“Emergent City” is Joseph A. Sarafian’s 5th year Thesis project at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

“By the turn of the Twenty-Second century, a new epoch in global survival had emerged. The human race was no longer concerned with sustainability as a trend, because it could no longer deny the fact that the world was in fact dying. The environmental catastrophes that surfaced in the Twenty-First century became increasingly frequent. Barraged with hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and tsunamis, mankind was at the brink of extinction.

What emerged was a new strategy in the toolset of disaster housing, but more importantly evolution. A swarm of robotic spiders, called the “Arachne” were created to fly to devastated cities and build nests of housing for displaced residents.  Using the logic of a 3d printer, the Arachne deposit strands of material, including Carbon Nanotubes, Porous Alumina, Nanogel, and Micro-Encapsulated Phase Change Material (MPCM), generating emergent solutions that can be rapidly fabricated with minimal macro-scale details. The Arachne understands two fundamental building types, the suspended unit, and the nested unit. Suspended units are hung from a lattice of spun structure while the nested units are built into existing infrastructure that is salvageable. The structures generated are thus a synthesized byproduct of their environment.”