Context > Imagining Future
City of Futroit
Futroit is the city that came after Detroit. It is also the city that comes after any large, metropolitan center begins to contract, collapse and fail. Futroit shows the way of a future city in which humanity must grapple with new urban environmental architectures based upon the bones of the old. Although the humans of Futroit have dramatically rearranged their living conditions, Futroit retains the skeletal forms of its previous infrastructure; roads, malls, sidewalks, phone booths, and water pipes.
Malls for a Inscription of Nomads’ History
In Futroit! people are nomads. Their houses are not static anymore and exhibit herding behaviors. On the other hand, infrastructures that were built for temporal activities such as shopping become static skeletons for urban life. Although people are nomads, they may want to leave their vestiges of their locations.
Now, abandoned shopping malls transform to a space for the nomad's desire to leave their history. Since shopping malls already have the state-of-the-art technology such as climate control and surveillance, they function as a safe place. This is the analogy to the ancient caves on which primitive men represented their life.
References & Resources
Dark Stores by Brian Ulrich
deadmalls DOT com