Hasta La Ideas

In what is surely a sign that the world is getting smaller—or perhaps just an indication that urbanism is a hot topic these days—the last two months have seen Daan Roosegaarde bounce between stages on both sides of the globe. In August, the Dutch designer took a short trip to Copenhagen to accept the INDEX: Design to Improve Life Award for his much-lauded “Smart Highway” concept. A month later, he turned up at Beijing Design Week as a speaker at the intersection of the “Smart Cities” theme and the Guest City program, representing his native Amsterdam. But if his globetrotting lifestyle is partly predicated on his nationality, so too is his work informed by his experiences abroad: back in his homeland for Dutch Design Week, Roosegaarde has put forth yet another visionary proposal… inspired by Beijing’s infamous smog-o-sphere.

Developed in collaboration with a team at TU Delft, “SMOG” is designed to suck pollutants out of the sky by generating a massive electromagnetic field using copper coils embedded in the earth. “It’s a similar principle to if you have a statically charged balloon that attracts your hair,” Roosegaarde notes in an interview with Dezeen.

As the story goes, Roosegaarde drew on his firsthand experience during Beijing Design Week, when he happened to stay at a hotel with a clear view of Rem Koolhaas’s CCTV Headquarters. “I had a good day when I could see it and I had a bad day when I could not see it. On a bad day the smog is completely like a veil. You don’t see anything. I thought, that’s interesting, that’s a design problem.” If he gets the project off the ground, so to speak, it will ‘drain’ a column with a diameter of up to 50–60 meters of the particularly nasty particulate matter; he likens it to ‘drawing’ by erasing smog—I’m imagining something like an inverse skywriter.

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