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The fantasy mobile cities designed to move with the times
United Kingdom Architecture News - Mar 30, 2014 - 12:16 3363 views
How architects have long dreamt of creating portable urban superstructures that can avoid decline by simply moving on
An artist’s impression of the ‘Green Machine’ (see below), a mobile, city-sized structure that would slowly move across the Sahara cultivating the land
Not very well-known beyond the hermetic world of architectural theory, the Italian collective Superstudio left us with some of the most brilliant and critical parables in the history of modern urbanism. Perhaps the best is their 1971 idea of the “Continuous Production Conveyor Belt City”. “The city moves,” they wrote, “unrolling like a majestic serpent; over new lands, taking its 8 million inhabitants on a ride through valleys and hills, from the mountains to the seashore, generation after generation. The head of the city is the Grand Factory, 4 miles wide and 100 yards high, like the city it continuously produces . . . The Grand Factory devours shreds of useless nature and unformed minerals at its front end and emits sections of completely formed city, ready for use, from its back end.”
Superstudio’s parable, a razor-sharp critique of disposable consumer culture, can seem to have come true, at least in the new megacities of Asia and the endlessly expanding exurbs of the US. But where they nailed a particular mood was in the urge to build anew, to reimagine cities not as permanent but as something mobile, places to be remade. Superstudio’s London contemporaries, Archigram, even went a step further, drawing what they called “Walking Cities”, visions of entire cities moving on sinisterly spindly legs.
‘Continuous Production Conveyor Belt City’, 1971
What makes these visionary cities so fascinating is the way they betray our fears (and, to a lesser extent, our hopes) better than the bland architecture which defines our streets and squares. As planners return to anachronistic models of the picturesque and to simulacra of medieval villages and Victorian suburbs (the prevailing trend for this nostalgia is called New Urbanism), the mad visions begin to appear elegiacally attractive, a riposte to the banality of good intentions and reactionary mediocrity.
The paradox is that architects, engineers and production designers used to have visions which were unrealisable because the technologies they demanded did not exist. Now, those technologies do exist.
The eco-domes of the Eden Project in Cornwall, UK
More recently Wilkinson Eyre’s extraordinary greenhouses at Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay show that expressionistic structures can be built at the urban scale. So now when we fear the collapse of the ozone layer, the pollution of the atmosphere and general environmental degradation, we can imagine a life lived between hermetically sealed apartment blocks, shopping malls and parks beneath a glass roof.
It exemplified everything the contemporary city was not, but also embodied dreams of the car and the aeroplane as mechanisms to free us from our staid rootedness. Archigram’s other ideas included the “Plug-in City”, which was just a huge framework into which other elements could be plugged, and the “Instant City”, a floating arts centre megastructure transported by balloons that would land, introduce and seed new cultural practices and infrastructures and then depart in search of the next cultural desert.
Archigram’s Ron Herron at work in 1972
It might be nuclear apocalypse, it might be climatic catastrophe, it might be rising water levels or tidal waves, earthquakes, volcanoes, or a war over resources. Or it might just be escaping from bourgeois moral codes. Whatever the reason, these would be cities on the move. The two key thinkers in the field of these new mobile megastructures were curious figures, neither of whom built much, yet both of whom have remained lodestones of architectural ideas, rediscovered by each successive generation. They are Yona Friedman and Constant Nieuwenhuys.
Friedman (born 1923), a Hungarian-born, Paris-dwelling Israeli, meditated on megastructural frameworks which would supply the urban infrastructure without dictating form, and which could sit on any landscape, be it desert or war-torn territory. His influence was most heavily felt in projects for informal settlements in developing countries where his ideas about creating the materials and mindset for self-reliance and self-building represented a radical break with previous, more paternalistic responses.
Nieuwenhuys (1920-2005) suggested a similar urban frame which he dubbed “New Babylon”. Conceived as a post-wage-economy environment, this was a plug-in city devoted to leisure, a self-determined landscape of communal fun characterised by an endless space-frame (the Centre Pompidou in Paris is arguably its closest living relative).
Both these proposals effectively limited the architect’s input to the infrastructure, leaving the form of the architecture to its residents – in tune with the free-spirited, self-build aspirations of the 1960s. These were structures which barely touched the ground, in which communities existed romantically and in freedom halfway between land and sky.
Recent tragic events in Japan and the Philippines as well as seemingly endless floods in the UK have also exposed the vulnerabilities of living on land at the water’s edge. Venice is slowly sinking, rising water levels threaten most of the world’s great cities and that fear has led to an increase in thinking about waterborne cities. It is curious that even with the extraordinary technologies developed for offshore engineering and with the pressure on land values, the sea remains somehow beyond the realms of architecture.
Ocean-bottom schemes may be fanciful but floating cities are beginning to attract attention. The Netherlands is so far ahead of the game here it is hardly worth looking anywhere else – the wonderfully seductive floating settlement of Ijburg is characteristically open, accessible and sensible. It makes sense then that architect Alex de Rijke, of Dutch origin but based in London, should have proposed “Floatopolis”, a dockland scheme using prefabricated floating housing units. It is both feasible and sensible, unlike the proposed Freedom Ship, a city for 50,000 tax exiles and their staff with an airport on the roof, an idea which seems to have foundered.
The modern city dweller is characterised by a paradoxical attachment to place and a desire for mobility. The laptop and mobile phone have allowed us to take our offices and social lives with us wherever we go, yet our homes remain firmly fixed to the ground. Of course, we are not thinking of the millions of refugees wandering the world, burdened less by their few possessions than by memories of what they have lost. We are not thinking of favela-dwellers ingeniously improvising ad hoc cities from the detritus of contemporary consumption. And we are not thinking of the hours we spend on planes and trains, in cars, or the time at festivals and in marquees where the infrastructure appears and then is gone with little fuss. We are often told that moving house is, along with divorce, the most stressful thing that can happen to us. Perhaps, if we were to build entire cities capable of moving, it might get a little easier....Continue Reading
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