Views of Planet City: Urban Foraging

Developed within the Getty Foundation’s cultural initiative “PST ART: Art and Science Collide,” Planet City examines what the world could look like if half the Earth were reserved for nature, and the 10 billion remaining humans retreated into a single megalopolis. To help design that incredible city, artist and SCI-Arc faculty John Cooper pioneered a new architectural look using “foraging” techniques to show what a city built around need, using only existing structures and materials, might look like.

Cooper’s project within the exhibit, titled Planet City Spoils, offered a new aesthetic created from structures found around Los Angeles. Rather than digitally building 3D assets — which would have been prohibitively time-consuming — his team deployed a Leica BLK2GO scanner at chosen locations to capture a building’s structural make-up and materials. Each LiDAR scan was then added to a “shadow archive,” where artists could disassemble and reassemble scans to build digital and physical models using their chosen tools (including Cloud Compare, Rhino, Blender and Unreal Engine).

Views of Planet City: Scanning the Wilderness

While the Planet City megapolis offers an original look at a possible urban future, it also gives us a glimpse at what the rest of the world might look like untouched by human influence. In the associated multimedia project, Feral Planet, SCI-Arc faculty and artist Angelica Lorenzi set out to capture LiDAR scans of some of the most remote places in the world. Those scans then became the basis for a series of short films that dramatized the process of rewilding the uninhabited wilderness.

Lorenzi and a team of students traveled to the rocky coastal region of Piedra Blanca, California; the glacial mountains of Haines, Alaska; the densely forested high desert of McCoin Orchard, Oregon; and the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Monte Alban, Oaxaca. At each location they deployed a BLK360 to capture vegetation, geographic elements and the topography of each site. From there, the scans were uploaded and edited within Unreal Engine to create richly textured 3D assets, including animated models.

The Views of Planet City exhibit opened to the public in September 2024 and appeared at the Pacific Design Center Gallery through January 26, 2025. It remains on view at the SCI-Arc Gallery until February 16.

“The postgraduate programs at SCI-Arc EDGE broaden what an architect is capable of doing in the world by developing new knowledge and expertise,” said SCI-Arc postgraduate programs chair David Ruy. “Despite competing predictions about the future, direct experience with emerging technologies has always been the best crystal ball. I am thrilled to engage in this partnership and can’t emphasize enough how significant this relationship will be for our students and faculty.”

Additional details on the SCI-Arc programs, including the Leica Geosystems scholarships, can be found here.