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English Version
Newer York, New
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WIRED January 2000
(Commentary and Analysis)
Dear Dr,
I read this very interesting article on my way back to
Beirut after 14 days of traveling around almost all major cities of Italy and
Southern France. My very first impression is the great feeling of writing again,
about some reflexions, occurred from my university studies. Some of them
unlinked directly to the article, others do, especially after a great collection
of info on some European cities…
My first reaction to the article is that we’re far away
from the described catastrophe or even for the need of rethinking the cities. (I
am talking about European cities I visited; I don’t know what’s going on, for
real, in the States)
What I realized most of my travels and my close look to
European cities is the continuous work and the daily improvement of the living
in these cities. It’s really a daily process not just interfering when a problem
occurs, which makes the radical or rethinking the whole concept of the city
unnecessary, at least for the near future.
Concept unfortunately not applicable in our cities.
When I read the article back, again and again and after
being surprised at first (because of the full domination of technology even on
architects ideas; thing unfamiliar to me as an architect who believes in
creating simple concepts that fit smoothly in its environment and respond to its
users needs. I guess we end up this way because of our unsuccessful, artificial
buildings that didn’t and still don’t coordinate between human uses, cities and
environment), then very interested in ideas and logic of things.
I started to ask myself questions and make comparison
between this article, what we’re living now and the decline of ancient cities
and civilizations:
- Why did old cities died? And others survived? What is the
major factor of its decline? Or progress? ...
- Does all that (the ideas discussed in the article) fit in
the timeline of human civilization?
- Are we trying to prolong the life of an exhausted and
dying cities and civilization?
- Was it a malfunction or just a matter of aged city?
- If it was really a malfunction problem, why didn’t we fix
it before catastrophe?
- If we knew the causes of the problems (heat for example)
why we didn’t stop the causes instead of waiting and trying to live with the
problem…
As we all know, one of the major environmental problems of
this century is heat. This factor feed the recent crisis:
- Exhausted cities
- Deteriorated infrastructure
- Dysfunctional mess
- Over needed resources and energy
- Vital system pushed (by heat) to the limit….
- Communication rescues and security still depending on
resources and techniques that fail in such cases.
All that and more, pushes us to thing that something really
has to be done.
Our imagination and logic thoughts make some kind of a
scene that encloses the whole issue (of this scene):
We have:
1. a Problem
2. Some kind of a power
3. A solution
4. “Human kind” application
The problem here is the heat
The power is represented by economic force, power of money
and investment: “Bill Gates”
The solution represented by the Architect
And finally the client: a suffering citizen…
And here is how the system works:
We have a major problem, the investment is in danger, the
powerful man calls the man with fast and radical solutions, they convince a
desperate coyote and if it works we spread the idea… and the problem is solved…
We have heat problem, malfunctioning city, Bill calls the
brilliant architect who got solutions (clean green cyberfuture…), we find a
couple suffering directly from the problem, and we convince them to test our
ideas…
And once again we are facing the same question:
What city do we need? and on what principles?
All what we lived and the evolution we made push us to mix
market demand, technology and “green”; software and nature; architecture and
organism…
And here we are rethinking the problem of the human
habitat, the environment and the city:
Form / function / material / waste recovery / recycling /
composting…
New concepts, new ways of thinking, new materials and
techniques adopted for the new generation buildings might resolve the recent
problems:
- New concept for energy resources
- New construction and management principles
- The use of old but still unadopted technology
- Application of Microsoft model to housing
- Interactive, automated and the green thinking housing is
the latest solution to adopt
- Buildings to become like organism
- No more fragmented technology, stand-alone boxes with no
operating systems
- Reduction and why not elimination of time and attention
costs of the wannabe-Green lifestyle
- Daily-life needs managed by the web
- Green and natural cities
-Modular Lego-style constructions
- Operating systems to become apparent as the decoration of
the building
- Biotech and natural materials mixed with hi-tech and the
new generation of actual materials
- Recovery waste, recycled and composted materials
- The use of all properties of natural materials and
profiting of it in all product lines (in construction or food chain)
- “Energy Harvest”
Biotech built, oxygen pumping city centers, cybernetic
civilization, clean green cyberfuture…
WOW, what a progress
Still to discuss one serious reality that might freeze all
that or put it in real application and time: Finance
At the end, I would like to add that this article gave me
some great thoughts concerning the architecture of the future and a new way of
thinking to face the problems of the cities, resolved sometimes with small
interferes, some other times with radical and revolutionary solutions.
I still think we’re a little bit far from catastrophe but
such evolution or let me say such revolutionary thinking would be very much
appreciated in some cases and healthier or more comfortable in many others and
surely a better heritage for the future generations.
Wednesday, May 26 2004
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