Angelos Floros

Presented: 10th International Conference on Architecture and Built Environment, S.ARCH, Berlin, April 4-6, 2023, link

Published: Floros A., "Dronecote", Proceedings of the 10th International Conference S.ARCH-2023, Berlin

Topic: T1 — State of Affairs and Future Visions: Adaptable Architecture

"Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future." — T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton

Dronecote is a house for drones: a free-standing tower, or an extension to an existing building, that hosts unmanned aircraft and the people, logistics and services that come with them. It is designed as an open platform, with the Prefecture of the Ionian Islands as its case study — Corfu, Paxos, Lefkas, Ithaca, Kefalonia and Zakynthos, six islands where distance is the everyday problem.

The project begins in the past rather than the future. Long before the internet, societies ran on birds. Pigeon posts operated in Genoa, in Mysore in 1750, in Brussels in 1818, in Auckland in 1897. In the First World War a pigeon named Cher Ami was awarded the Croix de guerre for carrying messages out of northern France; in the Second, eighty-two homing pigeons were dropped into the Netherlands during Operation Market Garden to fly 390 kilometres back to Britain. In England in 1977, thirty pigeons a day carried laboratory material between Plymouth General and Devonport hospitals. The birds were a node-based network — centralized or decentralized depending on who built it.

They needed housing, and the dovecote is what architecture built for them. In Western Europe it became a symbol of power; in Greece it became the peristerones of the Cyclades, more than a thousand of them documented on Tinos alone, introduced by the Venetians in the fifteenth century and built away from the towns, in the service of decentralized economies. The war produced a mobile version: the B Type bus, converted into a dovecote on wheels.

Dronecote asks what that building type becomes when the bird is a machine. The research is organised in four axes: the construction of the tower; the applications for a drone node-based network; the needs of urban, suburban and regional societies; and the local principles of everyday life, set against a global map. The technology is already in service — Zipline flies blood and vaccines across Rwanda; Virginia authorised commercial drone delivery in 2019 — but the regulations shift constantly, and the architecture has not yet been designed.

As practice-based research, the project holds two questions open: how can a civilization capitalize on the achievements of its past, and how does it feel to live today together with the future?

Dronecote is part of HAL (Hub of Art Laboratories) at the Department of Audio and Visual Arts, Ionian University.

Keywords: Delivery, Drones, Robotic Age, Services, Adaptable Architecture