Istanbul is at such high risk for a devastating earthquake that engineers at Purdue University and the Republic of Turkey have come up with a bold new proposal: build a second city.
A second, satellite city would provide immediate refuge to inhabitants of the old city in the event of a catastrophic earthquake and soften such an event’s effects on the nation’s economy.
The animation of the future Turkish city was created in two months by using the TeraGrid, a National Science Foundation-funded research computing grid.
Purdue is one of 11 research institutions that comprise TeraGrid, which is the world’s largest open science computing grid. The movie is embedded below:
The animation was rendered using the TeraGrid Distributed Rendering Environment, or TeraDRE, developed by research scientists in Information Technology at Purdue.
See Purdue University News for more info.
It would be interesting to read peoples thoughts on the output, feel free to post your comments..
To quote the webpage-teaser: “3-D animation rendered by thousands of Purdue computers provides virtual tour of an earthquake-proof city adjacent to Istanbul, Turkey.” If this is the outcome of “thousands of computers” – they should consider to buy new ones. Sketchup would have managed to do a similar animation with far less efforts and power. But maybe this is just a first milestone. I’m not too impressed.
With “Teragrid” power i would expect moving people, waving trees, birds flying… but the two months for modeling and rendering must have left little time to put up detail. On the architectural side is a “painful” experience seeing something that will have no “urban” quality! The architects must have lost the last 15 years of discussion around quality of life in cities and sustainability. With three people and 10 computers i would easily make something similar 😉
Seems just zoning!!!
I agree – it is painful to see all the different zones. I wonder if the good people of istanbul know the awful suburban future that awaits them…
How could you include more multi use spaces to make more efficient use of the land? Could you show incremental simulation that shows how the culture will shape the emerging urban form. How will this new city be financed? How will people living in the old city be relocated? Do they get a lottery ticket and hope to get a nice spot near friends and neighbors? Just curious. Maybe I’m looking to deeply at this.
…it does look like Purdue’s campus…lots of rectangular and H-shaped dorm like structures with similar engineering mall like fountain. The transportation center is lot nicer than Purdue’s airport though from what I remember.
Nice music.