Audi Urban Future: Project New York

Audi will take advantage of New York's 'Festival of Ideas' to display their vision of Manhattan in 2030, an objective that fulfills part of the German automaker's Urban Future Initiative. Now in its second year (the first was held in Venice last year) the initiative was created with the intention of looking at the future of megacities as well as individual transport methods and mobility.

For Project New York, Audi will be bringing together architects, designers, artists and researchers to visualize ideas for the city's future, and the carmaker has collaborated with the Architizer architecture community to create a 1:1200 scale model of Manhattan.

Five up-and-coming New York architecture practices – LEONG LEONG, Matter Practice, Abruzzo Bodziak Architects, Peter Macapia/labDORA and Marc Fornes & THEVERYMANY – will all play part in the design of a future Manhattan. Each team will devote its attention to one district of the city, for example Lower Manhattan, Central Park West or Midtown East.

Before the exhibition begins, the teams of architects will work individually on the district that is assigned to them. Once the exhibition begins, the teams will join together in order to allow the different areas – with their differing scenarios for the future – to fuse together at the margins. As this is occuring, the resulting ideas will be immediately transferred to the model. A camera will record this build process – enabling visitors to the gallery to follow the progress on screens continuously, whilst simultaneously being uploaded to Facebook.

Alongside the evolving model, showcasing how the city of the future might look, the project also aims to initiate wide-ranging discussions about urban development, infrastructure and research into the future.

"Rather than a competition, Project New York acts as a laboratory to exploit the potential of collaboration, contingency and dissemination to reach beyond the limitations of the single idea, the individual city, and our present time," commented Troy Conrad Therrien and Christopher Barley, curators of the Architizer project.

An additional exhibition, developed with Storefront for Art & Architecture and entitled 'The Draw Think Tank', will also be shown alongside Project New York.

The Draw Think Tank aims to bring together representatives of various disciplines, including experts from Audi will exchange views about "Individual Mobility", "Collective Spaces of Movement" and "Urbanizing Technologies" over three different rounds of discussion. As these discussions take place, participants will illustrate their thoughts by sketching them on iPads. Once finished, the sketches will be merged into one final large image and then projected onto the walls of the event venue, the so-called SpaceBuster.

The Audi Urban Future Initiative in New York opens on May 7th.

For more information on the Audi Urban Future projects or the Festival of Ideas, check out the following websites:
Audi Urban Future Initiative
New York Festival Of Ideas

By John O'Brien