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It seems to me that we may well be in a position in the internet
where we can create some sort of different architecture somewhere
down the line. But, it seems to me as though the kind they were
talking about was science-fiction, fantasy, fun, more like art,
very expensive, very delicate. How can we have your liquid walls
that are lit up by lights that are controlled by computers that
may be beamed across the whole planet through space? You need to
shelter this thing. It is not going to be out in the hailstones
and the wind and exposed to freezing-it needs shelter itself. It
is not architecture in the sense that architecture provides an artificial
climate in which we can go about our own business, though it is
interesting and sort of fun, like art.
Anyway, there we are at this conference, and Paolo is unveiling
the next phase of Arcosanti. That is cloisters which will have in
them a media lab set up by the guys who organized the conference.
But Soleri is so tuned to this in so many ways that he doesn't have,
for example, his structures completely climate modified to the comfort
optimum of 65 degrees, or whatever it is. He likes people to be
just a little bit uncomfortable so they notice the season's as they
come and go, and the time of day. He has bridges planned connecting
one part of the building with another, in the next phase of construction,
that are for no other purpose than promenading about, enjoying the
view and looking across the valley. He has places to sit on the
tops of the buildings. This, to me, shows that he grasps the pedestrian
environment. This is something really important.
Insofar as the computers come together with Arcosanti in, say,
paying the rent so Arcosanti can help finance it's construction,
that is really great. Insofar as they can do prosaic things like
print out your labels and connect you by email, that is really great
too. Obviously there will be much more sophisticated things that
will come down the line later. All of this has happened in the last
10 or 15 years, which is pretty remarkable that we are even calling
it common or prosaic. But, in fact, this kind of application of
the internet and of computers that is pretty straight forward in
transferring information, is really helpful, and you can put good
content through that.
But, if the content's is not good, or if you are building something
that is, frankly, fun and expensive but doesn't serve anybody, or
possibly even diverts them from dealing with the crisis of the time
which is the collapse of species all over the planet, a change of
climate, and a few other garguantuan problems, then it is questionable
as to whether it is serving very well. You have to ask the deeper
question, "What is the content of the information that is flowing
here? We've got a good system for moving it. Let's concentrate now
on what it is going to move in terms of the information. I would
say, of course, "even more importantly, what is it going to build
that is the home, the environment, that we all live in. Are our
cities and towns going to be harmful to the planet or not?"
Of course, the sprawl, automobile, oil freeway infrastructure is
deadly to the whole planet. We have to get away from that and think
through the pedestrian city very seriously.
What struck me as most profound about the (issues brought up by
the conference) is that you really do need to get the city reorganized.
The ecological city that Paolo was talking about, going way back
to the early 1960s, is a purely pedestrian city that is very, very
compact, like the Indian pueblos of a long time before, like the
villages he knew as a child growing up in northern Italy.
The village structure is a profound invention. Ecovillage people
don't respect it. They take little separate houses, put little solar
greenhouses on them, put in a permaculture garden, and that's fine.
It operates really neat, you get these nice recycled materials,
no toxic outgassing in these structures, and so on. You collect
solar energy and start your crops early in your solar greenhouse,
and, in a lot of ways, it's off to a good start.
But, in fact, the traditional village is built around a street
with zero lot line, very compact, with two to three story buildings
frequently. I took a trip to Nepal this year and saw villages that
were four and five stories high that were two blocks wide and only
six blocks long-way up in the Himalyas. The were very three dimensional,
very compact, with wide, wide open spaces all around them.
Why would someone live like that? Well, you share heat between
buildings, you have very quick access to one another, you can defend
these places when under distress. A lot of things are going on that
make a lot of sense from the social and the access point of view,
energy conservation and preservation of agricultural and natural
land.
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ECOTECTURE: You have said that the design
of cities is a critical or a central issue. How do you position
cities on the biospheric or planetary scale?
RR: Are you saying, how do cities impact
the environment in a way I think is negative or could be positive?
ECOTECTURE: That's one issue. Another
is that now, for the first time in human history, half the population
is living in cities. Obviously, that number is going to increase
very rapidly. When you say that cities are a central issue-why not
ecoforestry, or population control?
RR: Number one, we live in the cities
and we learn from the environments we live in. The cities we build
now teach us some pretty specious notions about life on earth. You
get in the car and you are entertained and lulled and spend money
to get a sense of who you are. Your status or your ego structure
is based on the things you buy. The most expensive, other than your
house, is your car, and that connects you to other houses. The house
itself is isolated and disconnected from the rest of your world.
To get to the rest of your world you need to consume an average
of 500 gallons of gasoline per year for each American person. There
is a problem there. You are spending five, six, seven thousand dollars
a year on your automobile, you're changing the climate, and so on.
Register rendering of a Bridge City (click
on image).
You may be asking, "how does one quantify all this?" There are
some numbers there, but, just in energy alone, the automobile is
responsible for around 21 percent of all (US) energy. If you add
the other motor vehicles you have a total of something like 25 percent.
You think in terms of your separate houses scattered across a sprawl
infrastructure, created largely by cars, each little house uses
its cooling and heating energy once and loses it through the walls
and doesn't share it with any other building. If you put those things
together, transportation and land use... even with the public transit
system instead of pedestrian access you have a city like New York
operating on half the energy per capita as the American average.
That's because it has a transit system, which is much more energy
conserving than cars, and because buildings share heat and cooling
from one unit to another- they have common walls. So, with transportation,
space heating losses, "scatterization" of buildings- now you are
talking around 40 percent or more of the energy load of the entire
country.
Then you throw in some other things, like, "What is it you
are manufacturing?" The fact that the buildings are scattered and
don't share walls means you are manufacturing a whole lot more building.
That they are little and scattered doesn't mean that the total is
little at all, it means that the total is much greater. When you
lay down asphalt in these vast ribbons all over the place and track
the gasoline, manufacture the cars, and put that into the world
you are talking about a large section of your industrial capacity
being for cars and sprawl as well. If you start adding it all up,
I wouldn't be surprised if you find that over 75 percent of the
investment that we make in the world is in the infrastructure that
we build. The rest of it would include clothing and technological
gizmos we enjoy, music, movies, or whatever. That takes a lot of
money. It takes probably a whole lot less energy. Certainly to have
you sitting there listening to a Walkman isn't paving over the agricultural
land, but the built infrastructure is.
So the effect, not just the energy effect, but the pollution load
and the actual covering of the landscape is awesome because of the
way we build. The American
Farmland Trust points out that one million acres of agricultural
land are lost every year in the United States because of sprawl.
Not only that, but 50 percent of the value of America's agriculture
comes from the 12 percent of the land closest to the cities. It
is the richest soil, that is why the cities are built there in the
first place, and it is closer into everything so the distribution
routes are better. Usually, the cities popped up in areas where
the climate was good for agriculture as well, so these sprawled
cities, even in agricultural zones, tend to cover agricultural land.
From many different points of view you have a real disaster caused
by structuring cities the way we structure them. Especially when
you consider that you could structure them so they would take up
very small amount of land compared to that.
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