Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
mission to a point of consumption—can be conveyed to one arcology with
much less investment than to the 2,500 or so homes it replaces. The
economies of scale only increase with the size of the arcology. Hundert-
wasser, too, has considered density, but in a typically idiosyncratic way that
distills into his proverb, “the vertical belongs to man, the horizontal to
nature,” by which he means that people can build as high as they want as
long as the resulting upper surface is planted so that an airplane ride above
it would not reveal a city, only the primal forest transposed many stories
into the air, to regenerate and cleanse water, add shade, disperse the wind,
contribute oxygen, provide a home for wildlife—all so the city is not cut
off from nature. However improbable this may sound, wherever Hundert-
wasser has implemented the theory it has worked. In contrast to injecting
tangibly vibrant nature into the city, “Soleri believes that for maximum
efficiency the city should adopt a three-dimensional form, as biological
organisms have.”
25
One is a metaphor, the other a praxis.
26
No one knows how people will dwell in an arcology. People may tend
to live segregated by income and social status (nearly the same thing), or by
job description/type, or by some other propensity. Will an arcology have
neighborhoods? (For that matter, once constructed and colonized will the
arcologies exhibit homeostatic maintenance of a planned polity or will they
exhibit unplanned growth? No one knows.) The present social experiments
at Arcosanti are probing some guidelines. Dwellers in an arcology may be
allocated different volumes of living space, but will this assignment be made
on the basis of need or wealth? Clearly two systems of value will struggle
to apportion space.Today no one knows if it will be more desirable to live
on the ground floors of an arcology—with seemingly endless garden views
out the window and no street noise or soot or smoke—or will it be
deemed more desirable to live in the upper floors (as from the bridge of a
ship or a skyscraper's penthouse), with an imperially symbolic view of the
landscape? No one knows what money will buy in the way of preferential
living within such a community. In contrast to these theoretical questions
testing the essentials of what people want from their cities, Hundertwasser,
building within the through-composed urban structure, tried to recreate a
small town of stacked cottages. In addition to the usual conveniences of
modern life (laundry rooms and storage space, etc.) his buildings are full of
amenities: indoor winter gardens, cafés, children's playrooms, roof gardens
with access from several floors, colorful and variegated interiors, and imme-
diate entry to the city's grid plan by which to commute or play.
