2009

Created with James D. Graham.

Winner of the Holcim Forum Student Competition (Spring 2007)

Featured in Surface Magazine, Plan 68, the Chronicle of Higher Education, American Scholar, Technology Review, Certain Agendas in Architecture (SA+P Press), USA Today, the Boston Globe, and other publications.

Exhibited at the Venice Biennale (2006), the New York Center for Architecture (2009), and the Canadian Center for Architecture (2009).

The CROWD FARM considers the human body to be an essential, participatory, and kineticallycharged agent within the urban and architectural environment. This design for a new civic terrain and energy farm proposes to generate crowds by creating a multi-faceted public space and to capture the expended energy of those crowds with a tectonic system that responds to their movements.

The energy from crowds can be overwhelming.  All of the movement, the stomping, the pushing, and the shear weight can be frightening.  But what if all of that energy could be used as a resource?

The CROWD FARM capitalizes on a valuable resource at Torino's busy central train station: the huge crowds that push through the busy transit hub during the course of each day.  The CROWD FARM introduces new dynamic crowds to the site and capitalizes on those that already exist. Harvesting the energy through a tectonic system, the structure captures the energy that is normally absorbed by the surfaces on which we walk. 

The crowd becomes a very necessary player in the production of energy, as it can only be gathered in meaningful quantities across a large population.

As a preliminary test, we constructed a prototype stool that exploits the normally passive act of sitting. 

The weight of the body on the seat causes a flywheel to spin, powering a dynamo that lights four LED’s: an active demonstration of the potential for gathering energy that is ordinarily absorbed by the built environment.

The stool was exhibited at the Venice Biennale in the Fall of 2006.

Within the CROWD FARM, the ambient exertion of each step is captured in a responsive flooring system; the generation

of power relies on the accretion of footsteps across an urban-scale site— a dispersed microgeneration.

While one person sitting does not produce an overwhelming result, if the action were multiplied across the spectators at a sporting event, or an entire population, the results would be astounding.

The crucial element is not the individual act of energy absorption, but its reliable accretion across a population in a confined area.

As crowds gather and move, the ground plane of the CROWD FARM adapts, allowing for constant spatial reconfiguration.

To maximize the potential for crowd formation on the site, this project reverses the usual “down and out” distribution of public program (focusing activity on the ground-level periphery of a site like a classic city block) in favor of an “up and in” model, which attempts to create internal traffic by allowing “desire lines” of pedestrian connectivity, bolstering the existing regional-to-local rail transfer, and providing a range of unprogrammed but specifically-calibrated spatial typologies that encourage various scales of gathering.