The Ubiquitous Network by David Zhai & Alexis Burson

David Zhai and Alexis Burson, two students from Columbia University GSAPP, were recently selected in the New York category for their entry in this year’s d3: Housing Tomorrow Competition. Their innovative project The Ubiquitous Network, located at the Hoboken Terminal Yards, a 76 acre site straddling New York and New Jersey, speculated on the future of the network society through the hybridization of data and living.

Project Description from the Architects:

The site strategy involves a series of server cores established within a network of high and low-density housing. The servers interface with surrounding domestic spaces allowing informational feedback to occur between the inhabitants and a kinetic architectural system that responds to the various spatial needs of a global community.

Revenue generated from the data servers help to subsidize the cost of living while the substantial heat created from the processing of data is used in a heat-exchange process to support domestic heating and hot water. Heat from the servers also supports a network of vertical farming which provide sustenance for the community. An integrated biometric monitoring system allows residents to better improve on their health and lifestyle while increasing the effectiveness of health and emergency response services.

Currently, technology has moved much faster than the policies that govern it. Issues of privacy and security will only grow as technology becomes less visible while its ability to gather data increases. Using the science of the Faraday cage, the Data Negation space is a deployable membrane over the living space of each unit. This membrane is capable of negating all wireless transmissions creating a place of total privacy. At the same time, this space becomes inherently architecturally political, allowing the residents to directly address the data if ever the methods of collection exceed or violate constitutional and amendment rights.

By re-conceptualizing new modes of informational collection and distribution on an urban scale, with consideration for health, privacy, economy, and the environment, this proposal tests but also begins to define the emergence of the post-computing society and the creation of a new urbanism and a new model of community.

All images courtesy of David Zhai and Alexis Burson.