Anna Andronova, University College London (UCL), Bartlett School of Architecture, London, United Kingdom & Kazan State University of Architecture & Engineering, Kazan, Russia

My LafargeHolcim Next Generation Award winning project “Liquid Era” speculated on digital futures through integration with natural environment in Kazan, Russia. Urban climatology and hydrology dissertation studies in the Bartlett School gave me more in-depth insight on how these complex natural processes are working. Two years after my graduation, our city authorities show particular interest in development of Volga adjacent project areas in collaboration with my university; and as I come back to start practicing, I am accepting the challenge.

Site offers opportunities to do an unconventional project with the new digital tools on board: it inherits a unique hydrology of Kuybyshev Reservoir, the largest in Europe and vast obsolete infrastructure. My objective is to propose a resilient and sustainable waterscape, able to overcome predicted stress conditions through improved water management, integrating with regional healthcare complex. However, there is always limited funding for the research stage, which is essential in such ambitious intention.

In my vision, production should go beyond just built environment: not materialize an object as such, but materialize its performance. Architecture may remain “liquid”: rainbows, fog, frost, gravity, shadows and data will be my primary materials. Water in architecture will be explored in its full cycle as a force for form-making (plasticity and weathering), energy generation (streams and waves), transportation (hydraulic and floating dynamics), biological performance (growth, sanitation, healing), as well as leakage, material degradation and decay.

The days when the sustainability of a construction project was a matter of ad hoc measures are over – sustainable construction has become systematic and specific. This was emphatically shown by the results of the Holcim Awards in region Europe: The first prize was shared by two projects in Brussels, both of which excel in terms of their multi-functionality.

The project for a possible future of the city opens with a provocative question. “How could we, architects, be so confident that sustainability in the future will still lie in the field of bricks and mortar?” Learning from nature’s regulating processes, the author explores a set of fluid morphologies to derive an understanding of architecture in sync with the environment. Architecture, according to the project’s designer, can digitally reproduce the mechanisms at work in nature to produce architectural structures that can sustain themselves, while in symbiosis with nature. These forms and spaces (made of “digital multi-materials, nano-composites, natural vegetation, and holographic lasers”), are subsequently tested in a real context – in the city of Kazan. Here, the new structures are superimposing onto the heterogeneous city fabric to create a hybrid amalgam of entropic quality.

Innovation and transferability: Mindful city

Author’s concept is the transformation of a “smart” city into a “mindful” city. Mindfulness of a city is combined from two main parts: automation and interconnection of its infrastructural systems and socio-emotional intelligence of its citizens. New digital logic results in new spatial organization models, where the urban context is reimagined, by transforming it into condensed, clever, but flexible space. Typological matrix of city structural elements (point, line, surface, volume) introduces time notion into the rich functional programming, so that hybrid landscape is made. Absolute communication and coordination of infrastructural systems turns a city to a super-organism.