Getting around in the city? We hailed cabs, not Ubers. Autonomous vehicles? “When we talked about those, people looked at us like we were from a Star Trek convention,” says Gerry, a senior project manager in our San Francisco studio and co-director of our Mobility Lab.
And yet Gerry, along with Tyrone, a senior computational designer in our Atlanta studio, conceived of a distributed, integrated mobility system built around autonomous vehicles, or self-driving cars, and a social software application. To say they were prescient—on the cusp of a decade of change in both technology and mobility—would be an understatement.
Their story begins with a competition issued by The Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) and The Architect’s Newspaper to envision a new transportation infrastructure for Los Angeles. Gerry and Tyrone, then both in our San Francisco studio, cultivated a team of other architects and urban designers (dubbed the 510 collective) to develop a submission.
As Gerry explains, the competition prospectus was biased toward a transit solution, which the team felt was inappropriate for a 500-square-mile polycentric city heavily dependent on a freeway infrastructure. “So that’s our design problem,” Gerry explained to a colloquium crowd the following year. “It’s not what we wish it was like, but it is what it is—so why not design for that?”