Human Topographies
Ecatepec de Morelos, Mexico City, Mexico
2011
*
Certificate of Concours d’Elegance for best architecture senior project, Cal Poly Pomona, 2011
*Interim Design Showcase Exhibition Selection, 2011
The megacity is created by expansion controlled only by the needs of the people. Growth continues informally outward as verticality becomes less and less possible in urban cores. Incredibly rapid and autonomous patterns of settlement are creating cities too big for comprehension. What do we do before this expansion creates international, social, political, structural, and economic problems too big for comprehension?
This project maximizes our possible [reasonable] densities through familiar architectural and construction systems and envisions appropriate, sustainable, yet futuristic vertical systems that will permit necessary macro and micro vertical expansion, adding rare program like open space, amenities, and agriculture zones, as we engulf the fringes of our megacities. This architectural proposal offers a vertical system not unlike ideologies surrounding existing self-built horizontal systems: a 3-dimensional micro-city contained in constantly growing vertical structures, integrated within the existing maximized human topographies. In essence, in 30 years when 90% of the world’s population lives in cities (8.3 billion people), it will not make sense to avoid verticality.
