Fuller’s earth

Foster and Partners’ zero-carbon city of Masdar is moving along faster than you might think, and one rather racy aspect of it is a Dymaxion-inspired transport system

Words Hugh Pearman

Images Nigel Young/Foster + Partners

You might have thought, when it was first announced, that the new zero carbon, zero waste city of Masdar in Abu Dhabi was one of those beguiling concept designs doomed never to see the light of day, a vanity project for the Emirs. Combining technologies ancient and modern to reduce ambient and perceived temperatures and balancing energy generation and usage, with a transport strategy based on a park-and-ride principle using automated driverless electric taxis, its heart was obviously in the right place, but would it ever get built?  Those who attended Lord Foster’s Annual Discourse at the RIBA in October will know the answer. There on the screen was the first completed chunk of Masdar, plus the launch fleet of cyber-taxis (also called podcars, with the whole system known generically as Personal Rapid Transit or PRT). There was also something more, and unexpected: a film showing a new semi-auto urban car based on a Buckminster Fuller ‘Dymaxion’ concept.  What, I wondered, was going on? Foster and his co-director David Nelson had, it turned out, been having fun.

We all know, I hope, about Foster’s Bucky background. He was a hero to that generation of architects (Nick Grimshaw is another disciple, as the Eden Project amply proves). Foster and Fuller collaborated on various projects: the tensegrity-structure ‘Climatroffice’, for instance, is what the Willis Faber building could have been, had the technology of the time been up to it. And as we know from recent press coverage, Foster has had a replica Dymaxion car made from the original drawings and study of the only surviving original, complete with the same reversed 1930s Ford running gear that Fuller used. With its single steerable rear wheel it can turn on a sixpence, it’s the grandaddy of all MPVs, but it’s not for the fainthearted, particularly at speed.

Since David Nelson has quite a transport-related portfolio (Canary Wharf Underground station, North Greenwich Transport Interchange, Bilbao Metro, McLaren Technology Centre, and the ongoing Florence High-Speed Railway Station) and helped direct the Dymaxion reconstruction project, it made sense to call in at the Foster office for a chat.  I could understand the hobbyist appeal of building a replica Dymaxion car (which for all its retro-futuristic looks was made in very much the same hand-crafted aluminium-on-timber way as a Morgan). But what on earth is the connection with Masdar?

Nelson is an affable chap, known to be a good boss, one of the long-term co-directors with Foster and joint head of design in the practice alongside Spencer de Grey. Crucially, his training was in industrial design rather than architecture – not that this makes any difference in the Foster studio, and the RIBA made him an honorary fellow in 2002.  The conversation starts with Masdar in general – which he sees as a potential university-led centre of clean-technology excellence, rather as Stanford University in California became for Silicon Valley. ‘It went from fruit fields to the centre of the US economy in about 100 years.’ Moreover, he says, there is a global need for new cities: ‘In India alone, because of population growth, they’re going to need something like three and a half times the urban area that they currently have. And what about China? There’s going to be a need to build places from scratch.’  So Masdar is a prototype for the carbon-neutral city of tomorrow. And transport is key to getting the carbon emissions down.

‘We looked at the transportation right from the outset,’ says Nelson.  ‘The Masdar Initiative was very keen that the footprint of the city would be effectively carbon-neutral. That meant that normal car transport was out, because back then – three or four years ago – that was all that was available. So we developed the concept of keeping conventional cars out on the perimeter, and then linking via the PRT system to the city’s buildings. We knew the PRT would need development to become a city-wide network. The difficulty is not in the vehicles moving around, but in the control system. What’s the grid like, what’s the frequency?  Because it’s a mobility plan, it’s locked into what happens on the new ground level above. So – how far will people walk, when it’s hot and humid? How can we bring the buildings together to provide a different sort of circulation in the streets so that it’s cooler, with a natural flow of air?’

Today, the first fruits of that thinking are there to be seen. The Masdar Institute with its residences is there, solar power is on tap, and the fledgling city uses a pilot-scheme transport system of 13 vehicles, each seating four people, as developed by the Dutch-based company 2getthere. It deploys an invisible guideway of buried magnets and a wireless command system. It’s the most significant example yet of a true PRT system in use. Not that it has to go very far: in this early phase, as Nelson says, it acts purely as a shuttle between the centre and the conventional-vehicle parking garage on the edge. As Masdar develops – it’s slowed down a lot from its original ambitious programme, and won’t be built out until at least 2030 – more routes will be added, with the control system being expanded phase by phase. A new phase is about to start. The PRT element is part of an overall public transport strategy also including a tram and metro system.

Fine – but where does Bucky come in?  This stems from the growing awareness that automated-vehicle technology is changing rapidly, with the real prospect of individual private cars being controlled as they move. With satellite navigation now commonplace, it’s a logical next step, and would be a real benefit in smoothing and speeding traffic flow through congested areas. Foster himself is comfortable with the implications of this – as he says, if you are a commercial pilot your course and your every movement relative to other planes is tracked and controlled, so why not do something similar for the dangerously hurtling projectiles of cars? Nelson and his team thus set out to investigate how a car from elsewhere might lock onto a city’s control system – in this case, Masdar’s – as it approached. The Emirates are relatively small, they can take a whole-country approach. They had to start somewhere, so somewhat nostalgically they chose a previously unbuilt Bucky Dymaxion design of 1943, the D45. Unlike Foster’s enormous Dymaxion cruiser, this was conceived as a fat little urban runabout seating four abreast, though with an extending rear wheel to give a longer wheelbase at speed. What Nelson’s team has done is update the concept for today – slimmer, with electric motors in each of the three wheels, and a built-in guidance system that can take over when necessary. When on auto-control, the steering wheel folds itself away. It’s just to stimulate thought – Nelson admits that any electric car with the same guidance system would do – but the distinctive silver D45 blobmobiles would advertise their purpose admirably. ‘It still looks very contemporary, and the manoeuvrability is very good,’ he says. Safe guided cars would not need the heavy crash protection of conventional cars, so reducing size and energy consumption and extending their range significantly.

As Nelson says: ‘We realised that the technology of electric cars was being pursued on a much larger scale than we originally envisaged.’ Google, for instance, has recently successfully tested a prototype driverless car that works on normal roads. The PRT with its dedicated vehicles could become redundant in a society with mass ownership of such electric vehicles, especially if they were charged from solar power stations (as at Masdar) or other alternative sources,  so being genuinely emissions-free. That, coupled with forthcoming auto-guidance technology which will make Google’s effort less Heath Robinson, is a game-changer. Masdar’s undercroft could become a general – but controlled – below-grade roadway and parking system, for electric freight transport as well as people-carriers.

With the technology developing so fast, it clearly makes sense not to over-commit yourself to any one, possibly obsolescent, system. Metros and tramways are mature technologies, but the driverless car is still at the about-to-break stage. ‘It’s going a lot quicker than we ever imagined,’ reflects Nelson. ‘The pressure is on to find alternatives to oil in personal transport. That brings choices, freedom – all the things that the conventional car brought.  In a few years’ time, if the car is clean, all we’ll need to fit to it is the control electronics.’

It’s not tomorrow, or even the day after, but it’s within reach. And if Foster and David Nelson have anything to do with it, it’s as likely that the first mainstream outing of tomorrow’s car will happen in Abu Dhabi rather than California, and Masdar’s early PRT cars could end up in museums like Bucky’s Dymaxion car. All this makes transport planning in the new cities of tomorrow somewhat fluid.  We live, as they say, in interesting times. ‘It’s open-ended,’ says Nelson, ‘You get a bit excited about it.’