"Overcrowding never looked so attractive. As part of the Tate Modern’s current exhibition, Global Cities, on display in the gallery’s vast Turbine Hall, is a series of intriguing “density models”. The plywood structures were created by a team of designers and architects at the London School Of Economics, led by Professor Richard Burdett. The models are shaped around the outlines of each city, with each layer of plywood representing an extra 200 people per square kilometre. We spoke to the team behind their creation…
“To create the models, we calculated a 3D surface representing residential density in each city and then extracted the contour lines for those with Geographic Information System software,” explains the LSE team’s Bruno Moser. “Those were then processed by modelmakers Pipers, cut and assembled.”
Global Cities addresses the major issues facing today’s cities – size, speed, form, density and diversity. It evolved out of a previous exhibition included in last year’s Architecture Biennale in Venice. The density models first made their appearance there, where styrofoam forms ingeniously represented the populations of 12 of the world’s major urban centres. For the Tate show, only four models were made, representing the populations of Greater London, Cairo, Mexico City and Mumbai, allowing a more sophisticated model to be developed." SOURCE
