Finalist 2011 Skyscraper Competition: Auto Hive – Designing a new City Based on new Modes of Mobility

It can be said that both architecture and urban design of the contemporary metropolises and suburbs are directly influenced by the reinvention of modes of movement such as lifts, subways, and automobiles.

As a result of such inter-twined development between the automobiles and modern urbanism, the world at large is undergoing what may be described as a ‘bifurcation’; experiencing concurrent population, technological and information shifts. This point of instability due to energy crisis allows for the formation of a ‘new state of order’. The Auto-Hive Project is conceived as such a response.

Newmarket, is a primer retail district and arterial route of central Auckland, New Zealand which is threatened by rapid population shift and decades of unchecked suburban sprawl. The concepts of connectedness and movement became a vital question during the design process, where densification is augmented by a system for increasing mobility; an evolution in the transportation network. As a result, Newmarket was re-envisioned as a sub-metropolis in a proposed post-cartographic information era within the design project, where physical location is negated in favor of connectedness in the new city-network.

Source: eVolo