Futurecities – urban promise

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Glass traces the path of the utopian city, from the sci-fi visions of the ’60s to Norman Foster’s zero carbon project and a tower to rival Everest. But which holds the key to our survival?

Two major factors have historically contributed to a radical shift in the construction and organisation of cities: the first is a technological advance, the second is a disastrous event. From the aqueducts and public baths of ancient Roman cities to the arrival of train travel in the 19th century, technological advances have long inspired urban designers and architects in their envisioning of the city of the future. This technocratic approach hit its climax in the 20th century with the “futuristic city” proposals of the Modernists of the 1920s and ’30s and the Radicals of the 1960s.

The Modernists, obsessed with the then recent effects of industrialisation and the introduction of private vehicular traffic on the city, rejected the innovations of over two millennia of city-making to fully embrace a new mechanical way of urban living. At a time when automobile travel was novel and exciting the Modernists, led by the French-Swiss architect Le Corbusier, presented at the 1933 Congrès Internationaux D’architecture Moderne (CIAM) the Functional City which separated the functions of the city: Dwelling, Work, Recreation, and Transportation.

With the separation of residential dwellings from the workplace and leisure amenities, residents were forced to travel unwalkable distances. Zoning, therefore, dictated that commuting became an essential aspect of daily life which was exhilarating at a time when car travel was symbolic of personal freedom and the future itself. But could the Modernists have possibly foreseen the dangers that lay ahead by enslaving cities and inhabitants to the car including pollution, depletion of natural resources, an energy crisis, urban sprawl and alienation?

With the dismissal of Le Corbusier’s 1925 Plan Voisin to demolish and reconstruct central Paris as a series of identical tower blocks in a park, the Modernists feared that the historic urban centres they preached against would never be transformed into sparkling futuristic urban delights. World War II, however, gave the Modernists their chance.

In the 1960s, groups of young architects in England, Italy and Japan rose to prominence denouncing the plans implemented by the Modernists and calling for a more systematic and technical solution to the urban overcrowding crisis. Collectively known as the Radicals, they too called for the dismissal of historic precedent in favour of a completely fresh, untested organisation for urban living and took inspiration from the disposable mass-produced goods and the space age of the 1960s just as their predecessors had been inspired by the developments in industrial efficiency and travel including steam liners and the car.

In England, a group of young architects and artists called Archigram focused on the mass-production, consumerism, and throw-away mentality of the post-war city. These ideals were embodied in the proposal of a Plug-In City by Archigram’s Peter Cook who was quoted in a 1964 Sunday Times article saying “after all, my wife wears clothes which will be an embarrassment in two years. Hospitals have paper sheets. Soon it won’t be so shocking to throw away a building we have been using.”

Unlike the Modernists who were eager to replace the historic city centres, Cook proposed to build a linear grid structure around the existing city which would stretch from London across the Channel allowing for the “plugging in” of various disposable capsules to create accommodation wherever desired along the grid. This, he claimed, would allow the individual to take ownership of the city and to change it as would be convenient for the individual at the time. Cities, therefore, would no longer be static but would be ever changing depending on the needs of the individual rather than society.

Though attention was paid to the futuristic transport necessary to cover the great distances of the structural grid, including a monorail system and even hovercrafts, no mention was given regarding how this new city would receive the vast amounts of energy required to operate such a technologically sophisticated system nor where and how the capsules would be produced or what would happen to the waste, including that of the “disposable architecture” generated by such a throw-away society.

And what would be the social, psychological, and cultural impact of living within a disposable city? Not all of the Radicals were seduced by this futuristic disposable dream. In the late 1960s and early ’70s the Italian Superstudio led by Adolfo Natalini, illustrated the banality of such a superstructure and the apocalyptic landscape created as a result of a society’s over-mechanisation and overconsumption, in a series of critical collages entitled the Continuous Monument and Fundamental Acts: Life, Supersurface. With the impending energy crisis, the Florentine group’s dystopian vision of a world dependent on technology seemed only too prophetic.

Currently the United Arab Emirates, which per capita is amongst the world’s leaders of greenhouse gas emitters, has seen one of the highest rates of urban development in the past decade. Backlash against the energy guzzling “glass boxes” and car-dominated urban structure of Dubai has led many to question the feasibility of building a sustainable city in the desert. However, the Arab peninsula has historically implemented highly sophisticated passive climatic control systems incorporating wind towers, air circulation through convection, thermal mass to control heat gain and loss, exploitation of cooling northern winds, cooling water features, elaborate shading devices, the orientation of streets to control wind movement and closely knit urban fabric to shade narrow streets.

Today a new self-sustainable, car-free development to house 50,000 residents is underway in the Arab desert. Designed as an anti-Dubai by Foster + Partners, upon completion in 2018 Masdar City will be the first “zero carbon and waste free” urban centre in the world. Unlike the Functional City and the Plug- In City, Masdar will not rely on private transportation but rather pedestrian and public transport as cars will be banned eliminating a major source of fossil-fuel dependency.

Masdar, Arabic for source, was conceived as a high-density walled city in the Middle Eastern tradition characterised by narrow shaded streets, modern mashrabiya or intricate external wooden screens, and courtyard houses. By drawing from the site’s social, cultural, and most importantly climatic context and incorporating 21st century sustainability technology including photovoltaic panels, wind farms, and waste to energy plants, energy needs can be significantly reduced through holistic design while the remainder of energy required can be produced by the city itself.

For all of its integration of traditional passive and technologically modern climatic control devices, transportation, waste disposal and energy generation methods, by only providing housing for 50,000 Masdar does not address the world’s exponentially growing metropolitan populations. With urban sprawl a significant risk to our natural landscapes and resources, how can the density of cities be increased to allow for the influx of millions of inhabitants while maintaining vast areas of countryside? Eugene Tsui, author of the ‘Ultima Tower’, believes that he has the solution.

The Ultima Tower is a proposed “two-mile high, one-mile wide building” consisting of 120 levels intended to accommodate one million people. With a footprint the size of Beijing’s central business district and serviced by 144 lifts the Ultima Tower sounds as if it could have been dreamt up by Archigram. However, Tsui’s design addresses the energy and waste issues generated by such an intensely dense development relying as much on passive sustainability means as it does on the extravagant engineering feats required to construct such a structure.

Although tower cities as a solution to urban sprawl has been a fascination for architects for the past century including Frank Lloyd Wright’s Mile High Illinois tower in 1956, few had considered the possibility of incorporating passive means of climate control. With the ‘Ultima Tower’ natural ventilation would be achieved through the utilisation of operable windows specially designed to withstand the extreme winds at such high altitudes, daylight would be distributed throughout the extremely deep floor plates by a reflective mirrored core, and the tower’s cooling system would draw lake water throughout the building. However, while there may be the possibility to build such a structure, what would be the long-lasting sociological and psychological effects of vertical urban living?

Throughout history mankind has developed ingenious methods for adapting dwellings and settlements to deal with inhospitable climatic conditions through a technology based on an understanding of nature itself. This knowledge was disregarded in the 20th century as a quest for an international architectural style and solution to the world’s urban problems rendered regional and historical conditions obsolete. Ironically the “futuristic” solutions for urban living, centred on fuel-hungry modes of transport and consumerism as illustrated in the proposals of the Modernists and Radicals, have led not only to the ecological crisis that we are now experiencing but also to many other metropolitan ills including alienation and anti-social behaviour.

In the 21st century, as the world is facing a previously unimaginable ecological disaster, designers and planners are revisiting the passive sustainability methods of urban and architectural precedents. Only by integrating newly conceived technological devices with traditional principles can we achieve a truly sustainable city. Many “perfect” cities have been dreamt up over the ages but often are a manifestation of only one person’s ideals and in many cases neglect everything we have learnt about human nature over the last several thousand years. If a democratic and sustainable solution can be found, the results could change the future of our species. Let’s hope this is the city of the future.

by Karin Templin

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From the Glass Archive – Issue Three – Promise