Mhm. Mhm.
The proposed designs of Architect Palace Hillary for extremely high and
complex cities. Are colleges, as he calls them. They seem at first glance
, wholly unrealistic for our times with new housing being demanded
constantly, were simply spreading out across the landscape everywhere. But
at what point do we stop and undertake the titanic job of attempting a
structure several times higher than the Empire State building, which would
integrate all of the functions of a city and be surrounded by unspoiled
nature for that is basically what an archaeology involves. So, Larry is
building a very modest test archaeology in my home state of Arizona. Now,
a few years ago, he proposed a truly large one to the state of New Jersey
for their famous Meadowlands area. The chairman of the Meadowlands
Commission at that time, was paul Ylva soccer, now professor of public
Affairs and Urban planning at Princeton University, a man with wide
experience in government and environmental development work. Follow when
last we met, you left quite an impact on me. I don't know if you recall,
we were meeting in New Jersey when I had the responsibility of developing
the Meadowlands, I had to face the legislature to get money. It had to be
very practical. And at the time though, the impact that you made was with
an idea. Mhm. Subsequently, I've been senior models and reading the book.
I have a little difficulty
seeing the idea behind some of the words and the models and I wondered
since I think the idea is so important, whether you feel sometimes that
the model gets in the way very often, it seems that the models present
themselves a little too strongly, which means that people are impressed or
depressed by the models. And so the idea gets lost. And I guess that
wasn't a fault of mine in trying to give body to an abstract idea. The
abstract idea which at least you're left with me is in contrast to what
the americans have been doing, what much of the world is now doing instead
of sprawling out, we must begin concentrating and must begin to put
together all the functions that make up really quality living, which we're
trying to get in the city. You look at some of the models. Do you think
about the vulnerability of a mega structure such as that too internal
sabotage. I would hate to be have to do the urban renewal of a city like
that. Well, there is a there is an implicit fragility in anything which is
very lively I guess. And on the other hand, we have to we have to be able
to put enough redundancies and enough auxiliary elements so that in a
moment of crisis, we are not faced with total disaster, but in but at the
same time, I feel that any large syria today is prone to disaster. I mean
, it is a disaster really that stretched into I think you'll find many new
Yorkers or Los Angelenos agreeing with you on a crowded highway when
they're going to work because certainly I think for many of us now we
spend so much of our time in a car or in crowded situations moving from
one thing that we want to do to the next thing that we want to do. Yeah.
And and the price we're paying. It's not just the price in hours and and
let's say the price of the car. It's really an endless list of price tags
that we don't consider. Well the highway network, the network within the
city itself for streets and roads, the storage of this big machine, the
cost of the machine, the maintenance of the machine. It's really a social
and cultural price that we're paying, which is staggering. I think you're
really criticizing what we have your critic, aren't you? Well, I feel that
I have the right to criticize. If I if I can, if I have a hope of bring in
offering an alternative, I wouldn't like to criticize if it's just a
demolition performance that has been done. It's easy to criticize what we
have now, as I mentioned myself legislatures, the taxpayer, We already
have cities which are way behind and the ability to pay for what they have.
It staggers my imagination sometimes when I think how can we discard or
leave the investment that we have to move to such a radically new concept
, I would be the last person to suggest this kind of thing if it's true
that we are going to build the equivalent of one city per month, A lot of
, well 100,000 people, something that per month. I think that we shouldn't
even begin to think that we have to discard what we have and that's very
precious. No matter badly organized and are poorly is working. The point
seems to me that when we do something new and we do it every day, then we
did this, we should really try to put a new idea, possibly go to the roots
of the problem and try to be radical in the best sense of the world. How
close would Manhattan come to your concept if you took the automobile out
pretty close. The, the only thing that in a way we should take the streets
out also because the street is, is as much as a dividing elements of
modern and then a connective element in the city really, it divides and
divides and divides constant. So what you're really saying is that the
city surrounded by the shell is three dimensional. You should have access
from one point to the other very quickly. Yeah, that's right. It's not
only one level of two or three levels that are going to make the
difference. It's really the ability of connecting everywhere within the
city, no matter how how high you are. No, you are. So that you don't have
only a network or overlap of two or three networks. It's a, it's a
constant flow that you can, you can obtain within the city. And this is
what makes the city work really because the logistics, it's it's at the
heart of the physical problems on the instrumental prob you might be
surprised to hear that. I might say you're very practical. Oh, I'm
absolutely, well, I make a distinction between the practical and the real
and I'm very attached to that. I think that I, I feel I'm realistic and I
feel that sometimes we become so practical that we, we live in a utopian
kind of world. Things that you some of the things you're talking about are
coming. It's interesting to see how we stretch bit by bit to achieve what
you've tried to put into one model. I can give you some examples. You've
already referred to the fact that America must build At least a new city
of 300,000 every year and keep moving through until the year 2000 if we're
to accommodate all our people. And I noticed that the concept of new
communities, which was visionary in this country just a few years ago is
now probably going to be laid out as national policy already is nationals.
Then I heard the other day that someone has suggested to President Nixon
That we use the resources of unemployed engineers 50,000 of them now to
begin designing in effect a utility corridor, which would link the
sprawled populations along the seaboards that we now have. I really think
that we need a little more of the reasons why we are doing those things
and maybe those are, they have to be a little philosophical or conceptual
, because if we know why we're doing things, I think we might be able to
do them better. What strikes me is that we have vague ideas why we do this
and might we do that, but when you dig into it, we remain. You know, we
are in in quicksands, quicksands. I feel that the basic concept is very
sound that I have, and it's really pointing at this direction and that's
what makes me optimist optimist. One of the things that
really remains as a haunting question to me is whether you are not trying
to go back to the intimacy of a greek city or a european city, a medieval
castle town with populations that are now up in the millions and billions
of people. Can you possibly get intimacy even with your kind of
miniaturization? Well, I think intimacy, it has very much to do with
number. And as you say, when you're living with a great number of intimacy
, it goes out of the window, but there are many institutions and many
activities which don't need intimacy. They need, they need to be in a
contest, which is somehow almost breathtaking in a way, and anything that
has to do with the urban activity has something to do with extra intimacy.
So we should be able to define the intimate space with its own functions
and then immediately at the doorstep of this intimate space defined spaces
which are less and less intimate according to what the functions performed
is. And this is not obtainable. I think by trying to to speed up traffic
as we do now. We can only achieve it by cutting distances because then we
reintroduced man as a bypass as a person, as an individual with two legs
that can enjoy to go through different environments. What is reaching a
certain point that he is interested in and this is the introduction of the
of the biological, let's say individual is going to define some of the
scale the humaneness in the scale of the city which now is totally gonna
you're in Los Angeles and unless you sit in this car you are, you are
defeated. I mean you cannot operate as I was thinking about this
conversation and going through your things again, I kept thinking of
policy. Hillary sitting in the back yard, we're the Los Angeles suburban
yet the suburbanite is there. He's managed to get his little park in his
backyard. He's got his restaurant in his grill when he wants music, he
puts on a record and he gets the best orchestra of the world. Then he can
show his home movies, the television set brings him every politician and
without having to walk even across the street, he has all the culture that
you seem to want physically to compact. I think that if we if we go to the
extreme which we have to go to in a way to understand what the problem
might be is that this individual and its own family might end up by being
what I would tend to call a naked mind in the sense that he might deprive
himself of the actual experiencing of life because I can watch on tv as
many killings as as I can take and still not understand what what death is.
But if I if I watch an animal dying or if I butcher an animal then really
start to understand what life and death is a little more. So if we
extrapolate, I think that with this form of synthetic information which is
very important for for learning as a learning device, but only with this
kind of information we tend to produce human beings which are very
abstract and possibly very dangerous to themselves into society. I think
that the environmental information has to be very substantial because it's
the one that really brings in blood and tears and sweat and an informed
society but not compassionate. That's right. Yeah. Um because we can say,
well we take a child, we put in a in a white box, we plug all sorts of
information into it and we can do it now And what we we end up maybe
within 10 years to have a genius, they're a genius that is going to be a
monster because it cannot distinguish between good and evil between
compassion and and non compassion and and it's it's just going to make
rational decisions which are not human decisions. We we are we are far
beyond the rational at this point. You've taken to great risks. One of
them I think is two risk and idea in a form like this. I have a feeling
that you knew what you were doing because with the shock value of the form
at least people are broken loose in their minds. Well, yeah, that that was
the the original idea. The concept is one this complexity, miniaturization
Behavour and then I was trying to illustrate it. So I developed 40 or so
different schemes trying to so to show that once you accept the concept,
that doesn't mean that you are going to accept this solution and that
solution, that there is an infinite variety of possibility built into it.
Maybe I went too far with that or maybe I tend to be a little too strong
in my visual definitions, I don't know, you might get the the budding
politician to join your people out in Arizona listen to you for a whole
summer and then right the message, he would like to get across to the
legislature, that would be great, which, well, I wanted to refer to what I
think is your second risk, most people that I know who come up with an
astounding idea, verbalize it. Maybe go so far as to give it pictorial
form, but very few go out and say, all right now I will start building.
Didn't you feel, don't you feel rather lonely with the risk you're taking
out in Arizona yes and no, in a way we've been doing that in a very small
scale for a few years. So I know a little what we're getting into just a
little, but you have only one life to live, so you better you better get
busy and try to take, take some chances. I'm curious to know how it's
going and it's going very slowly, but it's going in the sense that every
year we are putting a little more effort and a little more ability to,
well a little more cash, let's say. But we are now stifled by the fact
that we have to pay for the land, which is a big burden, but we are, we
are going to have more and more participants, mainly young people that are
willing to put up some cash and some sweat here you are with talking about
mega structures and yet without any cash flow that I can see without any
new community support from the government or foundation grants you're
beginning to build, well, it might be a responsibility or might be vision
. I don't know. We'll see what went through if I may ask it's presumptuous
question, What went through your mind as you looked at that piece of land
, you have the idea you want badly for that idea to be communicated and
then comes making it concrete. Can you describe when you first looked at
that land and what, what went through your head? Well, I like very much
that land. I mean the kind of landscape there is in Arizona so
independently from what I would do of it. I like it very much. But I
always feel that somehow I like much very much the land when I can
manipulate it in the way, when I can intervene because what I cannot
change in a way it's not doesn't belong to me. I don't feel comfortable
with it. So I felt that that land was very apt to accept what I was going
to try to do with it At the same time. I I think I have a great respect
for the land. So that instead of taking those 800 acres and transformed
into something that could be maybe better, but probably will not be better
than what it is now, I take a little corner of it, 1% corner of it and I'm
trying to build a little man made environment on that corner so that the
people living there will still enjoy that kind of vastness. I'm curious as
, as one who is fond of many aspects of traditional Japanese culture. Do
you see in Japanese tradition, the miniaturization you're talking about, I
would say yes. Mhm and the ability of the japanese to really make so much
out of so little and I hope they are able to keep that I'm afraid, I'm not
, I'm afraid they tend to become very much like us. Somebody let the
automobile loose in japan and europe and now Russia and china and I
remember talking to several soviet economists who said that they would
like to stop the automobile but they can't, not even with Russian power.
So that's loose in the Japanese tradition though it may well be that the
United States is going to come to it. Our concept is to sprawl. We still
are settling the frontier, We like to express our psychological needs in
terms of space. I like to have two walls an acre, two acres between myself
and my neighbors arguments and yet I began to see how we recognize most of
the most of the homes that are now being built are multi family structures
were going to a different culture.
Well, I think there's a loneliness and a deep deprivation really in, in
suburban
structure that it's slowly coming coming about. I mean we are realizing
that it's not as golden as we as we thought it was. I think it becomes
really, really, do you see in the commune movement in this country only
only as a very important transient situation for young people, Not, not
much more than that because they seem to be rejecting the the ability of
technology to really free ourselves. If we are going to be using it in the
right way. So it's it's there is a nostalgia in it that I think it's not
very, very healthy. What would have happened if the city had come to you
and said, we want to move from what we are to what your conception is. How
would you go about it? Well, evidently that would take a little bit of
time to think about. But when you are faced with with the proposition of
this kind, you have to set up your own teamwork and and you know, start
from from the beginning, which is quite a long way back. And so it will be
years of work and hundreds probably of people involved in it and so on.
But I would still try to keep those, those tenets in mind because I think
they are very, very basic.
But I wish that will happen. You would you would like to have a city as
your patron. It isn't the medieval days anymore. I'm not sure we have
anybody who's capable of giving urban renewal's, you know, we still do do
them one way or the other or at least we think that we should do something
about those things. One advantage would be that instead of dislocating
masses of population in this case, you would you would need to dislocate
only a very small amount of people because the structure itself is so so
small. And then once the structure begins to be usable, it doesn't have to
be finished, usable. Then the population that hasn't been removed would
start to seep into it so that instead of having two dislocations, you
would really have one dislocation from the from the old that has been
decided should go into the new. So that would be a great accident. What
would happen? I think one of your principles is that a person should have
immediate access to open space, which I think you would first of all
define his privacy and the privacy, but it is often reflected in open
space, the ability to walk. Mhm, Which is very difficult right now. I was
walking down the freeway, But with the numbers that you've compacted into
your communities, what would happen if half the community decided Sunday
morning at 10:00 to go out and take a walk, I think it would be crowded.
You know, they would say the hub of the whatever these centuries, but not
necessarily congested in the sense that would be an ugly happening because
for one thing you would be dealing with with an open landscape and you
have roadways and so on getting into the countryside, but a number of
those people could go and say underground and move out to mass
transportation systems or even private transportation because I think if
the car means something is is as as an instrument of leisure. So I would
say that possibly the car should be stored there so that people can use it.
That I think that if you can somehow eliminate the coercion that we are,
we are compelled into now because of survival, then this moving in and out
of the city will not be as a mass as we might think of because knowing
that the land is available every time, every moment of the day, every day
of the week means that possibly I decided to go down now and you decide to
go down later and so on. So you might have to stagger your elevator ships.
Well, yeah, those things I think should be done and can be done. But the
friends of the difference between the complexity of the car and the
simplicity of the elevator is an indication of where the right thing is
and the efficiency of the elevator against the deficiency of the car. It's
again an indication that the elevator is an answer. Very good answer. You
really aren't going beyond present present technology, are you Not
necessarily, no, because we are building friends of those 2000 New York
each other which are abundantly within the limit of I mean any of the
ideas here, it's abundantly within those limits. Give and take a few of
them one of the things. Again, when you see that structure your mind
immediately begins, I think going in the wrong direction, it starts moving
towards technological problems that are associated with this or whatever.
Am I right? And this is why I really don't want to spend much time going
after the technical details or some of that sort of thing. Am I right in
assuming that you're really making a commentary and what on the, on the
society that is built on distance from each other? The failure to have the
wholeness of the city represents and that you're trying to give first
ideal for him to the need to bring those together and then you've tried
your hand as an architect in some physical expression, I think so, he put
it so well that I
had a feeling almost in a way that that you ought to have a co author for
some of the people I have to live with, who might just take that book and
say Romanticism dreamer or whatever and not listened to follow salary
because paul is really saying something which is I think most relevant to
our conditions power. It's thought that to be practical, you have to be
incremental, which means one little bit more to what you are presently
doing. If you keep adding one little practical bit to what we have, what
do you see down the long road? Well, to be incremental is very important,
but I think to be incremental means to know where we are going somehow and
unless we get at least a vague notion of why we're going there and how
we're going to get there, it's really going to be chaos. And now chaos is
indicated by this problem of destroying the ecology and which is very
fashionable.
Hopefully it's more than just a fashionable trend and it's not that we are
, we don't have any more land to go into it. This continent is half empty.
The fact is that when we isolate one person within a large enough Let's
say corrupted environment, this person is going to pay and his family is
going to pay his Children and everybody else is going to pay. So it
doesn't matter if there is a 50,000 square miles of wilderness when when I
cannot reach them or when I can when I am separated from from it. So that
from a point of view of what the earth, my answer to us, I would say the
earth can cancel us in in a split second and then start all over again.
But if if we if we disappear somehow, the genius of the earth is going to
disappear and we defeat not just ourselves but the animal kingdom, the
vegetable kingdom and the solar system maybe. So we are very fundamental
and we should be very careful because the responsibility we have is
incredible and all the future is in in front of us in the past is just a
little flicker. Are you really saying that the earth is a mega structure
in a way. Yes. But in other ways it's a miniature of the universe and we
are and we are miniatures of miniatures. So we are, in a way we are more
in our complexity, we are more infinite, that whole galaxy, each one of us
, and that's why we are so, so unique and so so important.