Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
terms as their social-architectural solutions are framed within historic time's
limited choice of possible responses.
From Art Nouveau both Hundertwasser and Soleri have inherited issues
of workmanship. Soleri uses low-tech construction that can be divided into
many sub-sections while Hundertwasser employs skilled craftsman to “over
endow” a building as a post-industrial labor sink. In an “excessive” labor
investment, Hundertwasser's craftsmen are given almost total freedom to
work liberated from the architect's constraints. If wastage were reduced in
the modern consumer economy the investment in labor-intensive, post-
industrial, crafts and skills could award buildings a much longer life span.
Against the onslaught of uniformity the alienated worker could be re-
invested in his product by assimilating excess labor into construction, so
that the city becomes a “creativity sink” and the citizen in his newly hab-
itable city becomes, again, more than a scurrying denizen amid huge
machines for living, or a renter flitting without consequence through un-
noticing spaces.
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From Art Deco's counterpoise of nature and building
come two approaches: Soleri puts the city into a garden; Hundertwasser
puts the garden into the city. In either case, somewhat surprisingly given its
wholesome ambitions, the Bauhaus emerges the enemy. The problem is
one of focus, of assembling an environment from well-designed artifacts or
inducing design from the entirety of the city.
Though a multiplex object, with as many parts as a living being, the city
was always viewed as a single entity envisioned as both sculpturally fixed (a
visual impression, for example, a skyline) and dynamic (as a living being), a
thing and a process, a noun and a verb. This may seem a modern notion,
something that grows from concepts of city planning and contemporary
musings about how to assign function, but the idea is very old. The topic
of Jonah describes the metropolis Nineveh.
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In this characterization, really
a very brief inventory of things, a great composite object is indicated—
inferring many houses, lanes, shops, bazaars, walls and gates, temples,
palaces, gardens, districts perhaps set off by larger roads, military strong
points, fountains, assembly places, etc.Yet the same text says that “Nineveh
was an exceeding great city of three days' journey” ( Jonah 3:3) and that,
accordingly, “Jonah began to enter into the city a day's journey” ( Jonah
3:4). Here time was exchanged for space. The city was being measured as
so many days' pedestrian journey across. We still measure that way: some
one asks how far a certain point is, and we reply “half an hour away.” Space
is equated with distance traveled at an assumed rate—the most efficacious
