Architecture City of
the (Near) Future
The ideas sound ripped
from a sci-fi film, but these architects’ practical plans hope to reshape urban
living.
By Julie V. Iovine Oct. 13, 2014 4:48 p.m. ET
The ideas sound ripped from a sci-fi film, but these architects’
practical plans hope to reshape urban living. Yale School of Architecture
New Haven, Conn. ‘Infra Eco Logi Urbanism,” a small exhibition on view through Nov. 20 at the Yale School of Architecture, is loaded with challenging material and jargon not easily accessible to the general public. Its name refers to how the pressures of infrastructure, ecology and logistics all come to bear on urbanism. But it has important things to say about urban planning and the future of cities.
The show’s slick installation of floating, poster-sized light boxes, each tethered to a coiled electrical cord running up to the ceiling, could be mistaken for a “Star Trek” movie set. The boxes—glowing white and green—depict maps and flow charts, analytical lists and government code information, plus a few photographs, models and architectural renderings. The only thing apparent at a glance is that almost all the material relates to the cities and regions around the Great Lakes.
“Infra Eco Logi Urbanism” is the result of a research project devised by Geoffrey Thün, Kathy Velikov and Colin Ripley of RVTR, an architecture firm with offices in Toronto and Ann Arbor, Mich. Their approach illustrates one aspect of a sea change among architects: In the past few years, urban planners and design professionals have become much more intent on confronting such consequences of unchecked growth as air pollution, traffic congestion, contaminated waterways, blighted landscapes and invasive sprawl. They believe that inspirational planning can help make things better.
The first step is to look at the world differently, seeing it as composed of networks and systems—the webs we weave—rather than studded with something so limited and finite as individual buildings. Architect-planners, especially those with their roots in academia, have begun to devise rational plans for buildings the size of cities and cities that encompass entire regions or cross international borders.
The idea of vast megalopolises blooming across the landscape may conjure B-movie science-fiction fantasies or the utopian visions of the 1960s, but they are already well under way—and largely beyond our control. Consider the Great Lakes Megaregion, the name applied to the monster metropolis—population 56 million—spanning two countries, eight states, two provinces, 12 major metropolitan areas and the five watersheds of the Great Lakes. Toronto, Chicago and Detroit all fall within the so-called GLM, where converging growth, as well as economic stagnation, highlight the already thoroughly intertwined fate and future of the region in matters pertaining to shared natural resources, overlapping transportation and distribution systems, shifting employment demands and environmental threats, among other issues.
“Infra Eco Logi Urbanism” addresses that megaregion’s challenges and opportunities. Take traffic, for instance. According to the exhibition, every day some $900 million in goods plus 420,000 vehicles travel from Toronto on the 18-lane superhighway 401, entering the U.S. near Detroit. That traffic is set to double by 2035, but already traffic delays account for an annual $5 billion loss in gross domestic product in Canada.
Such problems seem intractable, but the architects at RVTR dig deep to uncover design possibilities lurking within the system. Their most viable idea is to overlay the current highway system, hogged by cars and trucks, with such other networks as cable optics, elevated rail, even water and waste conveyance.
Or consider “orphaned parcels.” The show analyzes over a dozen highway interchanges in the region, those big spaghetti bowls of freeway, and teases out unused acreage—the orphaned parcels—within and around those loops. They can be used for the footings of supersize buildings straddling the highway. Such megastructures have been around for a long time—remember Brasília? But instead of standing out in strident isolation, these new ones would be tied tightly into the flow of concentrated traffic that already exists.
“Eco Logi Urbanism” imagines three different megastructures, one each for Toronto, the Detroit-Windsor border, and Chicago. The proposals draw inspiration from such precedents, both built and imagined, as the Barbican in London, Rockefeller Center in New York, and the 1966 visionary plan Potteries Thinkbelt, by Cedric Price, that imagined a university as a network of mobile classrooms and research facilities traveling as needed along a rail line.
RVTR presents its plan for The Gateway in Toronto as a “modern acropolis,” occupying the no-man’s-land between Pearson International Airport and Highway 401—or, rather, hovering over it like a huge Flexible Flyer with dents and holes. Elevated high-speed rails, hybrid-fueled cars, bicycles and people would all converge here in a great arrivals hall surrounded by Olympic-size sporting venues as well as megachurches and research facilities. One of its inspirations seems to be the 27-acre, $2.5 billion L.A. Live entertainment complex, which contains ballrooms, bars, concert halls, a hotel and a condominium tower.
The proposal for Detroit, The Crossing, reaches forward and backward in time and across borders. A futuristic take on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, it is a 1.5-mile occupied bridge spanning the Detroit River between Detroit and Windsor, Ontario. The Crossing would house the Centre for Great Lake Governance—assembly halls where residents of the mega-region might convene to discuss shared resources, energy needs and other issues related to cross-border coordination. In models and renderings, The Crossing looks like a trestle bridge embedded with the buildings of the United Nations.
Then there’s The Exchange, RVTR’s plan for a series of opportunistic structures spread alongside and above Chicago’s Congress Parkway, the major east-west corridor in that city’s downtown. By taking advantage of underused parking garages, air rights and barren lots, The Exchange would weave together existing buildings and orphaned parcels, using an elevated pedestrian walkway to connect a new high-speed rail station—built right over the Circle Interchange, a notorious bottleneck—to an expanded bus-terminal hub, historic Union Station and a new ferry port.
Aerial building and elevated walkways have been a staple in visions of the urban future since Hugh Ferriss’s classic 1929 book, “The Metropolis of Tomorrow.” The architects of RVTR call their take a “mongrel urban architecture” that integrates “new forms of ecological entrepreneurship, networks of common space and the support of multiple forms of open exchange.”
We have seen top-down planning in the past and are thankful that Le Corbusier’s dreams of replacing Paris with flat fields dotted with skyscrapers never got off the table. Places such as La Defense in Paris and Empire State Plaza in Albany, N.Y., failed miserably—becoming bywords for soulless grandiosity—because they were imposed as if on a blank slate. Would RVTR’s projects, or the many others showing up on the drafting software of urban planners, fare any better? Perhaps. As provocative and improbable—or even preposterous—as they may seem, they do take into account all that is already in the landscape, including the people, and build from there.
“Eco Logi Urbanism” presents itself as a manifesto, and it would have had even more impact had it been written in plain English—“continuous low-density polycentric urban formations” are more clearly known as sprawl. That said, problems will only ever be solved by those thinking as far ahead as possible. Or as the Chicago architect Daniel Burnham, patron saint of another approach to urban planning, the City Beautiful Movement, once said, “Make no little plans.”
Ms. Iovine writes about architecture for the Journal.
Comments
City Planners are preparing to throw voters and property
owners under the bus. They will dig in
and receive $billions in design fees forced by unelected Regional Commissions
who will be authorized to extract whatever they need in taxes and your property
to fulfill the planners vision of your future.
This is UN Agenda 21, getting ahead of itself.
These planners need to take a few economics courses
before they spend our billions on their “dream cities” in the US.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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