Humanity is developing, and the size of cities is always evolving. People work in skyscrapers and take the subway through cities, something that no human could have imagined hundreds of years ago. So in a few hundred years, will the city be more advanced and more three-dimensional?
Let the experts answer the questions for you!
As early as the Renaissance, the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius tried to find a model of an ideal city, and he put forward the model of an ideal city in his book "Ten Books of Architecture", thus opening the prelude to the human planning of future urban models.
At the beginning of the 20th century, some active intellectuals in the architectural world, such as futuristic architects, tried to explore urban models that adapted to new social changes and lifestyles, and proposed some imaginative explorations.
In Japan in the 1960s, the architects of the "metabolism school" formed under the influence of Kenzo Tange emphasized the growth, change, and decay of things, and strongly advocated the use of new technologies to solve problems, believing that cities and buildings were not static, but had a metabolic process like living things.
Nakagin Capsule Building in Tokyo, Japan
Another group of architects, who also deeply admired advanced technology, was born in The United Kingdom in the 1960s and became known as the "Building Telecommunications Group". They claim to be trying to find a building with an active spirit that will have a keen sense of reflexes and the ability to respond as much as possible to certain things. Cook's "Insert City" in the group and Heron's "Walking City" are both creative.
In the modern era, the Dutch MVRDV Architects has put forward the concept of "cubic kilometers", they believe that today's city scale has expanded very large, so the city must not only expand on the two-dimensional plane, but also increase the vertical dimension, and the sky will also become the direction of urban development - to build a three-dimensional city with more public levels, to expand the capacity of the city to face the growing population, more complex urban life and the consequent shortage of urban space.
A ready-made case study – Hong Kong's urban construction may allow us to see some prototypes of future three-dimensional cities.
Hong Kong has a population of more than 7 million, but it is only more than 1,000 square kilometers, which is really a lot of people and a small amount of land. In order to adapt to this situation, in Hong Kong, a multi-level connection in the vertical dimension has been formed, with dense high-rise buildings built next to each other, corridors connecting high-rise buildings, direct access to different transportation hubs, coupled with the change of elevation along the mountain, forming a system of many cascading connections. A well-established underground rail system passes through Victoria Harbour, connecting the various districts. Efficient operation relieves the pressure of ground transportation and expands the city's activity space.
Architecture in a modern city
Source: Popular Science China Network