Jaguar, in partnership with RIBA, recently hosted an event in Mayfair, London to reveal its vision for an urban future as electric vehicle adoption reaches tipping point. 'The Electrified Automotive Future and its Relationship to Architecture' was the subject of the evening, which welcomed a group of London's leading architects, planners, property developers and infrastructure experts.
Ian Callum and a number of architects led by award-winning Jon Eaglesham of Barr Gazetas presented concepts depicting a joint-vision as to what an urban future of automotive electrification could look like.
Today
This example takes a traditional, tired motorway service station and breathes new electrified life in to it. It is based on Forton Services on the M6. When it opened in 1965 Forton Services was a beacon of modernity featuring an up-market restaurant and a sun deck. Today motorway services are often an unpleasant jumble of commercial buildings servicing noisy, polluted motorways. With electrification, much reduced noise and pollution together with increased 'dwell time,' result in such stations becoming destinations with an array of amenities and services including farm shops, gymnasiums, swimming pools and restaurants to give travelers greater options to occupy the time required to charge their vehicles. The trend towards connecting these stations to their local rural and urban community is enhanced by the environmental improvements electric cars will bring. Encouraging people to visit for a variety of reasons, be it for leisure, to work or to trade produce and ideas, they will revive the lost model of the ancient caravanserai.
Tomorrow
This concept is based on one of the UK's most iconic multi-storey car parks - on Welbeck Street, hidden behind Oxford Street in London's West End. Completed in 1970, and originally constructed to provide car parking space for shoppers, the structure symbolises an era of fossil fuel consumption. Re-imagined as a self-sufficient charging plaza, the proposal is to reinvent the existing stock of city centre multi-storey car parks, where owners of electric vehicles who are less likely to have access to off-street parking at their homes, can charge their cars adjacent to good public transport links. The proposal at Welbeck Street makes use of the existing structural grid to support solar photovoltaics panels that will provide clean energy for inner-city electric vehicle owners to charge their cars. The result is cleaner and greener surroundings and parts of the building freed up for retail and leisure use. A public artwork on the side of the building indicates the renewable energy generated to charge the cars within the structure.
Electric City
Reimagining post-industrial wastelands, this concept takes Liverpool's Stanley Dock as an example. Built in 1901, it was once the largest building in the world, but fell into disrepair in the 1980s, symbolizing lost industry and economic difficulty. In this concept, it has been reimagined as a community interchange, helping to rejuvenate the city through the creation of new community facilities and industries based on green energy on redundant sites country wide. Linked to the future of transport and car-free city centers, redundant brownfield sites like Stanley Dock can offer the multi-modal 'last mile' connection to cities, whilst rejuvenating the communities they are situated in.
Electric Future
In this concept, London is a cleaner, healthier city where repurposed, new infrastructure, connected to electric vehicles, has allowed a proliferation of vegetation and green space. Cities across the UK are electrically self-sufficient harnessing solar and tidal power to power the increased number of electric vehicles, both land-based and airborne.
"This study is all about realising opportunity," said Barr Gazetas' managing director Jon Eaglesham. "These four concepts should all be possible within a generation. Electric vehicle successes such as the I-PACE represent a huge catalyst for change. As architects, together with town planners and authorities national and local, we need to embrace this opportunity now, and bring visions such as these to reality, improving experiences, and indeed lives, up and down the country."
Images: Courtesy of Jaguar