Shaum Mehra is an educator and award winning architect living and working in San Francisco, California. He teaches an undergraduate design studio at the Academy of Art University, and is the co-founder of Oblique City Architects.In his research, Shaum is focused on the issue of social and environmental stability of indigenous cultures, and their access to sustainable resources, both material and societal.
Yury Kogan is an architect working in San Francisco. His interests include coexistent symbiotic relationships with neighboring ecosystems that stimulate human awareness and empathy, memorial and spiritual design and rapid prototyping techniques and their relation to the traditional ornament.
Traumatic Cities
The form of the City as an immovable infrastructure with its roots planted firmly in the earth is rapidly becoming an archaic system for living and for urban survival. Climate change is eroding our shorelines and resculpting the contours of our human habitable Earth. Increased political instability and the ensuing warfare that follows makes the City a helpless target, a sitting duck. As recent history has shown, once proud cities can be reduced to rubble in mere moments. The immovable City has nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. It is at the mercy of circumstance.
Traumatic Cities envisions a new City types, emerging as a response to our present global conditions. There are Cities that can adapt and transform as circumstances dictate. They are mobile, shapeless, fluid, decentralized. Its instincts are defensive--to take flight, disperse, hide--yet it is capable of attack, of colonization, of amorphous mold-like campaigns of geopolitical aggregation and domination.
SOLAR INFERNO
A man in a helicopter flying over the San Francisco Bay Area on Monday. Photo: Google Maps
A man in a helicopter flying over the San Francisco Bay Area on Monday. A man in a helicopter flying over the San Francisco Bay Area on Monday. Photo: Google Maps
A man in a helicopter flying over the San Francisco Bay Area on Monday. A man in a helicopter flying over the San Francisco Bay Area on Monday. Photo: Google Maps