Next Project

Shadow City

Part 1 Project 2010
Aaron Marriot
Nottingham Trent University | UK
The Shadow City

The date is August 15th, year 2053, location Mansfield road to the North of Nottingham’s city centre. Once a busy place the now silent and deserted road still bears fragments of its nearly forgotten past. There lies little remaining pigments of what was once the main bloodline into the city.
Shadow city is a speculative project into the influences of depleting oil supplies upon future perceptions of architecture. In this year the global supply of crude oil has depleted to critical level, resulting in mass abandonment of privatised transportation leaving vast scars on all cities within the western hemisphere. The project explores the architectural merit of these robust settlements that developed in response to this event. Located amidst the ruins of societies once lived obsession with perfection one can find the shadow city. Hidden within a subterranean void lies architectural innovation that has been spontaneously constructed in response to a given set of circumstances. One key character that can be observed is the settlements similarity to a slum however shadow cities ability to develop in response to its temporality makes it a contemporary slum, if indeed a slum at all.



This is a speculative project that explores the transformation of cities and architecture, and questions the role of object obsessive architecture that is prevalent today. It is in many senses future gazing, though it tries to do this through a reclaimed proposition that space is inhabited first as a measure of cultivating life, and culture.

Tutor(s)


2010
• Page Hits: 15434         • Entry Date: 21 June 2010         • Last Update: 19 April 2011