Natural Fuse: Usman Haque from Architectural League of New York on Vimeo.

(Introduction by Mark Shepard)

For many of us these days, “home” is an idea constructed from several places–we live in social environments and neighborhoods composed of networked fragments that bridge huge geographical distances. Usman Haque talks about such architectural issues with specific reference to Natural Fuse, his project for the League’s exhibition Toward the Sentient City.

Natural Fuse is a city-wide network of electronically-assisted plants that act both as energy providers and and as a shared “carbon sink” resource. The project encourages collective cooperation in regulating energy consumption through a network of “circuit breakers” distributed throughout the city.

Natural Fuse is built on Haque’s Pachube platform, a web service that enables people to tag and share real time sensor data from objects, devices and spaces around the world, facilitating interaction between remote environments, both physical and virtual.

Usman Haque has created responsive environments, interactive installations, digital interface devices and mass participation performances. His skills include the design of both physical spaces and the software and systems that bring them to life. As well as directing the work of Haque Design + Research he was until 2005 a teacher in the Interactive Architecture Workshop at the Bartlett School of Architecture, London.