Israeli designer Dror Benshetrit, famous for sleek Manhattan synagogues and chairs Rihanna gets down with in sexy music videos, has again reaffixed his talents, this time on, well, dirt. See, the Turkish Prime Minister wants to build a canal that would displace something like 1 billion cubic meters of soil. What's seen above is a man-made city island Benshetrit and a team of architects designed to solve not just to the dirt quandary/excess, but also, the designer says, a myriad of planning problems faced by the modern-day metropolis. The project, called HavvAda, would supposedly house 300,000 people in six crazy-looking mega-domes. The rather fantastical renderings for the area, which is less than two miles long and only about two-thirds of a mile wide, put forth an intriguing way to plan a city. The mounds serve as a grid for building structures in horizontal rings rather than in clusters of vertical buildings. HavvAda is more a thought experiment than a step-by-step guide to, say, creating an insane manmade island to challenge all others, but, as Benshetrit tells Co.Design, he hopes the ideas will be "a motherboard for other designers and other architects." It's a concept better seen than explained, so check out another pair of renderings below.
· Envisioning The City Of The Future As A Man-Made Island [Co.Design]