It's worth noting that the "tower in the park" modernist ethos of building very tall towers to create lots of green space was largely a bust.
Parks need a certain level of activation, and developments like these tended to fall below those thresholds. If not active, parks become ill-maintained, desolate, and foreboding. In the worst case scenario, they become havens for crime, since there are no witnesses or bystanders to help out someone getting mugged.
I don't understand how that's different than a regular park in the middle of a city. Why would having a skyscraper in the middle of a park instead of beside it result in higher crime?
The problem is when the park exists just as negative space between the buildings, as a way to provide seperation.
Towers surrounding a park, like Central Park in New York (or any decent size park in Manhattan) works well. Towers as a city wall like Grant Park in Chicago also work well. In both cases the park is a focal point of the urban form which puts all attention on the communal area it represents.
The purpose of "towers in a park" was to break up the urban form, and have density without urbanism. One big problem they were trying to avoid is rooms where the "view" out the window was of a ventilation shaft between buildings. They wanted towers with "no such thing as a bad view" by positioning them in a staggered layout and with substantial setbacks. This creates a bunch of awkward negative spaces in the layout and the architect just stamps "park" on all the vacant areas.
The result might be good views from inside the buildings but the no-man's-land between them becomes an alienating place with broken sight lines and blind corners. Toss in a criminal element and you end up with some really unpleasant spaces.
Yes, in just about every large city across the world, including Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas, especially in cities, and newer parts of older cities, that were developed since the 1950s. It still influences contemporary architecture and city layout, though today maybe it's less deliberate (i.e. artistic, conceptual) and more a consequence of car culture and not wanting to crowd tall skyscrapers. So you just turn all the empty space between skyscrapers into "park", which almost invariably becomes desolate green space. It's the status quo even though the original concept has become largely discredited (or at least lacking for advocates) among the urban planning crowd and, to a lesser extent, architects (the effect frames their buildings as monoliths, easier to be admired as signature pieces).
It originates with Le Corbusier and his Radiant City concept from the 1930s. See https://99percentinvisible.org/article/ville-radieuse-le-cor.... The influences quickly spread through Europe and North America before exploding everywhere post WWII. There are several Wikipedia pages about Le Corbusiers, including https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ville_Radieuse but in a simple search I couldn't find one that gives a good overview of how influential it actually was. A lot academic urban planning literature discusses it. OTOH, the idea of less crowding long predated Le Corbusiers, and his vision may have been inevitable, but it was Le Corbusiers who packaged it up into a comprehensive concept, which helped the practice to spread much more rapidly and uniformly around the world.
A city is about what you can do. The skyscrapper in a park is less useful because you cannot walk to stores, work, or other things. As such people living there become used to driving everywhere. Even if they want to go to a park they will - out of habit - get in the car, and drive - at this point the local park is no better than any other. All those cars in fact imply a large parking lot and so the park isn't in walking distance of the door so it is reasonable to drive across the parking lot if you do want to visit that park.
In short the park is too large compared to everything else and so it isn't enough of a draw for locals to keep out the rif-raf.
Note that I said drive, not take transit above. Although the density might be there, the sky scrapper in the park ends up acting like a cul-de-sac: all transit has to make long detours to get to each one and so the effective speed of transit is unacceptably slow for any trip thus forcing people to drive just to get a reasonable trip time.
No it wouldn't - too far to get to anything else. It would be expensive just because it is still NYC and a high demand area, but it wouldn't be the most expensive because while it is close to one great thing about NYC it is far from all the others.
Because Central Park is literally surrounded by skyscrapers that don’t have parks in neighborhoods with below average park coverage other than Central Park. It’s the exception that proves the rule.
It’s also not that safe and requires its own police precinct.
I think the encapsulation probably refers to the 'city in a building' aspect, i.e. residents have most needs satisfied within the building, and rarely need to leave the building itself.
Regular parks are generally a lot smaller, so it’s easier to keep them busy and above the desolate threshold.
The thing about the tower in the park ethos was that every building should be surrounded by park and the neighborhood should be more park than city. That’s way too low of a density to keep parks safe.
This is it. There are many regular city parks I wouldn't walk through at night even if they weren't closed. I walk around them not through them. I live in the park it becomes a problem.
What's the difference between a city park and e.g. the hundreds of miles of trails and national forest behind my house? Somehow that manages to be crime-free despite less usage. Would love a theory of how density works in your model.
It takes preparation, resources, a vehicle, travel to the trailhead, motivation, effort, and miles of walking to get into trails in a national forest. Potential victims on a trail aren’t carrying many valuables because they’re out hiking.
A city park is within walking distance, requires no vehicle to get to, can be visited on a whim, and potential victims are more likely carrying valuables (jewelry, electronics, nice handbags). Criminals can visit the park, commit a crime, and disappear back into the dense city on a whim, without planning or preparing.
Most crimes in this context are crimes of convenience. Hiking long trails is not convenient.
>> potential victims are more likely carrying valuables (jewelry, electronics, nice handbags)
Back when I was a daily hiker, I would have been carry seriously expensive gear. A few thousand dollars at least. Way more expensive than I would have walking around town. It would have been work to track me down in the forest though.
As one of the other commenters pointed out, in a national forest the crime occurs as car clouting at the trailhead. I would leave my car unlocked, and depending on weather, a window rolled down.
The parent poster must live next to a different national forest than the ones I hiked at, if you hiked at a popular trail it was completely normal to get back to the trailhead and see cars with their windows busted out.
A lot of towers in the park are located in places where the park is actually private property, so they are built to discourage through traffic or visitors that might help to keep it safe.
The other thing is that people visit their local, convenient parks unless there is a really good reason to travel far for one; and if everyone has their tower in a park, then why would they go to anyone else’s?
1. A low traffic urban park still has some traffic, and criminals want reasonable waiting times. You might wait all day on a hiking trail.
2. Escape routes. Harder to make a clean getaway on a trail. Often one way out, a single trail head, and then a drive. That's another thing, you probably need a car. In an urban park you can vanish back into the city from multiple exit points.
3. Crimes of opportunity. Most muggings aren't planned out far in advance. Driving to a hiking spot and patiently waiting isn't the psychological place typical criminals are operating from. Serial killers, maybe... and sometimes those killings do happen in secluded hiking areas.
I'd guess that the sort of people incidentally mugging others can't afford a car and so would generally be within walking distance of their home/haunts. Probably also not the sort to put in extra effort walking trails or chancing a long walk in case they found someone.
I've travelled and hiked in the US a lot. In outdoor tourism spots away from cities, I think the main threat for opportunistic thefts would be 20-30yo foreign tourists (shoestring travelling Europeans, South Americans, etc). Cities would be completely different.
but i'd assume that the main difference is that the hundreds of miles of trails and national forest behind your house doesn't have a residential tower stuck in the middle of it.
Wow, some of the complexes in those pictures look a lot like the cities I create when I'm playing Workers & Resources; if I didn't know any better I would have thought they were taken in the former Soviet bloc. I wonder how they managed to make it work where the West didn't.
Details matter and the Soviet examples must have got some details right that matter. The question for the reader is then what? (one answer already given is Soviets didn't give residents a choice - I have no idea if this is right or not)
the fact that they kept building them doesn't really mean it worked any better. the answer might be that it had all the same problems, they just cared less about solving those problems. the problem with towers in the park is isolation from services - in a society where services are more scarce to begin with, that's going to be less of a difference than other forms of planning.
but afaik the difference between "commieblocks" and towers in the park is that there was a lot less park per commieblock. you had more buildings clustered tighter together than the prototypical western towers in the park development.
My understanding is that the use separation wasn't nearly as strict. Some of them have markets and daycares in them, which increases the amount of people there at times that would be dead for a plain residential area.
Western academia got pumped chock full of former soviet bloc professionals after the walls fell so a generation of urban planners and other professionals spent their education hearing a fair bit about that kind of construction and planning.
Typically the built environment is going to be a better place to find action for ne’er do wells looking for action. Not being seen doesn’t matter much without opportunity.
To put it another way, hundreds of miles of forest trails sounds like a lot of work.
I'm assuming you live in a less populated area, which would also (on average) mean fewer criminals. Lower usage in high density vs lower usage in low density.
Parkland that is not often used to capacity that has less people near it would naturally also have less crime from people within it, because there’s not many people to commit crimes nearby in the first place. E.G. Los Angeles National Forest
Parkland that is not often used to capacity that has a lot of people near it would likely have more crime, because you’ve essentially created a glorified alleyway. E.G. Central Park in the 70s, when you didn’t want to be nearby it near sundown.
Central Park is a good case study of this phenomenon, because it’s now one of the most heavily used parks in one of most densely populated areas in the world, and billionaires pay premiums to live next to it. That didn’t always used to be the case, and it was considered dangerous.
I am not the person you asked, but it seems to me the key difference is concentration of accessible resources. If so, the areas where the trails behind your house intersect with wealthy suburban or urban areas are the areas most likely to conceal would-be robbers.
"towers in the park" is a pretty specific type of topology, where the only access to the tower is through the park without any type of through or cross traffic.
Emphasis on through or cross traffic. Generally there is a parking garage but it leads directly to a road around the perimeter of a very large block. If you think of the roads as basically long driveways to main roads, it’s not particularly inconvenient to drive around, or at least no more so than your average suburb with cul de sacs and loops.
Parking garages in these developments also tended to be centers of crime since they were big, desolate, and no one lingered in them to witness anything.
The Vancouver I saw (BC) didn't have any. I'm not saying they don't exist, but what I saw was towers surrounded by one and two story buildings. There were parks and a lot of dead area, but nothing that was tower surrounded by parks.
Beg to differ. I live in Yaletown in one of the Concord Pacific towers. David Lam Park and George Wainborn Park are vibrant as is the whole seawall. My kid goes to the daycare along one of the parks.
I'm sitting at my desk in an office in Gastown in a low-rise. The streets are covered in feces and broken crack pipes.
"towers in the park" refers to a pretty specific layout where the towers are surrounded and separated by parks. Yaletown has parks that are surrounded by towers, which generally seems to work better
To your point, it works best if the tower is a business related building (or a straight shopping mall), thus creating incentive to generate traffic and also properly maintin it.
Japan has plenty of those (e.g. Roppongi's Midtown, Tokyo Tower, Shinagawa's corp. park)
I would hardly argue that the Shinagawa corporate park, if you mean where the Intercontinental is and where Nikon used to be, works well. There's basically no human activity at ground level except people walking to and from the train.
Are you confused about what a question is and what a claim is?
The question is about whether you believe they are fake or not. I don’t have any claims in either direction.
e.g. “Didn’t pan out that well” according to what authoratative sources?
You can’t get around it via linking a wikipedia article with opinions expressed by other random people, without any more authority or credibility than many HN users.
Edit: And if there is no source with such, then it needs to be proven via logical arguments, observational evidence, etc.
He literally gave an explanation, which if you wanted more details about you could have enquired for him to expand. Instead you brought up the non-sequitur of fake pictures, and didn't engage him in the discussion. Just demanded sources while providing none yourself.
Why is your opinion about what another HN user wrote even meaningful?
Anything that user writes in the future will automatically supersede it.
And your opinion about the interpretation of someone else’s comment can never outweigh anyone else’s opinion on the same… so it seems empty of any substance.
Thats's from Wright's big pointy object period. Several of his unbuilt designs, including Broadacre City and the Arizona state capital, included big pointy objects. The Marin Civic Center was the only completed project where the big pointy object [1] was built.
The spire in Scottsdale is also a big pointy object that was completed (but long after he died). Looks like it was originally meant to be at the state capital, so perhaps it's the same one you're referring to?
Actually, it's not about pointy, but about the high rise as a building type - structure as a tall tree. Wright's prototype for this is Price Tower in OK [1]
>Jeddah Tower, or Kingdom Tower is a paused skyscraper construction project in Jeddah, a major port city on the Red Sea coast of Saudi Arabia. If completed according to plan, the Kingdom Tower would be the tallest building in the world, a title currently held by the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Kingdom Tower is planned to be approximately 1 km (3,300 ft) high, which is significantly taller than the current Guinness World Record holder, the Burj Khalifa which stands 828 m (2,717 ft) high.
> In the debate over density, architects and planners are split into two camps. The first is pro-density, which believes in ... clusters of skyscrapers. This is the pro-city crowd. The second is the anti-density camp ... This is the pro-suburb crowd
What about what me might call the "Barcelona" style? Or many other EU cities full of approximately six-story residential buildings with small shops on the ground floor. The style is relatively dense, with mass-transit systems and low private car ownership rates. But no need for skyscrapers. (There are some skyscrapers, but they're not key elements of the residential plan).
That's a fun blog. The author writes about tall buildings almost to a point of fetishism, but seems at least aware of that obsession, hence the name.
Although I don't care much about most tall buildings, I do like that blogs on single, weird topics still exist and are being written. Niche blogs are one of the best uses cases for the web.
Did he "design" the building as in full schematics of a building that should stand? Or was this just a sketch in jest? I assumed we were reaching the limits of how tall we can make skyscrapers. Doubling the tallest ever built seems unachievable. Doesn't the square cube law bring it down?
We're a long way from those limits. The limiting factor for tall buildings is elevators: The taller the building, the greater a percentage of the floor space gets taken up by elevator shafts. At some point so much space gets used by elevators that there's not enough rentable space left to make the building economically worthwhile.
It seems to me like elevator shafts with a single elevator going up and down is somewhat of a waste of building volume, with limited throughput similar to that of single-track railway.
Couldn't a smaller number of shafts move a greater amount of people using one-way traffic, paternoster-style?
Historically, elevators hung on cables, and that's why it was one per shaft. Paternosters put more weight on their hanging parts and probably have much more severe height limitations.
There are a few different systems out there, I haven't seen one in person, but they seem like interesting ideas. I found some searching "Circulating Multi-car Elevator System"
Maybe, but there are details that matter that make it questionable. The Paternoster works but has both safety issues (thus illegal for new construction and where they exist only trained people are allowed to use it), and is slow. There are lots of other options that your elevator salesman can discuss with out - but all have trade offs that you may not like. In the end though there is no getting around large numbers of people take a while to move.
> The limiting factor for tall buildings is elevators: The taller the building, the greater a percentage of the floor space gets taken up by elevator shaft
That’s only true if you plan for getting about everybody into and out of the building every day, at ground level.
There are some ‘designs’ (rather: rough ideas, typically in science fiction, and often dystopian) that let go of that constraint (think flying cars landing on balconies or enormous buildings where people mostly live and work on a few floors of an enormous building)
Generally, fire evacuation doesn't count on using elevators anyway. Stairwells are used for evacuation. If the elevators still work, they're typically used by firefighters going up.
A lot of his buildings that were actually built were materialized sketches. Fallingwater was underbuilt, and Usonian homes are a bit awkward to live in because Wright glossed over important livability features.
Just realized that architects had to actually draw their designs before computers. This is obviously true, but I haven't had to think about this until now.
The realization sets in that the whole culture war of the abstract on the ornamental, migtht boil down to avoiding having to draw till your hands fell off.
If you just need one drawing of something unique it is probably still fastest. But nobody needs one drawing of something unique. You often want to take your drawing and program some CNC (3d printer...) to build parts and CAD/CAM can do that much quicker. You often want more than one copy of the drawing reduced/enlarged. You often want to give different views to different people which CAD will just do with a few clicks. You often want to run analysis for various things (do the beams work, will the pipes carry the needed water...). Many more things modern CAD can just do and more things are being added - you just need to learn to use a computer.
The best way to start a design is with one drawing of something unique.
When I start I don’t know if its beams or walls or trusses or tensile fabric. I don’t know where the water comes from. I don’t know where it goes because I don’t know the shapes of things. Don’t know the form of the whole.
Sometimes computers are appropriate to the work. Sometimes they are not. I started learning CAD in 1989. My understanding of the work is different now.
Recommend checking out Taliesin West, if you're ever near Scottsdale. You'll get to see where he and his students did a lot of the draft work for his architecture and see some of the drafts too.
Fun story, Wright despised the electrification of the rural US, and threatened to abandon the property when poles were erected nearby, considering them unsightly.
I much prefer Gaudi - even more outrageous, and his roofs didn't leak. He didn't have access to modern engineering, but all his buildings were well built.
Gaudi pioneered a lot of interesting physical modelling techniques to check his designs, e.g., he was the first to use inverted space-hanging models for domes and vaults (although his predecessors had used them for arches).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vancouverism - many advantages to tall dense development. Especially stupid are his comments about how suburbia is supposedly better for kids even though they have nothing to do and rely on their parents to be driven to every activity. All based entirely on his made up anecdote.
People are less lonely in dense cities than they are in suburbs.
> suburbia is supposedly better for kids even though they have nothing to do and rely on their parents to be driven to every activity.
That's a USofAian "suburb" .. not a well designed suburb.
There are many types of "dense", ranging from all skyscrapers, through (say) dense row housing with much open space, to big single house blocks everywhere (arguably the worst form).
Elsewhere in the world suburbs are surrounded by green belts and have embedded parks, footpaths and cycleways, shops, etc that are reachable without cars.
I live in SW London. It's definitely suburbia, but the density is just about perfect, at least as I see it. Since about age 11 my kids were fairly free range - they could hang about outside with their friends (the street is very quiet, and there's a green space opposite), cycle to their friends, or use the frequent buses and trains, though we'd drive and pick them up if they were out late. Most weeks though, my car doesn't move Monday to Friday - I cycle to the station. There's plenty of green space around, and sailing and kayaking on the River Thames. But the good public transport and ability to cycle all around only really works because housing density is high. We have a four floor town house, so plenty of floor area but a fairly small garden. When we moved here, I thought it would be for just a few years, until we could afford somewhere with more land. Living previously in California, Massachusetts and elsewhere in the UK, it wasn't really my image of an ideal place. But we've been here 20 years and although I could afford to move anywhere now, I don't want to. I'm happy here. My neighbours are my friends, everyone knows everyone else, and I feel no need to try and impress anyone with how much land I have. Anyway, my point is that there probably is an optimal density for cities, and some European cities probably come close to that optimal.
I would guess some Latin American origins. They have a very persistent meme culture that is upset that, in English, when you say “American”, you mean “from the United States of America”. Whereas, at least in Spanish-speaking countries, they have a different mental model of the world’s landmasses and the entire western hemisphere is “America”. Not North or South as separate continents; it’s like being “European”. So, while in, say, Argentina, I might be careful to call myself “estadounidense” (my Spanish is poor, please forgive spelling and suffix errors), it’s
really not an issue in our southern neighbor, which is the Estados Unidos Mexicanos (United Mexican States) so, “estadounidense” applies equally to them. And yes, I have spent time in Mexico City, and nobody got in my face for saying “soy Americano”. Most of the visitors are going to be from other parts of Mexico or from the US, with a significant minority of Canadians.
It's generally white people thinking they are solving a problem, honestly. Even if some people don't like that 'America' tends to refer to the US rather than something general to the continent or one or both of the continents, it doesn't really matter - there is never any ambiguity. The contexts talking about something the US is doing vs the continents are pretty much always crystal clear.
> And yes, I have spent time in Mexico City, and nobody got in my face for saying “soy Americano”.
Oh but you can basically guarantee there's an inner eye roll everytime you call yourself Americano. Estadounidense works, as Estados Unidos Mexicanos is largely not in use, and Mexicano(a) is the prefered term.
It's not a different mental model, it's just a mis translation. In Spanish saying "soy Americano" translates to 'I am from the Americas'. That's why the preference is to just use Estadounidense. It effectively means that US people are wrong if they say 'soy Americano' in Spanish, and Latin Americans are wrong for saying 'I am American' is wrong in english.
> It's interesting how some like to regulate the language of others.
No one is trying to regulate anything lol, you're as free to use whatever non-standard terms or words you like, you can even use irregardless if it's your hearts desire to do so.
You just have to keep in mind that people using a silly term to make a silly point ultimately just end up making themselves look silly. Using a term like 'USofAian' is certainly a silly term since it tries to solve a problem that doesn't exist, and actually creates instances of the problem trying to be avoided.
That you've been using it that long is pretty bizarre to me. I guess it was just a way to stand out? Express some personality with a bit of semantic flair? I get that.
And no, in answer to your deleted replies, I'm not American, just someone that doesn't like seeing ambiguity created unnecessarily or misinformation spread, but I see now you were doing it more for stylistic reasons.
Yup. Should be obvious most people would share my stance also.
> Again, no.
Hmm. So why, then?
> Do you have examples of semantic flair that you use to stand out?
I don't try to stand out by being contrarian or via other semantic scheming.
> What ambiguity?
> What misinfomation?
It's confusing to at the least ESL speakers who may think it is a reasonable way to refer to people from the US and it is misinformation to suggest it is.
> For the third time. No.
Hmm.
> Stop trying to make your contextual PoV a thing Gretchen.
Not sure what Gretchen refers to, but I was just trying to assume good faith and that was the only reason I could muster. I look forward to your clarification.
> This is literally no more than a useful contraction of "United States of America citizen"
It's not useful, though - it's harmful. It creates ambiguity where this is none, and tries to solve a problem that doesn't exist.
> Should be obvious most people would share my stance also.
Yes. Most people like you share your point of view. Odd that.
> So why, then?
Check your hoistory, that appears to be the first time you haven't weighed in with nothing but your PoV, preconception, and desire to impose your conclusions as the motivations of others.
Congratulations. You're evolving.
> I don't try to stand out by being contrarian or via other semantic scheming.
But you assume others do? And that makes sense to you. Okay ...
There's been no sign of good faith and assuming the best from your comments since the first one (that appears edited) that patronisingly informed me that I should conform to your way of writing English.
> It's not useful, though - it's harmful.
Who is bleeding?
> It creates ambiguity
Again, what ambiguity? What country did you think that I was referring to?
> Yes. Most people like you share your point of view. Odd that.
You seem to have modified my statement and then taken something other than intended. Allow me to clarify. I was referring to most people as in the vast majority of the English speaking population. Not simply people like me.
> Check your hoistory, that appears to be the first time you haven't weighed in with nothing but your PoV, preconception, and desire to impose your conclusions as the motivations of others.
> Congratulations. You're evolving.
This was the answer you gave in response to my asking why you chose to use an obscure less common less well known term to refer to people of the US. All you could do is insult me in response. This leads me to believe I was correct in my previous good faith assumption.
Also, having to check post history so you can attempt to discredit me instead of just answering a simple question says a lot.
> But you assume others do? And that makes sense to you. Okay ...
As I said, it was the only good faith assumption I could come up with as to why someone would chose to use an obscure less common less well known term to refer to people from the US.
> Is it?
Without a doubt, due to being significantly less used and recognized.
> There's been no sign of good faith and assuming the best from your comments since the first one (that appears edited) that patronisingly informed me that I should conform to your way of writing English.
It wasn't patronizing, it was informing you that that term is less common and tries to solve a problem that doesn't exist. My reply was a lost gamble taking the chance you were someone that ran into someone like spreading nonsense and having picked up a bad term/habit as a result, as opposed to being someone that just likes being contrarian and causes people to pick up said bad terms/habits.
> Who is bleeding?
Is drawing blood really what you limit your concept of harm to?
> Again, what ambiguity?
This was clarified in my previous reply, as were other answers to questions you repeated, but I'll repeat myself again here while continuing to assume good faith.
The ambiguity is in giving the impression that it's a valid term to refer to people from the US, when really it's not so it just creates undue confusion and ambiguity.
Alexander doesn't like sky scrapers, but he absolutely does not advocate for suburbia, at least not the the car-dependent hellscape you presumably have in mind.
You can archive considerable density without skyscrapers. In fact we've been building vibrant, walkable cities without skyscrapers for most of history.
Calling Christopher Alexander an idiot in the context of architecture or urbanism is like calling Linus Torvalds a casual programmer. Peak Dunning-Kruger.
This is an appeal to authority. His arguments were prevalent in the 70s, but no less stupid, and we know better now. We have data to prove it too, unlike his unsubstantiated opinion piece.
Well, you seem pretty certain about all this. Most architects and planners I know are less so. I’ve worked with hundreds, and I know very few who would look me in the eye and say, “Yes, I’d rather raise my kid downtown in a high rise over a tree-filled neighborhood next to a park.”
Alexander isn’t making arguments about economic efficiency, but about what’s good for the human animal. I’d be curious what data you have to disprove this.
Now, if you’re talking about his specific claims like “the higher you are in a building the crazier you get,” yeah, I don’t think much of that supposed data is useful.
I was curious about the phrasing of the Elisha Otis (of elevators) memorial: "inventor of the upended street".
> Man in his upended street must know he is becoming a mere numerical item of convenience; on the way to being a thing. His inherent instinct for love and beauty is not only becoming suspect but, in spite of all intent, useless to society. He sees the human creature atrophy as he sees poverty of imagination in much "modern art," so-called. But it was Walt Whitman himself who raised the perpendicular hand to declare: "It is provided in the essence of things that from any fruition of success no matter what, shall come forth something to make a greater struggle necessary." This is what is now coming forth in our architecture as in our life.
― Frank Lloyd Wright, A Testament
Wonderful - I wonder if this concept served as the inspiration for William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land[0], later revived by John C Wright's Awake in the Night[1].
> The last few millions of the human race are gathered together in the Last Redoubt, a gigantic metal pyramid, nearly eight miles high, which is under siege from unknown forces and Powers outside in the dark.
The best part is that it doesn't connect to a sewer system because princelings aren't interested in competent city planning. Every morning a batallion of honey wagons remove the previous day's waste from holding tanks.
The building was not connected to a sewer system because there was no sewer system when the tower was built. There is now a sewer system and the tower is connected to it.
Is this because it was built too far from existing infrastructure?
I was amazed when I noticed enclaves of rich govt workers in northern VA that have stupid expensive communities but are all on septic tanks and well water.
If you have the right soil and plenty of safe ground water there is nothing wrong with septic and wells in the suburbs. However even at suburb density public systems are not that much more expensive and you gain never having to worry. I have several times in my life on well water turned the faucet on and no water - $2000 to a well driller to replace the pump and I had water again - the pumps last 30 years though essentially no other costs (electric but that is cheap) so overall a well is cheaper. With a septic system it is $600 to pump it every few years, but if the system fails it is $30,000 to replace it.
Again though this depends on where you live. In some places filter raw sewage through 2 cm of dirt and it is safe to drink - in other places raw sewage will travel miles. Likewise some places have plenty of safe water, other places have little water and still other places the water isn't safe to drink.
Reminds me of the line. People layed into that idea- because its a dysfunctional arcology - but its actually a statistic bunker- pretty OP when you expect your people to survive regional nuclear exchanges.
High rises with parking are such a stupid combination. You’re paying for density to put cars in so much of it. If you need parking in your high rise, you’re cosplaying a real metropolis.
> people who own penthouses they've never seen. At some point practicality just goes out the window
This isn't a matter of practicality but economics. The penthouse collectors don't need parking. A high rise with parking is practically screaming that it's a vanity project--the economics that demand a high rise don't work if you have to add dead space for cars. The math only balances if your building is entirely penthouses and valet space for sports cars.
Dude. 100 Helicopter parking spots. Just thinking of a future where 100 people owned them and flew right to their high rise apartment parking space. Pretty sweet but I would not like all that noise.
> thinking of a future where 100 people owned them and flew right to their high rise apartment parking space
I can't hear Blade's birds at their East River heliport on 30th Street in Manhattan from my friend's apartment in Hudson Yards. The noise is mostly at street level. Not in an apartment with a modicum of thought to acoustics.
Most people have great pleasure in owning and driving a nice car. The ones that do not are a minority. There are many reasons why cars (and trucks) are desirable and sought after possessions. It would be a logical fallacy that because you currently do not want one, people should build major projects with no regard to car parking.
Too many people though love cars. Some cities are banning cars. Of course buses, trains, delivery vehicles still exist.
Wide open places like US and Canada sure but many places are super crowded. Southern China, Lagos Nigeria, Tokyo, Mexico City. They're all implementing trains for a reason. There is just no way for cars to move if packed into a small area with hundreds of thousands of people.
In case you're being serious, you rent a car or take an Uber. A metropolis might as well be defined by its lack of car ownership.
Even when you're renting or being driven, you go as far as you can via train. (The Metro-North goes to an Appalachian trailhead [1].) It's safer, simpler, cheaper and nobody has the deadweight loss of being unpaid chauffeur.
Hrmm, so you do need a car after all. It's really amusing listening to people from the Bay Area pass down edicts for how everyone else should use transportation, given that their decrees are a complete non-starter in well over 99% of the United States. Calling it "out of touch" would be a bit generous.
> so you do need a car after all. It's really amusing listening to people from the Bay Area
The Bay Area is car centric--most people have a driver's license. I live in Wyoming and lived in New York. You need a car in Wyoming. You don't in Manhattan. High rises make sense in the latter. They'd be stupid here.
If you're dense enough to make high rises necessary, you're too dense for cars to make sense. Parking for high rises is a dead giveaway the project is being pursued for appearances. (San Francisco's skyscrapers are dominated by commercial buildings that double as advertising.)
You didn't ask how to go hiking in the mountains, you asked how to "leave city limits". but you could still bike, go with friends, or rent a car for a day if no buses go where you want. Hiking locations tend to have lots of tourists so there would likely be bus routes, however.
Sure, that's true - though I can see a couple dozen of them out of the window behind my desk, and there'd be lots more if I were on the other side of the building - but I was really just replying to the previous commenter's mockery of the idea that one could go to the mountains via bus. It's not only possible, it's routine!
Bullshit, I'm from the Puget Sound and it hardly covers any of the good trails in the Cascades, nor could it do so practically if service were ever expanded.
Yeah, and when my grandpa was a kid, instead of a 20 minute drive to the neighboring town, it literally took them three days on foot because of all the hills, sloughs, and rivers. Cars and their associated infrastructure are a modern miracle, and the luddites opposed them are extremely foolish.
Are you claiming that an occasional need for a car dictates that every person needs their own dedicated full time car and that all dwellings need associated parking?
Hmm, they should have gliders. If the average floor is ~800m above the ground, and the surrounding area is largely buildings less than 50m tall, then you don't need an active flying machine to travel over all the buildings directly from the tower to your destination.
Obviously it won't work in the other direction, and you'll need to bring your hang-glider back up, but hang-gliders are pretty light and that's a very solvable problem.
The lettering on the proposal is very interesting. I assume it was hand drawn. I can't find any typeface quite like it. Google Lens suggested it is similar to Copperplate Gothic, which it is and at once is not even close.
Neutraface has some similarities, including the low crossbar height. Fittingly, it appears to be used in materials published by the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.
"Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency." ~ Daniel Burnham
"The Line (stylised THE LINE; Arabic: ذا لاين) is a conceptual linear smart city in Saudi Arabia in Neom, Tabuk Province, housed in a single building, that is designed to have no cars, streets or carbon emissions.[2][3] The original plans called for the city to span 170 kilometres (110 mi) at a height of 500 m (1,600 ft)[4] and a width of 200 metres (660 ft) sized to accommodate a population of 9 million"
My personal pet dream, if i had a sufficient number of billions, - several large, like that Wright's, skyscrapers 30+ km into the ocean off the SF Ocean Beach (the depth there is like 50-80m, so sub-1M tons of concrete and steel would give you a 100m-side square foundation with 10m walls, and such foundation itself already can house 10-20 underwater stories)
Wright’s tower has a better chance of being built than the Line. (From just a security perspective, a Saudi Red Sea megaproject is all kinds of stupid.)
The Line is in Tabuk Province, Saudi Arabia's northwest projection against Jordan, Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula. It's within proven bombing range of several regional terrorist groups, including some with explicit antagonism against the KSA, e.g. the Houthis. Put simply, it's a megaproject that strongly depends on borders staying put and low-boil militancies at a simmer.
Parks need a certain level of activation, and developments like these tended to fall below those thresholds. If not active, parks become ill-maintained, desolate, and foreboding. In the worst case scenario, they become havens for crime, since there are no witnesses or bystanders to help out someone getting mugged.
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