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Air
Ship Air City: Self-sufficient dwellings in the sky.
Flock
House, Collaged concept image
Concept Layout, A.S.A.C.
Air Ship Air City (ASAC) is a proposal for an airborne laboratory that augments city land while imagining future cities in the sky. Designed as an autonomous living system for rising sea levels and overcrowded cities, it instigates repurposing the use and meaning of underutilized spaces. In preparation for an increase in population, a decrease in usable land, and a greater flux in environmental conditions, people will need to rely closely on immediate communities and look for alternative living models; ASAC intends to prepare, inform, and provide an alternative to current and future living spaces.
Air Ship Air City is an ecosystem in-progress on a rooftop in Downtown Brooklyn at the Metropolitan Exchange Building (Mex Building). Plans for ASAC include: building a studio space, edible gardens, greenhouses, aquaponic and sub-irrigated systems, rainwater collection systems, weather mapping and recording, migratory pattern recording, a public event space for art, music and ecological lectures. Its purpose is to engage visitors and citizens in ideas about diverse adaptations for changing climates in urban environments, and as elevated housing for a rotational one-person 1-month research residency on the roof inside of “Flock House.” Open to the public for events and guided tours, this space will hold up to 65 people.
ASAC will be created using repurposed materials from the Waterpod Project (a barge-based ecosystem and social sculpture that visited eight locations in the five boroughs of New York City during the summer of 2009), and other resources adapted from the remnants and waste of NYC’s construction materials. ASAC is a living sculpture where systems and radical structures come to life through participation and creativity of its collaborators. ASAC will bring together a team of artists, writers, curators, scientists, and urban designers.
Prior to beginning the residencies, ASAC will host an architecture residency "Terrafarm" composed of students from the U.S.A. and abroad, and commission them as part of the class to complete experimental projects in energy technologies. In this way, ASAC is an incubator for progressive social models that offer an alternative to the dominant approaches that have proved unsustainable.
Artist Mary Mattingly conceived of this collaborative live/work/public “city in the sky.” With a team of collaborators including writer and curator Ian Daniel, artist Kim Holleman, aquaponic systems director Andrew Carter, architect Tighe Lanning, horticulturalist Casey Tang, sustainability advisor Lonny Grafman, LEED Certified builder Cody Stross, and a collaboration with businesses from the Mex building, including Bodega Algae, Alive Structures, Terreform 1, and other ecology-based architectural and materials firms, ASAC will begin being built-out during the summer of 2010 and run through September 2011. Throughout the process, a rotation of writers-in-residence led by Ian Daniel will document the entire process as an ethnographic study of the changing space through the build-out, living experiments done by artists and residents, events, interaction of people with the ecosystems. The writers will produce both scientific and critical writing of the project to be submitted for publication and to serve as a document of the project and issues surrounding it.
Air Ship Air City Layout Plans
Area 1 (ASAC roof top layer): Flock House
- Collection and storage of rainwater with reused piping and 1550 rainwater catchment from the Waterpod, funnels, and a basic irrigation system for food grown in edible gardens.
-Flock House. Like a bird's nest, this is a temporary structure and sculpture containing a workspace, test space, and seed bank for the resident. Using the Waterpod “Greenhouse” structure consisting of a 2x4 frame and 16’ diameter dome, a 2x4 and 2x2” exoskeleton “human tube” would be built to wrap around the dome/frame like a nest. Then, used water tower wood from a preexisting water tower will be used to build an angular cloud “studio” workroom. Rotating artists and scientists will explore designer climates, storm stimulation, air space, air rights, and growing energy while web casting a daily weather report.
Area 2 (ASAC roof mid layer): Air Coop
- Preexisting rooftop structures covered with trellising material, sun-dispersing reflectors, and a green wall.
- Ten hens feed off of the rich grains and feed grown in their multi-tiered Air Coop and supply ASAC with daily fresh eggs.
Area 3 (ASAC roof ground layer):
- Edible gardens including a “keyhole” medicinal garden, a “keyhole” layered edible garden, a nut and berries “forest” foraging garden, and the upkeep of the preexisting mobile gardens, sub irrigation planters, tomato plants, and bed gardens. Built gardens will be nest-like and honeycomb shaped.
- A compass, sundial, human nest outdoor couches, aquaculture buckets, and a real-time sound sculpture that translates landing and takeoff data from the LaGuardia and JFK Airports into a sound piece at the space are all things we would like to incorporate into the space.
Area 4 (inside Mex Building):
- ASAC will harvest kitchen compost from each of the seven floors where compost goes unused and store this for rotational use.
- ASAC will begin by drawing power from the grid of the Mex Building but will eventually supply its own power harnessed from the sun and wind.
- ASAC will begin by drawing from the toilet facilities inside of the Mex Building, but will later use a system that turns waste into energy.
ASAC will be an object and a space that continues to be negotiated through democratic participation and implementation. In 2025, the Global Urban Observatory predicts that city dwellers will reach 5 billion. Our choices are: move to the water, inhabit Governor’s Island, crowd Long Island, and/or take to the sky.
In the upper levels of the city, the space below is recontextualized as both street map and historic city.
Can we create pathways for rainfall that mimic riverine, rivulet, rapid, rill, flux, fluent, fluvial ebb and flow?
In
2025, the Global Urban Observatory predicts that city dwellers will reach
5 billion.
We can: move to the water, inhabit Governor’s Island, crowd Long
Island, and/or take to the sky.
Air Ship Air City
is a proposal for a Living System lab where the sky’s the limit.
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A short background:
Mach 2 (link),
a project at Art Omi. Mach 2 is a sculpture of a personal flying machine
using jet packs. Mach 2 would fit a single person, and also could collect
dew from clouds to give the flyer fresh drinking water.
The Waterpod Build-out at the GMD Shipyard in the Brooklyn Navy
Yard, and being surrounded by the shipyard’s cranes. Already
elevated and mobile, the cranes in the shipyard could take to the streets
if need be. A city of elevated housing means more public space is available
below and green space available for growing food above the inhabitable
areas. The underneath is available space for hanging gardens.
 
The World’s
Fair Marina in Queens. This was the Waterpod’s final docking
location. Waking up at 6:30 to the sound of the first flights leaving
LaGuardia, the flights being approximately 7 minutes apart at the height
of the day, and dwindling to every half hour after 10pm made me crave
being in the air. The patterns of automated flight are precision-timed
by the airport and space-mapped by artists working with computer models.
The airspace grid became a fascinating place to explore.
Two million flights pass through the New York area airspace
each year.
Illustration: Aaron Koblin
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