Aerial Alchemy | New Microclimates
(PolyArk5 – Poly Air | SuperMegaCrit 2018)

The ambition of our project is based on environmentally friendly and useful device, designed for augmenting, enhancing and manipulating air and therefore creatively shaping space in public urban areas within cities, and thus altering patterns of behavior of both air and people within it. By doing so, we hope to activate public space even when the weather conditions wouldn’t normally allow it.

The idea behind our design is to make a device that works and looks like the natural air conditioning device – tree. Therefore, these devices are designed to work through the use of rainwater collected by the device and accumulated electrical energy provided by external solar panels.

This kind of artificial forestation can be achieved by repetitious positioning of these mechanisms in pedestrian zones with a goal of forming more adaptable areas that allow citizens to stay outside no matter the weather. Overlapping these augmented micro-atmospheres forms a microclimate over specific areas in the city thus solving problems such as extreme heat, cold, humidity by turning existing zones into refreshing corners where people can work, play or rest.

The design focuses on creating a micro-climate that can be found friendly, hostile, spiritual, exciting and relaxing by pedestrians that enjoy spending time in the open. The main idea is to activate public space even when the weather conditions wouldn’t normally allow it.
This design principle can also be used to redress the problem of urban segregation, and examining the corporatization of public space by focusing on a hostile architecture where architectural elements and the public realm are used to positively control human behavior.

This form of air conditioning focuses on altering airborne information usually not controlled by humans, such as weather, illumination, presence of mosquitoes or pollen, smells, sounds or organized data flow by creating inviting zones that provide users with a certain atmosphere that blocks unwanted airborne characteristics and that is more commonly linked to the insides rather than the outsides.
This device wasn’t designed for a certain target group, but yet we can claim with certainty that, in this time of unwanted political migrations, homeless people could be found enjoying the benefits of newly formed microclimate zones the most.

This device can be described as a mechanism that blurs boundaries between two dichotomies; a mechanism which seeks to create artificial ecologies using natural processes to form a dissolved gradient and to question how specific boundaries materialize, rematerialize, and finally dematerialize in different ways through the use of an adaptive interactive structure.

Next step could also be to create a mobile app that allows people to connect to these devices using their phones and program the atmosphere that surrounds them.