Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Now, some like Paolo Soleri argue that we are decades past the need for
this urban achievement and that humans and their aggregated artifact
should part ways. It hardly matters to his opponents whether the city was
intended as a designed environment, however sloppy or cumbersome, or if
the city was achieved as the sum of vernacular conglomeration, an archi-
tectural medley feeling its way blindly to the sun with none of the natural
elegance of a coral reef. Viewed as a manifestation of biologic function
expressed by technology (not a metaphor), the city comes in two flavors:
planned and unplanned.
The planned city, can be designed, like Baghdad which was mapped out
from its inception (though overgrown today beyond the recognition of its
commissioning organizers and patrons); or schematized (as was Boston
along functional zones).
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The unplanned city may grow upon a spot that
offers some unique natural circumstance: a ford in a river (Oxford) or a
deep-water harbor (hence the “pool” in Liverpool); access to some mineral
or other exploitable natural resource (the salt at Salzburg, the Indian-dug
wells that preceded Phoenix); a rare defensible position where otherwise is
found only open space (ancient Paris on its two islands or Venice on its
many).
Like the unplanned city, in its subsequent life the planned city too
assumes organic patterns as it ripens. It grows neighborhood by neighbor-
hood filling the most easily colonized zones available along and within
ready lines of commercial intercourse. To describe this process I would
like borrow a term from music:
durchcomponieri,
German for “through-
composed,” meaning that a song may be set so that the music for each
stanza is different (unlike strophic folk songs). The resulting form of a
“through-composed” song is not necessarily determined by the form of the
poem upon which it is based, but the music may respond expressively to
the changing tone, concepts, images, and situations in the verse. Likewise,
as each urban neighborhood grows it may or may not conform to the pre-
existing overall plan for the city, in building size or type, street width and
character. The through-composed city is alive and responsive.
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Yet the felt
need to consolidate the city, to make it a single imposing thing rather than
the sum of neighborhoods, is a predilection evident from the very earliest
cities.
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Perhaps more than a sky-challenging mentality, this consolidating
impulse underlies stories like that of the Tower of Babel (whose illustration
by Breughel so resembles one of Soleri's arcologies, with unintended irony
contributed by the viewer). The hubris of mankind and the vision of an
