URBAN CARAVANSERAI

Video Game:

The Arcosanti is a first-person open world survival simulation video game in Mars.  The objective is for the player to survive for 4 years and continue the mission to make a settlement by scavenging and utilizing whatever resources they may find within the Mars, including commodities such as food, water, medicine, and tools such as solar panels, astrodynamics, and a host of other items.  When they survive certain months, they get a parachute from the earth that contains food, water, and tools.   The game describes the human struggles and survive in a difficult environment.

Idea:

In designing a new caravanserai in this context, it was important for me to create an environment where people can scavenge and also being reminded of being a human.  

The techno-present self is only free from constraint in the realm of physical engagement. Bodies have incremental abilities to aim towards perfection, an illusion beyond definition.

While technology, out mental creations, have been evolving at a much faster rate than our physical body, scavenging will only remind us of our most identifiable roots as hunter-gatherer.  200,000 years of foraging compared with the 10,000 years of agriculture compared with the last 100 years of industrialized living compared with the last 100 years of widespread personal computers and cell phones.  How would human settlement look like in 2050, where our mental creations and physical body coexist?