Image courtesy of the University of Miami School of Architecture
The project, which is being designed by UM SoA’s Responsive Architecture and Design Lab (RAD-UM Lab), will be built next to the Yucatán Science and Technology Park (YSTP), established by the National Autonomous University of Mexico. RAD-UM Lab specializes in technology-based designing and the “internet of things,” everyday objects that can collect data and connect to modern tech. — The Miami Hurricane
The University of Miami School of Architecture continues to experiment in the realm of responsive architecture, this time at an urban scale. Zenciti is a proposed “smart city” to be located in the Yucatan Peninsula where the gathering of data will play a prominent role. Information technology will be embedded into the inner workings and infrastructure of the project allowing for potential opportunities to monitor urban issues such as traffic patterns, transportation, pollution levels, and energy consumption. Smart City models are curently in use in Europe with examples such as Amsterdam and Barcelona. Zenciti has the potential to be one the first examples in Latin America.
This initative is a collaboration between the University of Miami’s School of Architecture, Center for Computational Science, and College of Engineering, as well as the Yucatan State Government’s Information Technologies Innovation Cente. The UMSoA has aggressively been expanding research into responsive architecture under the leadership of Dean Rodolphe el-Khoury, who is an advocate for internetworking or the “Internet of Things”; the connection between information technology, responsiveness, and embedded tech into architecture and other physical devices. el-Khoury continues to guide the school into this pedagogical focus through different enterprises: the development of the RAD-UM Lab a non-profit research lab dedicated to this research, recent installations and commissions developed in the community, and bringing in visiting critics such as Vicente Guallart to hold studio and seminar topics on these issues.
