Before it was abandoned in the wake of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, Pripyat was a thriving Ukrainian city with a population of nearly 50,000. The relatively sudden exodus of its inhabitants left behind a physical snapshot of the times, preserved by the absence of humans intervention for fear of fallout.

Despite the dangers of returning, urban explorers have been visiting the place for years. Some photographers use cameras mounted on aerial drones to maintain a safer distance. Other in-person visitors less concerned about safety have gone in and looted old buildings. Most, though, go simply to observe, drawn to the deserted city by those mysterious forces that attract people to derelict places — embodied history, transgressive impulses and human curiosity among them.

Such dangerous or hard-to-reach abandoned places can particularly alluring, especially when their stories are compelling. Take Hashima, just one of many Japanese islands but unusually packed with old buildings. A thriving coal-mining city in times past, “Battleship Island” once had the highest population density on planet — until a drop in coal production led to its desertion. In recent years, more and more photos and videos of the place have proliferated thanks to the internet, in turn raising questions about how much to repair, restore or change it in order to make it more accessible for an increasing number of people visiting by boat.

While some architectural artifacts in remote locations like this have been left largely alone by visitors or modified simply to accommodate tourists, others have gone through generations of much more radical change. Off the coast of Great Britain, army and navy sea forts have been turned into everything from private retreats and luxury resorts to pirate radio stations and rogue micro-nations. Here, a combination of factors, including abandonment by the government and somewhat more accessible (yet still aquatic) locations have conspired to make these structures more appealing for different kinds of adaptive reuse.

Preservation, Restoration & Contention

In central locations with more people (and thus opinions) the fate of historical places has often been the subject of controversy. In many cities, preservation of a current state tends to win out. Even such a seemingly neutral position can be contentious, though, particularly when efforts to preserve are partial or seem superficial, as in the case of ‘ghost facades‘ where only thin surfaces are saved.

Rote historicism is a simplistic default that can lead to strange and unexpected results and extreme scenarios, like cities demolishing entire buildings to “preserve” the appearance of historical skylines.

In other cases, restorations are pursued, though choosing a target point of time or period can be fraught — some buildings have been changed substantially over centuries, making it challenging to decide what aspects to restore. Either way, renovations involve modifications, which can quickly divide people who crave a kind of physical authenticity from those who embrace the notion that architecture necessarily changes over time — the situation of Notre Dame after the fire illustrates the point. Supporters of extensions and additions that don’t match the original argue that visible differences will help people in the future understand what is truly old and new, while critics note that most famous old structures have already been damaged, rebuilt and changed for centuries. There is no single solution.

Ruination, Rediscovery & Reclamation

There are people, too, who think that historical ruins should simply be left alone to decay. Along those lines, many building infiltrators and urban explorers in the United States, Europe, Asia and other parts of the world where urbex is popular follow an unwritten code to leave no trace of their presence, allowing subsequent visitors to experience a disused space as they did. There is beauty in glimpsing snapshots of history and watching nature slowly reclaim a structure.

Some abandoned places endure through careful consideration and the avoidance of further damage, but many persist in their current form simply because they are less accessible in the first place — the latter status applies to many underwater towns and archaeological sites as well as underground tunnels, crypts and caverns.

Once rediscovered, though, the fates of such places depend on where they are located and current attitudes toward ruination, preservation and restoration, which continue to change over time, much like the locations in question will do … with or without further human intervention.

In Newark, New Jersey, a large and deceptively nondescript building is redefining the Garden State, producing millions of pounds of food per year just outside of Manhattan. This 70,000 square foot facility has the equivalent yield of over 5 million square feet of traditional farmland. Inside, a year-round, closed-loop aeroponics system employs no pesticides and requires 95% less water than field farming. This branch of AeroFarms is not alone — it’s part of a food production revolution with projects ranging from at-home and in-store micro-farms to massive facilities set up in old factories and warehouses around the world.

Technically, vertical farming can be done outside, too, by stacking planters in natural sunlight, but indoor vertical farms offer a range of advantages. Inside, there are no seasons and specialized LED lights make it possible to grow plants continuously and cycle through various crops more easily. The controlled environment and standardization of these systems also makes automation easier. In Japan, approaches have gone predictably high-tech, with endeavors like the Vegetable Factory, which is operated entirely by robots.

Spatial containment makes recycling more efficient, mitigates spoilage and reduces the risk of diseases and pests spreading beyond a specific facility. Transportation costs and energy requirements are also reduced for farms that move into old factories and warehouses right in and around cities, putting them closer to consumers. Aeroponics in general also require less material input — mainly mist and air with minimal water and soil — leading to a lighter footprint.

What started in large and independent facilities has begun to spread into mainstream grocery stores and supermarkets, too. A few years back, Target started testing direct retail micro-farms, beginning with leafy greens before moving to tomatoes, peppers and more. Since these kinds of retail spaces are climate-controlled already for the sake of both shoppers and products, less added energy is required to maintain ideal conditions.

In Berlin, a company called INFARM recently partnered with local shops to provide similar in-store services, cutting down on farm-to-table distance right in the heart of a major European metropolis. Meanwhile, in Tokyo, vertical creepers, rice paddies and broccoli fields were integrated into the design of an otherwise Modern-looking office building, brightening up the place while also providing food for the employee cafeteria.

Taking vertical integration a step further, projects like the ReGen Villages aim to incorporate stacked farms directly into residential communities. It may sound impractical or even Utopian, but at its root the idea is relatively traditional: backyard gardens and community gardening are nothing new. Coupled with walkability and density, these kinds of green-centric towns have a lot in common with New Urbanist ideas that go back decades.

Still, it is generally wise to maintain a healthy skepticism when it comes to fresh green architectural trends and technologies and eye-catching renderings. Skyscrapers covered in greenery (or treescrapers), for instance, have proven to be popular but also problematic in practice (catchy conceptual earthscrapers, groundscrapers and sidescrapers, too, for that matter). Sometimes, more practical organic solutions are hiding in plain sight. Take wood, for instance, a historically popular green building material now finding new forms and reaching new heights in tall buildings around the world. Newer is not always better.

Some extreme vertical farming ideas may indeed prove to be far-fetched and unsustainable, but market movements suggest there is a future in these kinds of facilities and approaches. Investors are putting their money where people’s mouths are, buying up disused urban real estate and developing new indoor farming technologies. Already, vertical farming is a $2,000,000,000 industry and experts project it will grow as much as 30% per year over the next decade.

Vertical farms are of course not a complete solution to ongoing threats like climate change and mounting global food crises, but they do show promise — these endeavors are slowly breaking down urban and rural barriers, reconnecting cities with the food sources that sustain them and shortening that critical distance from farm to table.

The United States currently has a shortage of about 7.2 million affordable and available rental homes for households with incomes at or below the poverty level, a statistic that’s clearly linked to the homelessness crisis. Meanwhile, 8 million Americans spend more than half of their monthly income on rent.

To house those most urgently in need as well as the people who make just enough money to fall through the cracks, cities have to start building more affordable housing as quickly as possible. But that doesn’t mean they should slap up some public housing towers and call it good. To be successful, affordable housing has to offer more than just shelter; it has to be thoughtfully designed to provide a good quality of life to its inhabitants.

In the U.S., the few affordable housing developments that exist often feel like fenced-off prisons, reflecting common attitudes about poverty rooted in the just-world hypothesis – the assumption that, essentially, people get what they deserve. Barriers to creating more affordable housing include city and state regulations that prioritize profitability for developers, and severe cuts to federal housing programs proposed by the current administration.

But some cities are forging their own paths. New York City has set out to build and preserve 300,000 units of affordable housing by 2026, and its Public Design Commission (PDC) published design guidelines for that goal that could become a blueprint for the entire nation.

More Than Shelter: Defining Successful Affordable Housing

“Designing New York: Quality Affordable Housing” lays out best practices in planning affordable housing that “contributes to the quality, character, diversity and experience of New York City’s communities” while improving equity, resiliency, sustainability and health for residents and neighborhoods. The developments should foster density and encourage interaction while presenting inviting, warm, safe and dignified living spaces that are durable, easy to maintain, attractive and accessible by transit, car, bike and on foot. Oh, and they have to be budget-friendly to build, too.

That may sound like a tall order, but the guide includes seven case studies of existing developments that tick off all of these boxes and more, and there’s no reason their success can’t be replicated elsewhere while also being tailored specifically to each location and population. Utopian dreams of affordable housing communities have certainly fallen flat before, like the spectacular failure of the modernist Pruitt-Igoe Housing Project in St. Louis, Missouri, but today most of them read like warnings of what not to do. While the future of affordable housing may center upon open-source technological solutions, PDC’s guide is a step in the right direction that can be acted upon right now, adding to the general discourse about what makes affordable housing successful.

Community-Oriented & Woven Through the Urban Fabric

Integrating affordable housing into the community instead of setting it apart is a great place to start. Not only should they offer easy circulation into transit and segue culturally and aesthetically into existing neighborhoods, they should respond to the priorities of the communities they serve. PDC cites the Frost Street Apartments, a 7-story, 47-unit complex in a gentrified area of Brooklyn by Curtis + Ginsberg Architects as an example.

Not only does it complement the typologies of surrounding architecture and avoid a monolithic appearance with setbacks and a variety of facade colors, it roots affordability into Williamsburg by housing people with incomes at 50%, 60% and 80% of the area median, with eight units set aside for adults with developmental disabilities. On-site support services are available, and residents enjoy bike storage, lots of natural light, bamboo flooring and open kitchens; five percent of the units are pre-adapted to be handicapped accessible.

“How can a building contribute to a sense of community, and help its residents regain stable, independent lives?” asks the Public Design Commission. The Schermerhorn in Brooklyn helps answer that question with 180 studio units for low-income residents and 9 multi-person suites with shared kitchens and bathrooms for formerly homeless single adult residents, all set along day-lit corridors. Preference is given to those working in the performing arts.

The building’s ground floor is home to a dance studio as well as the Mark O’Donnell Theater at The Actors Fund Arts Center, hosting performances by residents, and the entire second floor is devoted to shared spaces, social services and a rear terrace. It’s visually striking, too, cantilevered over a subway tunnel with a facade defined by five vertical channel glass panels.

Sustainability Means Addressing Health, Too

Making a structure sustainable requires more than just going down a checklist of physical attributes. Sustainability should address the health and well-being of inhabitants, too. While the Creston Avenue Residence in the Bronx may include rooftop solar panels, green roofs, low-VOC finishes, formaldehyde-free materials and a rainwater harvesting system, making it one of the few LEED Platinum Certified supportive housing buildings in the United States, it also incorporates community rooms and amenities that open onto a rear courtyard landscaped with native plants, offers lots of views of the neighborhood and encourages the use of stairways.

This building provides housing to people who are chronically homeless or in danger of being homeless, veterans with housing vouchers and households meeting income eligibility requirements, and offers support services to residents. It’s the first building funded by the New York State Medicaid Redesign Team Supporting Housing Initiative, which recognizes housing as a social determinant of health.

Another example cited by PDC is Arbor House in the Bronx by Bernstein Associates, a state of the art affordable housing complex that incorporates a 10,000-square-foot hydroponic rooftop farm that provides fresh produce like lettuce and herbs to tenants. Built in an area where residents have lower life expectancies and higher rates of preventable chronic diseases compared to New Yorkers in wealthier neighborhoods, Arbor House offers an indoor gym, a wide, central day-lit stairway, an outdoor fitness circuit and organic-themed artwork by a local artist to help give the building a sense of identity.

Smart Use of Land and Materials

For Navy Green, a 433-unit building in Brooklyn by FXCollaborative, Curtis + Ginsberg Architects and Architecture in Formation, one key to affordability was the choice to transform a contaminated brownfield into a building that takes up almost an entire city block to accommodate residents with a wide range of incomes and needs. Owned by the city, the land was once a naval prison.

After rehabilitation, it’s a series of four apartment buildings (low-income rental, mixed-income rental, mixed-income condominium and a supportive housing residence) that form a perimeter around a shared green. The buildings are strategically designed to block views of the adjacent Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and a 15-story Navy Yard warehouse. The distinctive facades of each individual building make the complex seem like it was developed over time.

While located in a waterfront neighborhood that’s susceptible to flooding, the Hunter’s Point South Commons and Crossing building by Ismael Leyva Architects and SHoP Architects in Long Island City offers affordable and income-restricted units stunning views while building flood potential into the design. Critical infrastructure is raised to higher elevations and the building is capable of withstanding substantial water loads, with temporary flood barriers integrated into the ground floor.

Of course, these projects don’t just spring up out of nowhere. Many of them receive special state or city funding and are built on land already owned by the city, circumventing a lot of common obstacles to building new affordable housing. But they also address affordability in a holistic way that benefits the city as a whole, avoiding the segregation of low-income residents from the rest of the population and improving their lives in the process.

Designing and constructing affordable housing also requires taking a hard look at what the word ‘affordable’ actually means in relation to the real and growing issue of income inequality in the United States. But the PDC’s “Designing New York: Quality Affordable Housing” gives us a strong foundation for a future of affordable housing that could also include lots of modular, 3D-printed and otherwise technologically advanced structures.

Does the idea of deploying robotic plants and animals in natural habitats to help save threatened species and reduce pollution make you feel better or worse about the state of the world? On the one hand, it’s kind of alarming that we’ve reached the point where we’re investing in bionic cockroaches and robot bees to make up for the destruction humans have unleashed upon the Earth. But on the other hand, recent advances in technology make it possible to explore, monitor and aid our environment in dazzling new ways, like using machine learning to predict the behavior of threatened species or interactive bio-tags to warn whales away from our ships.

High-Tech Bio-Tagging Systems

via GIPHY

The ‘Augmented Nature’ project helmed by a team of designers and engineers at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London aims to empower animals to thrive in their natural habitats and avoid threats of nearby humans. The team has developed two robotic bio-tags: one for the collard peccary, a type of pig that lives in the Amazon rainforest, and one for the humpback whale. In addition to passively gathering information on the animals, the tags actively aid them.

Using vibration, the bio-tags guide the peccaries to areas where they can dig wallows and disperse seeds, creating new habitats in safer areas away from destructive logging operations. Peccaries are crucial to both plant growth and amphibian habitats in the forest as they travel through the underbrush and roll in the mud.

The oceans have changed dramatically for humpback whales in the last century thanks to ship activities, pollution and ocean acidification, putting them at risk of ship collisions and disorienting them with the sounds of engines and other human activities. But these whales are essential players in ocean health, carrying nutrients from the depths where they feed back up to the surface to nourish phytoplankton, the basis of the entire food web. The Augmented Nature whale bio-tag integrates an underwater speaker to actively communicate with tagged whales, using sound to inform them about the positions of nearby ships.

Drone Bees & Other Synthetic Pollinators

Could pollinating robots really make up for the fact that bees are dying? Many scientists are skeptical, but the situation is desperate enough to give it a shot. Bee populations are plummeting, and without them, our crops are in serious trouble. The United States lost 44 percent of all honeybee colonies in 2016, and other species are near mass extinction. While it seems clear that we need to put a lot more effort into saving the living bees we still have, drones could help fill in the gaps in the meantime.

Pollinating robots are currently under development in a variety of forms, including insect-sized drones that use horse hairs coated with ionic liquid gel to mimic the biology of living bees, created by Eijiro Miyako, a researcher at Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology. Others aim to look a little more like real bees. Surprisingly, even mega retailer Walmart is putting a hat in the game; Walmart filed a patent for autonomous robot bees in March 2018.

Some people believe robotics could help keep bees alive, too. It seems like a sad reflection of the state of our world when we have to create artificial flowers to nourish bees because real ones are too covered in chemicals and mites. Artist Michael Candy built this conceptual Synthetic Pollenizer, a system of 3D-printed robotic flowers, which is installed alongside real plants to encourage bees to pollinate. Equipped with pollen and nectar, the machine feeds pollen collected from beehives into a synthetic stamen and then sends it through motors to regulate the amount of pollen on the ‘flower.’

“Bees are easily the most utilitarian pollinators used in industrial agriculture and they are suffering from a variety of environmental problems,” says Candy. “Perhaps in a future where designer crops are no longer able to produce pollen yet still receive it – then the Synthetic Pollenizer could rehabilitate the reproductive cycle of these genetically modified crops.”

Robotic Animals Document & Monitor Marine Life

A soft robotic fish named SoFi developed by MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory swims alongside real fish to capture close-up footage without disrupting or alarming them. The robot has been tested at depths of more than 50 feet for up to 40 minutes in Fiji’s Rainbow Reef. Its silicone body is based on those of real fish to give it a natural swimming pattern, and its buoyancy is controlled by an adjustable weight compartment and ‘buoyancy control unit’ that changes the fish’s density by compressing and decompressing air. The team uses a waterproofed Super Nintendo controller to steer it.

It may not be quite as graceful as the real thing, but the MantaDroid by the National University of Singapore is pretty close to passing as its biological counterpart, at least from a distance. The droid is designed to aid in marine biodiversity studies – and also, unsurprisingly, to carry out underwater surveillance.

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Augmented Nature 6 Ways Robotics Are Aiding Conservation Efforts

Looking like an oversized bird’s nest, this cozy pavilion is not quite as organic as it seems, its flowing walls made out of strands of 100% recyclable high-density polyethylene (HDPE.) Designed by Dutch architect Ben van Berkel of UNStudio for the pavilion series Revolution Precrafted, the ‘Ellipsicoon’ features a sinuous design created using 3D modeling computer programs, but its strands are hand-woven by traditional craftspeople. Its alternately raised and sunken surfaces offer places to sit or lounge, while the roof provides shade and openings let in a little sunlight.

“I have long been interested in exploring spaces which extend function to replace the reality of the everyday with the potential for more nuanced, reflective experiences,” says van Berkel. “The Ellipsicoon offers a place of temporary disengagement, where the practicalities, duties and interruptions of daily life can momentarily fade and the imagination can take over.”

The Revolution Precrafted series of transportable pavilions features designs by some of the world’s most renowned architects, including Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, Sou Fujimoto and Kengo Kuma. They see the pavilions as a new way of collecting and experiencing art, immersing oneself in intimate designer spaces. The project aims to democratize high design by making it more accessible to the public.