Future100: Students Explore Futuristic Building Technologies

The rapid ascent of computational technology and fabrication techniques continues apace, facilitating projects of ever-greater complexity and structural daring. But those feats of architecture and engineering remain limited by the fundamental constraints of economy and contracting know-how. That’s where architecture schools come in; they have long served as incubators for new modes of building and habitation that address the many crises of our time. So perhaps it is no surprise that the students of this year’s Metropolis Future100 are grappling with such issues as the migrant crisis, equity, pandemic response, and the remediation of mass incarceration. 

For University of Pennsylvania MArch student Danny Ortega, his portfolio titled In Between Realms demonstrates proposals as works of parafiction or what he describes as a “construction of reality through the hybridization of diverse media.” The portfolio is self-admittedly a flight of imagination, but the proposals retain a comprehensive understanding of materials and how structural and facade systems come together. Take the No Nation Embassy, a proposed safe house “for people of all backgrounds, cultures, and faiths,” where Ortega deftly lays out through structural models, facade applications, and axonometric diagrams how myriad pieces, such as sculptural columns of steel, composite stone panels, and ETFE, come together.