The Green Dip offers ways to reintroduce nature into our cities, by critically examining architectural strategies and green solutions.

The research group The Why Factory (Delft University of Technology) has produced a series of visualizations of various greened cities (Hong Kong, São Paulo, Dubai and many more). These visualizations respond to the analysis and calculations made for each of the biomes in which the cities are located. The visualizations are accompanied by sets of objective data, from the amount of oxygen that can be produced, via the gallons of water than can be stored, to the number of birds that can be provided with a habitat.

Ultimately, The Green Dip provides an innovative method to calculate the environmental benefits and estimate the costs of greening our cities. The research offers ways to reintroduce nature into our homes and claims that agriculture, forestry and organic production can be the catalyst for other ways of making the metropolis.@en

With (w)EGO: Dream Homes in Density, The Why Factory investigates participatory processes applied to housing design. These processes establish a negotiation among the desires of each of the residents of a housing slab and help determine the design of their apartments. To achieve this, Wegocity manifests a particular interest in the development of a gaming process. This game leverages the specificities of each resident and transforms them into spatial needs. This way, unexpected housing typologies emerge within a truly human-driven residential building.@en

Our current cities are comprised of enclosed, distant and introverted architecture equally isolated from urban life and ecological context.

How might we open these spaces? How might we introduce pockets of space capable of triggering social encounters, multiplying circulation and facilitating the introduction of flora and fauna?

This book gathers the research conducted by The Why Factory into what we term ‘urban porosity’. Using both analogue and digital approaches, our researchers and students explored modes to open up our cities. What might be imagined to open our towers and city blocks? Stepped floors? Public stairways? Grottos in which city dwellers might meet? Could we manipulate building envelopes in order to increase façade area? Might we perforate built volumes and thus create pocket parks?

Each of our hypotheses led to a series of step-by-step interventions that materialized in the form of a vast collection of towers built by our students using LEGO blocks. When gathered together, the resulting army of LEGO towers shows how far we can—and cannot—go. How much can a tower bend before it collapses? At what point does a porous tower become financially impossible to build or maintain?
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Copy Paste is the tenth book in the Why Factory’s Future Cities Series. Copy Paste is an invitation to copy with finesse and skill. Copy Paste understands the past as a vast archive on which we can and must build. Copy Paste is a reader in the art of evolution. Copy Paste is a bad ass copy guide. Instead of mocking the culture of copycats, design could learn better how to make good fakes: fakes good enough to beat their references. Copy Paste explores the tactical evolution of architecture. It brings together discussions on ethical and legal constraints, genealogy, reference, geometry and psychology with art historical evidence that copying might be older –more original even- than originality.@en