IwamotoScott Architecture recently won the $10,000 grand prize for their entry in the The History Channel’s City of the Future contest where they envisioned what San Francisco might look like in 2108. Their winning entry was a Hydro-Net concept that includes a “Geothermal Mushroom” at located on the top of Bernal Hill and a “Fog Flower” on Ocean Beach. Here’s their full series of Hydro-Net concept illustrations.
Symbiotic and multi-scalar, SF HYDRO-NET is an occupiable infrastructure that organizes critical flows of the city. HYDRO-NET provides an underground arterial traffic network for hydrogen-fueled hover-cars, while simultaneously collecting, storing and distributing water and power tapped from existing aquifer and geothermal sources beneath San Francisco. A new aquaculture zone with ponds of algae and forests of sinuous housing towers reoccupy Baylands inundated by rising sea levels. Hydrogen fuel is produced by the algae, and is stored and distributed within the nanotube wall structure of HYDRO-NET’s robotically-drilled tunnels. At key waterfront and neighborhood locales, HYDRO-NET emerges to form linkages between the terrestrial and subterranean worlds. Here new architectures bloom as opportunistic urban caves and outcroppings, fostering new social spaces and densified urban forms, fed by the resources and connectivity provided by HYDRO-NET. These locally responsive and distributed nodes and tendrils facilitate both the preservation and organic evolution of San Francisco.
via Gridskipper
illustrations by IwamotoScott Architecture
Here Are A Few Related Posts You Might Enjoy:
- Posters Featuring Fantastic Visions of a Future San Francisco
- Let’s Green This City: PG&E’s Goal For San Francisco
- Video of Chicken John’s Visit to San Francisco City Hall
- Wild Style City Allows You To Tag Virtual Graffiti Around San Francisco
- Aurora, A Vision of Future User Experience on the Web





















{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
those are some really crisp images.
some crappy photos from the design-off at The Ferry Building last month here: http://whatimseeing.com/2008/01/futurama-city-in-2108.html
Newsome can’t even speak proper english, and spend too much time at the pub, how would something like that happen under those circumstances.
San Francisco is a laid-back city still living in the past of the sixties. The city is driven by somewhat progressive (in france, that would be considered just plain Right Wing) politicians, and the most left wing ones’ attitude is to have said NO to progress for the past 20 years, arguing that improving SF infrastructure and embellishing the city would drive the price of life too HIGH. Well they ‘ve been wrong for a long time now, and that’s a proof that even the left wing in San Francisco lacks intelligence, vision, and leadership (this doesn’t mean, and will never mean that the Right Wing is an alternative, it is not, the alternative is an intelligent population). Refraining to improve the city has made San Francisco a backward place to live, where everything has become too expensive to enjoy LIFE here.
So if you have good ideas of other cities that are making real progress and will be a joy to live in, as opposed to Yuppie Intoxicated unProgressive San Fran, please let me know.
The real question is: How will this affect the 2108 Bernal Hill Soap Box Derby?
lol @ WALT. good one dude.