Buildings can be considered as a kind of basic products which has been massively and continuously produced through the whole human history and always driven by new technologies, especially by industrial revolutions. Now the coming 4th industrial revolution and people’s higher requirement for living/working environment and the shifting process between them demands more flexible social network and working/living/entertaining space. In the mean time, it also enable us to balance the American lifestyle and the need of new era of 4th industrial revolution.
There are many attempts to combine modern technologies and architecture. These technologies are always too complicated to be used widely on common projects, like evidence-based design, space syntax. Maybe the easy way to keep architecture up with the times lies in the industrial thought itself rather than specific technologies.
Specialization produces efficiency is a basic rule of industry. It also works on urban planning and Chicago is a typical example. Specialization of living and working turn Chicago into a city with clear downtown and suburban area . In a smaller scale, it also leads to clearly functional city blocks and grids. With the coming the 4th industrial revolution, specialization works in a more fragmented and disorderly way, since it require smaller function cells and more flexible collaboration among them. This state can be call as high entropy state. For architecture, high entropy will break the boundary of downtown, suburban and boarders of different functional blocks, which can be described as mixed-function. Then mixed functions can bring higher efficiency compared with divided-functions, so the mixed community for all living working and entertainment can be an answer for the urban planning of the city toward future.
On the other hand, the American lifestyle on cars costs much energy and time on the road, a mixed-function community is lower these negative effects. Block systems also makes Chicago very unfriendly for pedestrians and inconvenient for communication of residents in different blocks. By creating a mixed community on the site,a new mixed-lifestyle for citizens and friendly public space also for other visitors can be built up so as to encourage people to communicate and collaborate with each other, then generate a self-supporting community.