Dronesphere Colloquium and Workshop are made possible through the Howarth-Wright Fellowship at the University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design.
Dronesphere Colloquium and Workshop are organized by Simon Rabyniuk, one of two recipients for the 2018 award. Rabyniuk's project, Dronesphere: Urban Skies, undertakes a transhistorical analysis of Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural "aerial imaginary," for which his interest in powered flight contributed to speculative proposals for decentralized patterns of urbanization.
In 2000 the fellowship fund was created, at the University of Toronto, to commemorate the life and contribution of architectural historian, former Dean and Professor Emeritus, Thomas Howarth.
The Howarth-Wright fellowship enables a graduate Architecture student, at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, to travel in support of an independent research project that includes a public presentation component.
The fellowship specifically supports present-day inquiry into the status, positions and contribution of Frank Lloyd Wright through his building, speculative projects and writing. Historically, Taliesin West the home of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and former home of the Frank Lloyd Wright Archive, provided a center of study for the fellowship recipient. More recently, with the transfer of the archive into the joint custody of MOMA and the Avery Library, the fellowship now encourages fellows to engage a wider constellation of sites.
1. Frank Lloyd Wright, Gordon Strong Automobile Objective (1928), Detail including dirigible and dirigible docking mast.
2. & 3. Frank Lloyd Wright, "The Living City" (Circa. 1958), with plan detail of one of two 'helicopter taxis.’
3. Reno-Stead Airport looking North across runway 8/26. One of seven “Unmanned Aerial System Traffic Management Pilot Project” (UPP) Test Airports. Reno-Stead facilitated three out of four of NASA's UTM-TCL Tests(UAS Traffic Management - Technology Capability Levels). Currently the fourth test has not been scheduled. The first three are establishing protocols for inhabitation of urban air space by cooperative and non-cooperative drones.
5. Dronesphere, oblique model (2018). Onyx at First, DC’s tallest building constructed in the ‘oughts, offers a site of speculation for architectural artefacts for a future-tense person to person drone delivery service. These speculations graft onto existing structures providing maintenance, storage and deployment spaces for delivery drones.
6. Dronesphere, Diagram (2018). Elmer Sperry, investor of the ballistic gyroscope, inspects an instance of its installation circa 1911. Sperry's invention enabled remotely plotted flight in early 20th century. It did so by automating tasks previously performed by pilots such as righting the plane.