Network Hydrology

[Image: Hydro-Net by IwamotoScott].

Hydro-Net, by San Francisco architects IwamotoScott, who spoke last year at BLDGBLOG's San Francisco event, has been making the rounds lately, popping up on all sorts of architecture and design blogs – but rightly so: it won first prize in the History Channel's recent "City of the Future" competition, and it offers up some fascinating urban re-design ideas.

[Images: Hydro-Net by IwamotoScott].

The project reimagines the entire San Francisco peninsula in the year 2108 A.D., having been overlain, if not completely replaced by, a kind of prosthetic hydrological landscape – complete with underground rivers of algae which will be cultivated as a source of hydrogen for fuel.

[Images: Hydro-Net by IwamotoScott].

Architecturally speaking, the city will sprout a whole series of new structures, including multi-angled fog harvesting machines, tendril-like towers along the waterfront, subterranean transport tunnels, and biologically active reservoirs buried beneath the streets.
But you can just read that on the images themselves.
The project tells its own story: it is a narrative of San Francisco as it could – and might someday – be.

[Images: Hydro-Net by IwamotoScott].

Best of all, though, are the aquifers: voids beneath the city put to use as a means by which the city can hydrologically replenish itself – thus extending this new vision of San Francisco into the ground.
Leading me to ask: Does architecturally reimagining the surface of the earth mean that one is inherently Heideggerian? The landscape is extended, no longer serving as mere ground, or foundation, but structure.

[Images: Hydro-Net by IwamotoScott].

In any case, the end result is that we're faced with an infrastructurally renewed San Francisco... one whose skyline, and subterranean profile, will never be the same.

[Image: Hydro-Net by IwamotoScott].

See more in IwamotoScott's own Flickr set of the project.