AIR LUMNEZIA is the second in a series of speculative design studios examining the effects of artificial intelligence and automation on architecture and cities.
As the population has nearly doubled from the early 1950s to today, Switzerland has seen rapid urbanization at the expense of the natural landscape. In 2012, in an effort to plan the nation’s future territorial development, the federal government released the Spatial Concept Switzerland. The official map of Spatial Concept Switzerland illustrated a series of interconnected cities and nodes with overlapping zones that create a sophisticated, holistic network.
In this studio, AIR LUMNEZIA, we will foreground an autonomous delivery system (drones) as a prototypical spatial planning tool, liberating the ground and using air space as an alternative zone for delivery networks. No longer relying on roads, railways, bridges, or tunnels, drones can fly freely in the air operating in a new spatial territory overlayed onto the map of Spatial Concept Switzerland.
The studio’s site will be Val Lumnezia, Valley of Light, one of the side valleys in the Surselva region of Graubünden, Switzerland. The valley is a popular tourist destination with beautiful scenic nature, and has about 2,000 inhabitants spread out in multiple villages and settlements. This unique remote context will serve as a case study for our investigations. Pivoting from the existing physical transportation networks, we will seek to minimize the extent of further land-based transport infrastructure and development in the region by considering autonomous drone technology in the air.
Our architectural project is the design of a series of autonomous delivery hubs, i.e. “drone ports,” as a proto-typological architecture, in the form of patentable inventions that can be instantiated not only for the alpine villages of Val Lumnezia, but also generalized for other villages in Switzerland, and thereby, acting in unison as a network, challenge the Spatial Concept Switzerland and offer debatable alternatives.
Methodologically, the studio will continue our interest in data-driven/parametric design. The studio will interpret the requirements of drone flight networks and noise contours, mine the genius loci of the specific sites, and draw inspiration from the formal language of architectural and infrastructural precedents (such as alpine avalanche constructs, viewing towers, pigeon cots, hidden bunkers). We will critically engage coding, geometric operations, and parametric tools (Grasshopper) as ways to think about typological invention in architecture.
The studio will co-operate with the Digital Architecture and Planning Department in Vienna, and contribute to the on-going conversation on how unpopulated architectures and automated infrastructures can co-exist and spatially function within civic society.