Yaqiong Song & Yuyu Hu: La Défense is the human-controlled economic center of Paris. However, with the spread of the COVID-19 and the deterioration of the environment, more and more people continue to work from home after the pandemic, and many companies have moved away, which has led to an increase in building vacancy rates and a trend of decentralization in recent years. This phenomenon inspired our imagination and exploration of the forest invasion plan, the purpose of which is to introduce forests into the city. Forests will bring a new natural ecosystem, thereby improving the living environment and revitalizing La Défense.
“Forest Invasion Plan” rethinks the relationship between nature and ecology from an ecological perspective, and explores how to let nature guide humans to inhabit the city, making the city an organic part of the natural ecosystem and realizing the beautiful dream of ecological utopia.
Previous studies have shown that nature will gradually spread and occupy cities without interference from human activities. So we imagine that if the vacancy rate reaches its peak in a specific area, the land without human interference will gradually give way to the forest. After 100 years, forests lead mankind towards a prosperous symbiosis of an ecotopia. Here, Artificial Intelligence is used to simulate and predict the expansion of forests in La Défense and the gradual erosion of buildings within a hundred years without human intervention. After that, we added the parameter of "human beings" to conduct another round of simulation experiments to find a state that is conducive to the symbiotic development of humans and nature.
The simulation results show that nature expands steadily without human disturbance and erodes the buildings while bringing in a whole new ecosystem. In a hundred years, the results of the spread of the forest in the city serves as a premise and a basis for how humans inhabit the area. Here one can grow plants in the framework of the interface between architecture and nature and extract the electrons from the plant growth process to generate electricity. People can also redefine function in architecture.
Overall, the project tells a century-long story. The intention of the research is to explore the possibility of nature leading human construction to create an ecological utopia, which provides guidance for the future of the real life. At the same time, the design innovatively uses artificial intelligence as a tool to simulate and predict natural growth.
