MACHINAPOLIS
TEAM: Niko (Seong) Hur – South Korean
Where Machine = Architecture
With the abundance of technology, information, and resources readily available and the means to share such knowledge, everyone can basically manufacture and exchange goods anytime and anywhere. The scales of and the distances among the producer, consumer and the product are ever so small, to a point where a single individual is capable of making a product that he or she can then sell to another individual anywhere in the world.
As we move on from automated-machine filled structure of the last century to today’s 3d printers, the notion of “place of manufacture” or factory requires our attention.
The project pictures a world where products are no long mass produced. Rather, it celebrates the emergence of small and rapid prototyping that augments innovation and creativity. Modular assembly and aggregation of highly individualized units of manufacture will substitute the horizontal repetition of conventional warehousing and assembly line typology. Modules of related products (or non-related!) can be brought together to form larger aggregates, broken apart and reconfigured to create infinite number of combinations and possibilities to collaborate.
The modules, or the architecture, themselves have become the essential building parts of a giant social machine.