Tom van Lint
Complex projects
Student: Tom van Lint
Title: Through the vacuum: A new way of traveling
Studio: AMS Mid City
Semester: Fall 2019
Abstract: Different modes of transportation have always greatly impacted the way we as a society view the world. Until the invention of the steam engine, people were still closely bound to their cities and villages as traveling from one city to another could take up a full day. This made it hard to stay in contact with people in different places, but for example also hard for countries to be governed from a centralized position. When the train was introduced the world started to rapidly develop; different cities suddenly were within an hour’s reach and it became possible for organizations to work at national and later transnational scales.
Nowadays, after years of technological developments, mobility plays a key role within our globalized world. Infrastructure connects people and places around the world and allows for transnational economies to exist. Globalization, and with it industrialization, has brought us a lot, but there are also a lot of negative side effects, such as air pollution. It is therefore of great importance to keep innovating within all professional fields in order to grow towards a balanced and sustainable world. In the field of transportation, Hyperloop seems to be a promising new development, that might eventually partially substitute flying and other modes of transport. It is up to us as architects, designers, and urban planners, to think how these new modes of transport will influence our cities and landscapes so they don’t lead to new forms of congestion and border conditions. Furthermore, in this phase of the development we can still think of a more innovative use of the technology. These are some of the things my graduation project discusses.