Wellington

The radial design of Wellington puts the central public and commercial spaces on the mountaintops and connects them to the residential neighborhoods below. A walk through the central district of Wellington in 2100 reveals breathtaking views. A series of long bridges span the surrounding valleys, linking adjacent neighborhoods like a series of connected islands above the dangerous flood zone.

Building typologies change based on locations. At the top are taller structures for vertical density, and on the ground level are public and park spaces. At the rooftops, sky bridges create further connectedness.

The form of these buildings also directs Wellington’s strong winds from pedestrian zones at the ground level. Along the hillsides, landscapers are partially submerged in the ground. In some cases the building forms cut away to bring daylight in, while other buildings employ a series of helio-follicles that follow the path of the sun, funneling daylight into the interior through fiber optic cables.
The built-up portion of the site only occupies the side of the mountain that gets exposure to direct sunlight. The valleys, considered a dangerous flood zone, are left more or less untouched.

Wellington 2100 is a compact megacity, organized as a series of urban grafts to its especially rugged and mountainous terrain in order to accommodate a growth in population to more than 10 million. The new hyper dense zone is located in Ngauranga Gorge, presently a suburb north of the current city center.
Areas such as this one, at higher elevations and previously underutilized, are ideal for 2100, since they are free of coastal flooding, and are thus able to provide a home for parts of the city that lie within Wellington’s tsunami evacuation zone. In 2015, the central business district containing New Zealand’s Parliament, the head government offices and the majority of New Zealand’s foreign diplomatic offices, were located in a relatively flat and low-lying area within this zone. Wellywood, Wellington’s highest concentration of film production studios, located in the suburb of Miramar, lies within the evacuation zone and has also been relocated to our new site.

The transportation routes in the new district work as a well-integrated hierarchy. From the top of the mountain, one can take the Superbus4 that runs along the long bridges spanning between neighborhoods, to funicular trams also known as inclined plane or cable railways, which bring passengers up and down the hillsides. Another tram wraps the hillside at its midpoint, running along the ‘stacked Rambla’, a wider band dedicated to pedestrian and bike traffic with public transportation and private vehicles beneath.

At the bottom of the hill the funicular tram meets a high-speed bus line, which then takes passengers to other parts of the city. ‘Furry bridges’ that span the valleys provide a direct connection between two adjacent hilltops. These bridges are equipped with follicle-like extrusions which are actually piezoelectric disks wrapped in a carbon fiber flexible casing. When air moves the follicles, energy is created, allowing Wellington to make use of one of its most abundant energy sources, wind. The valleys form a natural wind tunnel by concentrating wind speeds as air moves past the follicles, creating a high intensity of energy generation.

Vertical axis wind turbines are hung off of the bottom support structure of the bridge, capturing yet more wind energy.

Additional wind-turbine farms are located on the dark side of the mountain. These wind energy sources are meant to supplement the more robust supply of energy arriving in batteries from Wellington’s sister city, Manila. Wellington’s protected harbors make it an ideal place to receive renewable energy from Manila by ship or seaplane.