Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Imagining An Underground Venice In The American Southwest

From BldgBlog post Hexagonal Hydropolis I went to the source Matsys where Andrew Kudless has created a futuristic and imaginative vision of a subterranean urban landscape in a dessicated American southwest.

The concept and architecture is stunning. Vast underground water reservoirs are connected to the cityscape via canals which also are the means of transport.


Image; Sietch Nevada / renderings by Nenad Katic

This is a grand and impressive outlook and I keep thinking on another track when I come across the many futuristic adaptive scenarios that are being proposed as responses to changing climate and resulting changes to our living space. The problems are varied, deep underground water storage, deep underground CO2 storage, coastal erosion, understanding changing river dynamics in the north Indian plains as glaciers shrink, exploring for uranium to boost nuclear energy....geology and geologists will play an increasingly important role as we explore and implement solutions to meet this challenge.

2 comments:

  1. Looks cool -- but project it down the road a ways: isn't moving below the surface the first step towards evolving into Morlocks?

    :)

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  2. nice concept! i found it eerily similar with the alien Moties in Larry Niven's A Mote in God's Eye. evolution through artificial selection of castes specialized for different tasks.

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