anything that has a life, There's also a termination. So we cities as
they're now, they're going to terminate themselves. But that doesn't mean
that the city as a concept and as a reality is going to disappear. New
cities are going to come about far better than the old cities.
Paolo Soleri is a designer of new cities. Cities of enormous height and
complexity and of great density cities. He believes we will soon need if
the man of the future urban man is to survive.
World population is now 3.5 billion. A third living city. By the end of
the century, the projection is 6.5 billion one half in city. This is the
coast of north America from new york to Washington, D. C. When the first
Europeans touched shore here five centuries ago, there was a wilderness
with a scattered native population. Today. 30 million people live in this
strip, Which is rapidly becoming one huge city. What human purposes do
cities serve? What principles regulate their growth? What maintains the
balance between demands for goods and services and those qualities of
beauty, space and tranquility which men require. With few exceptions,
today's cities or haphazard conglomerations, unregulated, unhealthy and in
trouble.
Salary proposes archaeology, architecture plus ecology. Not just bigger
buildings, but man made landscape. His plans and models show structures
meant to intensify urban life and conserve natural resources. I would
first say that I'm not necessarily advocating very large cities. In fact,
I think that we should cut the size of our communities possibly possibly
between, let's say 50,000 and one million might we might find answers
which are more human Mhm than what we have now, the complexity of the of
the system is in itself. I think the positive element because complexity
seems to be in the nature of life. You you you spend a great deal of time
discussing diversity and variety and complexity
and this is very close to some of my own concerns. And the question yeah,
that it seems to be needs to be dealt with is the how much variety is
livable. Mhm. I believe that if we put people into environments in which
there is that there is an amount or degree of variety beyond which people
can't cope with it and similarly the same thing would be true of certain
other dimensions of the environment that would go beyond that it becomes
incomprehensible and and that people cannot somehow form their own micro
environments.
Well, I would say that one of the of the disquieting elements in the
cities that we live in now is that they are undefinable there, you cannot
grasp them, really, they slip away from you, you can't visually or or
socially understand them. And one advantage of having this compact and
small, miniaturized system is that you can grasp it visually, you can
somehow move into it physically very, very quickly, very swiftly. So that
really you, after a while you understand what you're dealing with. I think
people have different views as to what the city should be, what what it
should provide or whatever something should be provided to it. Well, if
the city was was only a tool, you know for for affluence, I would say that
it's very unimportant we might get away from it. But if the city is that
specific place, that cityscape, that man made landscape, well, the
institutions that makes civilization can leave survive and develop, then
the city becomes the most important instrument that we have to to really
produce a better life for mankind. And apparently if you take away from
history, the history of the cities and the towns and the villages, you're
somehow canceled civilization itself. So the concept of the city is
absolutely fundamental in central to the development of civilization, of
culture, of men as a person in men as a, as a group three d. Jersey and
Archaeology proposed for the New Jersey Meadowlands for comparison. The
hancock building in Chicago three New Jersey is designed as a
sophisticated transportation hub with jet airport serving the greater new
york city area is enormous by today's standards. Yet it would occupy very
little ground space is designed to fit a site that is now threatened by
the encroachment of turnpikes, garbage dumps and oil refineries in the
outer skin. The dwellings open to light and air. These would not be boxes
but spaces in a large grid. The resident might choose from a variety of
possibilities from a tent in the garden to a small house. The core of the
city would contain public facilities such as theaters, universities,
hospitals, department stores and churches. Monorails would connect
specific areas of three d. Jersey and there would be a network to of
elevators, moving sidewalks and bicycle paths. Cars would have no function
within the city. So they might be used for sport or short range
transportation outside. Urban dwellers would be only minutes from whatever
they need and they would get used to walking again. Article 40. The
village of 20,000 on a sea cliff planned as a tourist center is about as
high as the Empire State building all around it. Open space and the sea.
It is dwarfed by Babalola. An industrial center with a population the size
of new york city Outside his 18,000 acres. A nature dominated Hinterland
By comparison, New York City covers 200,000 acres and is the center of the
megalopolis that requires hours of driving to escape. Heck, sanhedrin,
twice as high as the Empire State building population about the same size
as savannah, Georgia, racine Wisconsin or atlantic city, New Jersey. But
whereas those cities occupy thousands of acres and are surrounded by
industry and suburbs. Hex Tahitian is designed to stand on 148 and be
surrounded by open land.
Of course nothing being built today attempts the scope of an archaeology
of some radical experiments share an interest and multilayered urban life
habitat by the Canadian architect moshe Safdie is one of these, it's a new
thing in terms of scale. The group of people who built a village in a
certain time span, made, made
joint decisions, common decisions which permitted them to have a certain
control over the destiny. Now we we expand by many, many folds of this
activity. All of a sudden we're building an environment in a much, much
shorter time span for millions of people. And so we explore the morphology
of what that community and city is all about in order to try and translate
that into a form which is an organism. But I think that this that this new
scale of activity which is new to humanity creates new problems that
didn't exist before. And it's I'm not saying that's specifically the case
in your interpretation of making that three dimensional city or anybody
else's, but that when you make decisions at that scale Yeah. In that time
span you are affecting the lives of millions of people in a way that they
feel they're threatened. They're frightened. I'm talking about about the
man in the street who looks at your drawings and say, do I want to live
there? He feels my God, I've lost control. I mean, his, his reaction to
that is to say to use language that is familiar to him. He says, is this a
democracy for example, which is a very fashionable word in America is this
democracy? What what control do I have over that? If we take the example
of arab villages or italian hill towns of the indian pueblo, they, over a
period of time evolves certain vocabulary of elements and the peasant who
built his house, he accepted that if he wants a room, it has a certain
proportion and he puts a dome over it and he has a certain way of making a
window. And he added that to the fabric of the village. The result was an
environment that had a great deal of unity and he never went to school of
architecture and he had no degree and his house is 100 times better than
most of the houses were built today when the Villager was defining its own
environment. He was accepting a topography that was existing and that
topography, that landscape was sufficient for its needs was very good. It
was really what he needed. My contention is that now this topography, this
natural setting is not sufficient anymore. So somewhere somehow we have to
find, we have to define this topography which takes the place of the, of
the natural landscape and then let the individual define its own
environment. So in a way, I would say, and this is very elegant, I would
say that we or I would say would take the place of nature in defining this
man made nature within which the social being developed and this might be
arrogant, but I think it's unavoidable because because of this avalanche
of complexity that we are involved with and the natural landscape is not
anymore sufficient to let society developed as individuals. You have you
have to have an an intermediate stage where you take from nature of some
some elements and not just that. But you take the basic guidelines from
nature, the living nature and define this new landscape. And actually this
is very easy to say. It's very, very difficult to implement. Doesn't that
responsibility of taking the place of Nature frighten you? Doesn't give
you nightmares.
Yes and no, because I think that nature really compels me. It demands from
the demands from us. This new step, it's unavoidable. It's really a new
reality, a new intermediate reality that we are we are defining. We have
been defining for a long time. The cityscape has been for a long time and
intermediate step between nature and man. Now this escape has to become
more responsive to the needs of natural men of today, which is not the
natural man of of yesterday. The future of man Is salaries real concern
inextricably bound up with the future of nature. The complicated systems
through which we see life expressing itself and this concern flows from
certain basic principles based on the observation that life is on a course
for each stage is increasingly complex and increasingly compact.
Miniaturization is a key Solari concept. His comprehensive volume of
theory and drawings is prefaced with a single arresting line. This book is
about miniaturization. Our goals today seem inspired by what is feasible
or practical and the practical is almost always such a short term
consideration, intending to fragment the long range reality against this
tyranny of the practical. So Larry proposes love of an order implicit in
nature itself.
There is a very evident discipline in the biological kingdom, both vegetal
and animal. And it's the discipline of the animal, of the plant, which is
this absolute rigor to which any biological system is submitted in order
for it to grow, festival to be and then to develop and to grow and to
possibly go beyond itself. And it is the discipline of matter and energy
we are under. We are biological machines of an incredible
if anything goes wrong among the trillions and trillions of performances
that are present in every instant. If something goes wrong, the whole
system collapses. And unless this discipline is carried from the natural
to the human and from the biological into the mental. I think we are
somehow living in a utopian council over life is my question would be too
many young people is, do you think this discipline is necessary? Or you or
you feel that this is a negative thing and and this seems to be a
fundamental difference between a natural system which is plante system and
a man's social system. I mean, they seem to be quite at quite different
levels. In fact, that's one of the things that makes man very different
from the rest of nature is his ability to constantly break out of his own
framework and think of come up with new ideas, which is what you're
suggesting somehow seems to be some sort of control. You know, what I'm
suggesting is that as as there is a discipline in our body, an incredible
discipline, biologically speaking. So the body of society, the structure
for the body of society has to have some kind of discipline. And this
discipline is basically the ability of the physical body of the biological
body to be highly complex. The discipline of the social body, the
instrument again, and should be able to accept this complexity because it
is within this complexity. Then then the individual elements are going to
be able to through this intensity of of connections are going to develop
their own personal uh freedom. So I really think that it's it's an
evolutionary process. We cannot say, well, the city is beyond the
biological process. I think it's beyond because it's above them, not, not
because it's detached or because it's something else. It's just that up to
a point life has evolved biologically. Now life is evolving and evolving
technologically, but the the goal seems to be that life has to become
spiritually more intense. And I personally would wear a great deal of of
of a couple of things. Number one of leaping from the biological into the
cultural, I think it's well and good to speak of plant and animal, but
there's been a great many evolutions in between. That's number one. So
that I
think second in the relationship that that the idea the idea of using the
body as a system has been done in India has been done in ancient Greece
etcetera. And every time it's done, it leads to a totalitarian to be very
kind, extreme authoritarian system. In other words, when you start talking
about the body, politic of the body, social as being heart, brain,
etcetera, etcetera. Whether plato or in in in India, it's it's a it can be
a disaster because culture is extremely, it's far more complex than that.
Yes, well, I would say that and what I'm suggesting is a necessary step.
I would never dream to say that it's it's the sufficient step. But I feel
really that is necessary in order to achieve a greater level of individual
freedom. We have to as social beings, we have to accept a certain kind of
discipline that is evident throughout life. And I think that this
discipline is necessary
in order to really be able to move from from what you might call the
social uh, qualification to a an individual expression in its own rights.
And I don't I don't think we cannot we cannot avoid that as you as you
begin. So shall you end if you begin in blood like Russia, you people are
selling with ghosts.