep circling, picking up passengers and goods, never needing to park, getting rid of redundant structures, like garages, freeing up masses of urban space."
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It was noticeable that not one of the projects contained impressively powerful status symbol pyramids like that of the Tyrell Corporation inBlade Runner. Hodgetts said architecture used to be commissioned as an expression of pomp and power to illustrate political dominance or the vast wealth of a corporation's headquaters.
"That style of architecture is no longer needed." he said. "Look at banks: They've gone from huge edifices to a kiosk in a supermarket."
Özel, UCLA A.UD Lecturer and former Technology Director of IDEAS, jumped in to point out the emerging digital trends of the students' work. Originally from Turkey, Özel came to the US to study, and has worked in the architecture offices of Frank Gehry and Rafael Vinoly, before setting up his own architecture practice, Ozel Office.
"I'm very interested in the intersection between the digital and the physical worlds, as we are on the cusp of living in mixed realities," Özel told PCMag. "I call this The Architecture of Singularity: creating interactive environments that challenge traditional fabrication techniques and spatial assemblies, bringing in virtual and augmented reality, robotics and smart space applications. Thinking about architecture as an extension or a form of artificial intelligence by making semi-autonomous systems. These are sensor-based but also have an intelligence, a capacity to self-regulate not just in heating or cooling the environment but also through movement."
Özel's inspirations for his students include not just buildings that think but move. He once connected the external materials of a construction to a DJ wearing an EEG headset, whose brain waves then caused undulations in the fabric of the building itself.
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