Can you imagine what a skyscraper will look like in 2050? That’s the question the Arup Foresight team set out to answer in a report released earlier this year. Their vision of a 2050s urban building includes an array of renewable technologies, a vertical farm for food production, modular building components and even robots that provide cleaning and maintenance. You can read a good overview of the technologies employed here. As Josef Hargrave, foresight consultant and lead author of the report admits, some features are far more plausible than others – he describes the design as ‘a hamburger of ideas’. But Arup’s sketch is not intended to be a prediction so much as an imagining of possibilities for skyscrapers in the 2050s. Significantly too, these potential components are rooted in key drivers of change that are hard to dispute: urbanisation, climate change and new patterns of food production to name only a few.

A living organism
It’s on a conceptual level however that this design points to a particularly intriguing direction. The urban building of the future will function ‘as a living organism in its own right’ with a structure that is ‘highly adaptive and characterised by indeterminate functions; a scheme where space and form are manipulated depending on the time of day or the user group currently activating it.’

This idea of mutability and adaptability suggests a paradigm shift in the way that the function of architecture is understood. Big infrastructure projects tend to lock society into pathways that can be hard to deviate from; and given their scale and cost big infrastructure is necessarily an investment with long term horizons. But with technology and society set to change more ever more rapidly over the next decades (think Kurweil’s law of accelerating returns), there’s a greater risk of fixed infrastructure becoming anachronistic, redundant or constraining more quickly.

It makes sense therefore for the 2050s urban building to integrate adaptability into the very fabric of its design. It’s like the advantage of having hardware that will accommodate software updates for as long as possible – although with its modular components, even this structure’s hardware can be altered. At a scale that’s micro in comparison, there are nonetheless already fascinating examples of flexible design at a domestic level that allows a user to control the space as daily needs dictate, or life circumstances change over time (see http://www.lifeedited.com).

Community integration and the future workplace
The 2050s urban building is also conceived as located very firmly in the public realm – fully integrated with its urban community and environment, yet entirely self-sufficient. This integration is a stark contrast from the privatised, isolated spaces of most skyscrapers today, where you won’t gain access past the reception desk without a pass or appointment.

Arup Foresight has done previous work on the future of offices so detailed speculation of how the space of this 2050s building might be used or inhabited appears beyond this project’s scope. But it’s natural to wonder how this highly adaptive building design might dovetail with workplace trends over the next few decades. Some argue we will continue to see the rise of small, nimble organisations and the decline in numbers of large corporations. If that projection does eventuate, we can reasonably expect to see more co-working spaces, shared by several small companies from different sectors and freelancers.

Grind in NYC is a fantastic illustration of a co-working space and the people who work there talk enthusiastically of its collaborative and inspirational benefits. Increasingly it seems that freelancers, who could be at home, value working around people. Highly adaptive and fluid designs will therefore hold even more appeal if the future of the workplace is typified by a high churn of different occupants and users – with needs more dynamic and diverse than those demanded by a monolithic company headquarters. The 2050s skyscraper will not so much be built to last, as built to change.

Arup are holding an event later today about challenging conventional thinking on the design of buildings in the 21st century. Entitled makingbuildingswork@Arup, it forms part of the GreenSky thinking programme of events running all this week:
http://www.greenskythinking.org.uk/programme13/arup.html