Part 1- The City

Part 1 involved studying one of the city’s systems with a group. Our group focused on the water system, which we found to be increasingly dearchitecturalized over time. Whereas water infrastructure was traditionally heralded as a beacon of civilization (from the Roman aqueducts right up to Toronto’s R.C Harris filtration plant), water facilities are now typically buried- made into parks and littered with automated shacks.

We proposed that by 2030, decentralization of the water system take this trend to its conclusion. With different water reuse and recycling facilities available at every scale of the city (from the tap, through community and right out to the city scale), the infrastructure will disappear into the city fabric, leaving no dedicated “water buildings” anywhere.

Part 2- The Urban Plan

The second part of the project combined people from each group to “zoom in” from the city level and create a 1km x 1km urban plan that addressed each infrastructure studied- our plan proposed a densification of Bloor & Keele around a new transit hub. Paths were carved into the site by solar conditions, creating a pedestrianized, non-orthoganal, medieval-style community with quick access to rapid transit at the core.

Part 3 – The Building

The third part involved working individually to “zoom in” again and flesh out a building that within a 100m x 100m area of the urban plan. The New Well is a building that houses a community-level filtration facility that exposes the water infrastructure to all passers-by (be they travelling by subway, shuttle or foot).

The buliding is made to illlustrate the 3 layers of the city- the substrata into which the water system has disappeared, the natural strata and the superstrata which humans have built up from the. Because the site is located on a slope, the substrata can be exposed by pressing the landscape down. Then, the strata is brought over top of substrata by extending the natural grade, and superstrata is represented with a form that is lifted above the strata and shaped to blend into the rest of the urban plan.

Voronoi cells are used to generate the substrata form, as they mathematically describe the form taken by water when infused with air bubbles and create a cavernous forms that inspire. The main water feature is a pool, as it is a perfect example water reused under the proposed, new water system. A fitness center is added to complement and complete the program. The superstrata is proposed to be residential space, so as to fit with the urban plan’s goal of creating mixed use buildings throughout the area.

The script allows you to use Google Calendar as a frontend for cron-like scheduling on your Unix/Linux system. If that system is acting as a home server, you’ve suddenly gained an incredibly powerful administration tool that anyone can use to control and automate their environment. On this page, I talk about the technical aspects of the project, but in this post I talk more about the cool implications when looking at the bigger picture of design and interactive architecture.

How It Works

All you have to do is create a dedicated calendar in your Google Calendar and then create events as you see fit. When you create the events, include any commands you want executed at the time of the event in the event description. The script will check in every little while (half an hour default), and if there are events scheduled, will execute the associated commands.

You can have events execute at the end of an events as well, So, you could have an “Lights On” event where the coloured block actually shows when the light is on, rather than needing two events (one to turn lights on, and the other to turn them off). Much better than a list of cron jobs.

Quick Installation

Detailed instructions may be found in README in the tar file, but here is a super-simplified guide for installation under Ubuntu/Debian.

• Download the compressed files to your home directory.



• Open a terminal session and unpack the files with tar -xvf gcalcron-0.1.tar.gz followed by cd gcalcron-0.1Start the installation script with sudo ./setup.sh install



• Enter your Google account name, password and calendar ID when prompted. (The calendar ID is the ID of the calendar that will be checked for commands to run. You can find the ID of the calendar you want to use by looking at the “Calendar Address” field on the its setting page. The calendar settings pages can be found by clicking on “Settings”, selecting the “Calendars” tab.)



• The script will then install and set up everything for you. Once installed, you can run commands on your computer using GCal by simply creating an event in your automation calendar and listing any commands to be executed in the “Details” section of the event. If you want to have commands executed at the end of the event, list those commands after a “—”, as shown below.

For a more detailed explanation, instructions for other distros, instructions on how to set up a calendar specifically for automation and instructions for removal, see the README.

Notes

First off, it’s been a while since I’ve programmed and I taught myself some python just to make this thing. As such, I have made it available under the GPL 3.0 licence (more in the gzip), and I invite better people to adopt it and take it to the next level- more robust, more secure, tighter, all packaged up with better much installer. Please just credit me for the idea, and if you could include a link back to this page or the post page somewhere in the docs, I’d appreciate it.

Secondly, keep in mind that there is a security risk in exposing your computer to the net in this manner. With this script running, your computer will only be as safe as your Google account- anyone who get access to that will also be able to execute commands on your machine. The chances of someone hacking your account, noticing what you’re doing and deciding to be malicious about are probably pretty slim, but they’re there. You’ve been warned.

Finally, please note that I take no responsibility for anything that might happen as a result of running this script. You’re running this script as-is and I take no responsibility for any bad things that might happen. I’ve done my best with it and I’d like to be able to give you a better guarantee than that, but sadly I can’t.

Otherwise, enjoy.

Download the script here.

Show here are the initial sketches to which I committed, some snapshots of the subsequent development and the final renderings.