Efficient Living Machine is not just a proposal to revise the city, but also and above all an attempt to imagine what could take place in another way, human life on this earth. No longer the home, workplace, office, supermarket or bar rooted to the ground, but spaces in constant motion. The new urbanity can be imagined as spaces where the functions are in a perpetual search of new configurations, following the socio-political dynamics of a metropolis in constant change. The concept proposes a building able to function as a base infrastructure to improve and expand the lifestyle of the metropolis, improving the liveability of its users and capable of energy self-sufficiency. The resulting skyscraper proposal is derives from a system of overlapping grids; a series of layers that contain features such as recreational, farms, public parks and employment, grafted in the current fabric of New York, offering a variety of situations that could lead to a new city of morphogenesis.
The skyscraper offers its citizens a choice in different lifestyles depending on the level where they are. The first grid follows more regularly the plan of the present day city of New York, while the second disregards it. This spatial structure increases the density of functions, which also have the ability to be mobile and change their configuration within the internal structure, enabling each individual to follow the socio-economic dynamics of a metropolis in constant change, implementing these features as an evolution of cross programming. To increase the density of the metropolis the concept goes forward with the intention of private transport elimination, counterbalanced by the strengthening of public transport system, with different speed rates, according to the structure and life style to which it reports. The two grids are connected by vertical links that join together the various means of transportation, simultaneously generating new public spaces for socializing. These vertical connections also house the power generation function; the electricity is derived from wind turbines, photovoltaic systems and hydrogen system. The food is produced in the farms thus implementing a local food chain. The heating system employs the fermentation of organic waste from the farm and the whole city. The city also collects and purifies rainwater that is fed to the city’s system.
