The Overnight City. Future Explorations of Density and Population Growth in a Diminishing World

Abstract

Land is our planet’s scarcest resource. With all the combined advances in our civilizations and their respective technologies, we have yet as a society to fully understand our precarious situation within our diminishing livable planetary surface. We also live today within a world in constant stages of change. With rapid population growth on a global scale, and its resulting increases in urban density, our available usable living space is greatly becoming smaller and our lives more crowded and condensed. Following upon our urban centers, this thesis aims at exploring the effects of these global phenomena of overcrowding and overpopulation especially within the time remaining before we, as part of a developed society, witness the ground below our feet gradually disappear.

Montreal City is one developed world urban center ready to receive this next evolutionary step in urban growth and it is historically no stranger to architectural experimentation. Expanding the city’s infrastructures through the third dimension will allow greater freedom in the urban sculpture of this future face of our growing urban worlds. This will be the insertion of a new population-absorbing building and urban typology. This will be the return of the megastructure and the revival of an old visionary architectural language that will advance the exploration of the impact of growth and urban concentration.