FORM AND STRUCTURE: NEAR-FUTURE POSSIBILITIES OF MEGACITIES BASED ON SCIENCE FANTASY Fanzhe Sun 2019 - 2020
FORM AND STRUCTURE: NEAR-FUTURE POSSIBILITIES OF MEGACITIES BASED ON SCIENCE FANTASY
Student name: Fanzhe Sun Submission in 2020 July Studio programme: ADS2 National Park - New new forest fungi forest park Word count: 7343
FORM AND STRUCTURE: NEAR-FUTURE POSSIBILITIES OF MEGACITIES BASED ON SCIENCE FANTASY
CONTENT
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
6-7
PREFACE
8-9
INTRODUCTION
10-15
SECTION ONE
16-29
SECTION TWO
30-43
CONCLUSION
44-47
BIBLIOGRAPHY
48-49
CITIES IN SCIENCE FANTASY AND ITS MEGA FUTURE
HORIZONTAL TO TALLER AND WIDER MIXTURE
TALLER AND TALLER
TOWARDS IT WILL BE
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
INTRODUCTION: Figure 1: Oscar Newman, Nuclear-proof Manhattan, 1969
PAGE 13
SECTION ONE: Figure 2: Hugh Ferriss, The Metropolis of Tomorrow, 1929
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Figure 3: Ghost in the shell, Cityscape in film, 2017
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Figure 4: William Le Baron Jenney, The first skyscraper, 1885
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Figure 5: Le Corbusier, Ville Radieuse, 1924
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SECTION TWO: Figure 6: One residential complex, Tseung Kwan O, Hong Kong, 1988
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Figure 7: Peter Cook, long section of “plug-in” city, 1964 version
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Figure 8: Pieter Bruegel, Tower of Babel, 1563
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PREFACE
“Science fiction is about the future The human future will be urban Therefore, science fiction should be about urban futures. Science fiction is about the implications of new technologies Cities are the most complex of technological artefact Therefore, science fiction is [often] about the physical and technological possibilities of city making. Science fiction tries to explore the future of human society Cities are the central organizing system for human society Therefore, sf is [often] about the complexities of living in the future cities.” By Carl Abbott 1
INTRODUCTION
CITIES IN SCIENCE FANTASY AND ITS MEGA FUTURE
Joh Fredersen’s eyes wandered over Metropolis, a restless roaring sea with a surf of light. In the flashes and waves, the Niagara Falls of light, in the colour-play of revolving towers of light and brilliance, Metropolis seemed to have become transparent. The houses dissected into cones and cubes by the moving scythes of the searchlights gleamed, towering up, hoveringly, light flowing down their flanks like rain. —— Thea von Harbou, Metropolis (1927) 2
This type of description, to a great extent, conforms to current readers’ major impression about urban scene in the science-fantasy imagination, almost relating to the serried soaring skyscraper forest, to the shiny glazing skins, to the high-tech stylistic architecture forms that have visible distinctions from traditional or rural brutal styles, to the glaring light sea flowing down the vertical tower and then expanding widely along the transportation lines, to piles of density high-speed transportation networks or a sky full of flying cars. It seems to have become one of the symbolic imagines appearing in mind while mentioning this style of fantasy. Generally, cities are not often regarded as one category on the common lists of the science fantasy subject matters. Those more familiar imaginative elements are always rocket ships and space station, weird aliens and their new worlds, cloning and genetic engineering, robotics, artificial
Form and structure: near-future possibilities of megacities based on science fantasy
intelligence and information system, nanotechnology and even warp drives and time travel, to describe the probabilities and improbabilities of science technologies. But, for sure, cities are nevertheless ubiquitous and important, no matter those perfect technological world or miserable dystopian zones. They are often employed as backgrounds and stages for the stories through their social ecosystem and city fabric, in the familiarizing frames serving up effective expectations for readers and viewers and in the much similar method to work as what the cities do nowadays. Tangibly or invisibly, those common lists of SF subject matters inevitably influence the keynotes of their cityscapes, impact the cities’ operation mode as complex synthesis and infiltrate the everyday SF life to build up its typical style, in which the shuttled robot servers and holographic digital maps or advertisements bestride the visual impression of the technological cities in, for example, Cyberpunk worlds. 12
To serve different subjects and styles, these SF cities have rich and various settings for their differences and complexities: some of them function as faultlessly as glitchless machines; some are impregnable as a protective and self-sufficient shelters [figure 1]; some, oppositely, become disaster zones or closed prisons filled by struggling and pain sentiments; some describe a different peculiar world to satisfy the extra-terrestrial life, needs, habits and cultures. These settings help to concretely create myriad magnificent imaginative city types and forms. Among these, what is the most closed to the current cities’ forms in real twenty-first century is the technological megacity emphasizing the scale, density and complexity, as a prevalent impression of SF cities described at the beginning of this introduction. Those approaching this impression in real world such as Hongkong, New York, Shanghai, Dubai, are significant remaining of traditional cities with radical developing, of which all show the soaring and technologic visages to weave the shiny dreams in medias within the reality. The extraordinary elements and skylines
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Introduction - cities in science fantasy and its mega future
13
Figure 1: Oscar Newman, Nuclear-proof Manhattan, 1969 Here shows only one example about shelter protecting the city from disaster to represent various SF city types. Drawing is about a replica of Manhattan from architect Oscar Newman like a nightmare of his theory about defensive space. This type of underground city is some of the oldest ideas.
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Form and structure: near-future possibilities of megacities based on science fantasy
are inspired by past SF works, and again, being referred by the visuals of more SF films or art works as prototype, to take their middle skyscraper districts, that fairly emphasize the height and busyness, as the common starting point for much higher, larger and denser cities of future. As designers suggest in the visual choice of film, by and large, that “the future will be not only shiny but also ‘tall’, a place where glass- and steel towers frame urban airways through which the aircars weave.” 3
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If cities around the world continuedly developing along the current track, the most possible and practical near-future trend would go towards its magnificent extremity in density, size, height and depth under the situation of overpopulation and technology bomb. This prediction is based on a future without suffering disasters and transferring into ruin settlements or some specific shelters, and without considering the particular situations like space migration or occupation of vast unhuman territories for much grandly dispersive spread and relevant novel typologies that satisfy the uncertain new needs. In detail, that also guides the discussion in the following main body, the near-future hypothesis would much more possible to be a blend but expanding the scale and complexity from all axis or, more subversively, a redefined city form that one tower would run as one city when it arrived the certain level of vertical complexities .4 These possibilities are not noninteracting in parallel but mixed and fermenting into striking jumbo beyond the imagination, not only being displaced as prediction of trend in city form, frame and system but also excavated into some levels of practicalness from some aspects by cases. Of course, the other fantastic city settings related to those specific conditions, have undeniable meaning to the multiformity of future city and social, but this is not keyed in this dissertation.
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Introduction - cities in science fantasy and its mega future
ENDNOTES - INTRODUCTION: 1. Carl Abbott, Imagining Urban Futures: Cities in Science Fiction and What We Might Learn from Them (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2016), pp. 2,7. 2.Thea Von Harbou, ‘Metropolis’, 1927, quoted in Carl Abbott, Imagining Urban Futures: Cities in Science Fiction and What We Might Learn from Them (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2016), p. 19. 3. Abbott, p. 28. 4. where one tower is equivalent with one district and tower group is like current metropolitan. The relationship of the tower and tower group is like London zones and the great London. Figure 1: Oscar Newman, Nuclear-proof Manhattan, 1969, from Esquire, Dec.1969, Courtesy JF PTAK Science books, Courtesy of princeton architectural press via Atlas Obscura.
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Critical & Historical studies - Year 1
SECTION ONE
HORIZONTAL TO TALLER AND WIDER MIXTURE
‘Nightmarishly vast spires whose bulging foundations covered whole city blocks…. Storey after storey rose silent and dreamlike, buildings so unspeakably huge that they lost all sense of weight; they hung above the earth like Euclidean thunderheads, their summits lost in sheets of steel-gray rain.’ 1 This is one example from Bruce Sterling’s description of future Singapore in Islands in the Net (1988) to review the figure of this mixture SF city that have much overlap with the form of current metropolis. The fiction worlds never lack examples of this type of future city. Also, artists do not fall behind in analogous creations. In 1925, the “Drawings of the Future City” and following drawings of “Titan City” or New York from 1926 to 2026 by the architectural draftsman Hugh Ferriss, were displayed to show his renders of countless ziggurat towers in the dark and sweep searchlights lighting up the urban canyons celebrating technological progress, where dark and moody visual journey echoed the shadowy backdrops of classic silent film metropolis [figure 2].2 Not lonely, William Robinson Leigh create fantastic visions earlier in 1908, enormously inspiring the modernist and futurist in art and architecture.3 As unreal worlds, it is always an easy work to search out ten thousand art renders about this type of future cities in several seconds, but a difficult segue to architectural creation in the feasibility of real world, that always need deliberate bow towards the engineering and financial
Form and structure: near-future possibilities of megacities based on science fantasy
restrictions. There are promotions to bring some ambitions under the hype and puffery of high rising by the real estate business and exuberant design competitions. Marquee names of Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaus, Paul Rudolph, Paolo Soleri and so on have already produced a little more experiment in architectural science fantasy style than expectations, but those works do not quite leave the ground under the serious rules.
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The endeavour of architects, from not only avant-garde experimenters but also their epigones, is not totally fruitless, as future do not need every detail to be unusual. The current urban form being made up of buildings of these architects has demonstrated parts of some SF style cities, even just a little bit different from those, which would, in great probability, continue to guide the future to go along this existing route to reach a foreseeable future in some regions, like Asia. More specifically, it is difficult to identify the distinct discrepancies between the physical compositions of cities in some SF scene like Ghost in the shell and those in Hongkong, Shanghai and Tokyo. These artificial urbanized landscapes in film and realistic possess same layout principle, typologies, constructions and styles, as real metropolises have already seriously influenced the city backgrounds and ambiance of lots of cyberpunk works. it seems to be a reasonable near future that a more exaggerated current city enlarges its height and weight of city model and each construction in it. However, this closest SF future city settings in Cyberpunk is still worthy to be studied because its innovation take referential fresh city form and cityscapes, owing to its key technology being summarized as “a ubiquitous datasphere of computerized information, and invasive modification of the human body”. 4 These adhered immersive or bodiless small-scale technological reformations have fine impact on the urban appearance by the round effect on daily life. As one of its characteristics, widespread popularity of cyber technology immensely utilizes the database and digitalization to help every aspect of life and to decorate the city appearance by, for example, those sundry arresting huge holographic advertising between the skyscrapers visually presenting the splendid information
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Section one - Horizontal to taller and wider mixture
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Figure 2: Hugh Ferriss, The Metropolis of Tomorrow, 1929
Critical & Historical studies - Year 1
Form and structure: near-future possibilities of megacities based on science fantasy
city in Ghost in the shell [figure 3]. This can be saw as the foreshow of developing “smart city” used as secondary invisible system on physical city structure, but a unhappy situation that everything would have to be exposed in a surveillance environment for vast data collection may be inevitable behind the visible beauty and convenience.5 In a different method but similar backgound, Blade runner, as the milestone impacting the Cyberpunk SF style, use the fast shuttling “spinner”- a iconic fictional flying car of its world with its shiny light, to create new impression of the cityscape, but for sure, followed by more problems and thinking.
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Without considering countless possible future problems, existing problems that already preliminarily appears in todays’ density city will not disappear in near future cites, being also inherited by Cyberpunk cites. As the description of this typical near-future SF sub-category, which is in dark, depressive, alienated and lonely accordatura, anabatic and inflated shadows seriously canopy the dystopia urban bottom, behind its dazzling and colourful appearance hiding a worse environment caused by rising heights over it, unerasable hierarchies and technology gaps in different regions. Difference would never disappear even in the large and erecting near-future city form, and it will stimulate more and more dense vertical volumes, to display the power of elites or house more and more poor people. Future city is inevitably larger and higher but current city is not low. Referring to the existing history, it experienced an imaginative leap for cities developing towards vertical to reach current status, comparing to its developing history for over many millennia being far wider than higher. 6 Developing from one or two stories at very early stage to the time of five-or-six-floors height or higher was majorly limited by slow development of construction and material technologies as well as toilsome indoor vertical transportations by trudging up the stairs. The city landscapes were integrally dragged down and flattened into various city texture.
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Section one - Horizontal to taller and wider mixture
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Figure 3: Ghost in the shell, Cityscape in film, 2017
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Form and structure: near-future possibilities of megacities based on science fantasy
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The magnificent and powerful horizontally spread buildings have taken up the admiration of people for dozens of centuries before the glory of the vertical arriving, and the acceptance towards this new aesthetic was not instantaneous but experiencing a process. From the business blocks that filled the new down towns in the nineteenth century to the new apartment blocks housing the bourgeoisie of Vienna and Paris after 1870, both having similar functions with current high blocks preluded the boom of the vertical construction. These two districts similarly adopted four to six stories in the shapes of cubes or oblongs, that were meant to impress with solidity widely used as the unit language for larder areas of planning. Limited by service technology like water supply, the first floor above the ground-floor shops was the prime location, while top floors, always relegating to poor underclass, were despised, because of the cold and inconvenient conditions being more valued than nice view, that inverted the modern preference of hierarchy in height. 7 The first skyscraper recognized in the world is the Home insurance building, as a ten-storey building designed by William Le Baron Jenney, came out in Chicago in 1885 [figure 4]. The vertical development should ascribe the mass production and usage of reinforced concretes and streels, together with more mature structure for the load bearing of a towering structure. Relevant steel-frame construction technologies showed a kind of rigid beauty. Another non-negligible factor was the mechanically powered safety elevator, originally designed by Otis, as one of the two significant transportation inventions from the century of steam, that supported much more convenience to move towards higher locations and establish the possibilities of vertical communication system. It gave the life of Eiffel Tower and that first skyscraper in the world, as well as more tower office and residential buildings, which started to enter the visual of public and then transfer into aesthetic cliché in the future visualizing cityscapes.8 The idea of “skyline” also changed its common application to the horizontal line of downtown buildings by writers in 1890s, of which original meaning in nineteenth century had been the natural horizon of country vistas. 9
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Section one - Horizontal to taller and wider mixture
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Figure 4: William Le Baron Jenney, The first skyscraper, 1885
Critical & Historical studies - Year 1
Form and structure: near-future possibilities of megacities based on science fantasy
The peak of the vertical conquering the horizontal was from the 1890s to the 1930s in America, especially from the end of First World War when the world economic centre transferred from Europe to America, to the great depression in 1929. Higher and higher towers grew up, when the Baltimore Trust Building got to thirty-four floors, Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning got to forty and the American Insurance Union in Columbus got to forty-six.10 The fast development of shooting towers radically diffused to the worlds, among which the towers were regionally erected up in the later different time periods. Soon, the high tower has symbolized modernity and urban importance. The whole process spent around 150 years in total, when the urban experienced the radical rethought or sometimes rebuilt to give current priority to height rather than width, and this period also accorded with the time when the SF film enduringly engaged with imaginary urban.11
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During that peak period, Le Corbusier, as one of most self-confidential design utopians, put forward a series of high-rise schemes and led to the development of high-density housing typologies in 1920s, which took extensive effect on theories on SF city projects and urban planning in the twentieth and even twenty-first century, From “City for three million” in 1922, to the Ville Radieuse (The Radiant City) in 1924 [figure 5], then to the Voisin Plan for central Paris in 1925, his radical, strict, repeated and almost totalitarian of insistence in order and standardization were implemented through these proposals for what he thought a better lifestyle and a better society. 12 Significantly, his theory took the fresh experience of cleanness, simplicity and modernity to the early twentieth century, building up the efficient frame and principle for modernity generalization. The definition of city scope was going upwards in comparatively short time, but occupation in horizontal plane would never stop with larger and larger notion of city unit, as vertical developing is always second choice if having ground. Horizontal relation in city thinking did and will still take up the primary position to properly layout the city units from
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Section one - Horizontal to taller and wider mixture
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Figure 5: Le Corbusier, Ville Radieuse, 1924
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Form and structure: near-future possibilities of megacities based on science fantasy
the long urban history to the untouched future. For example, the serving scope for setting up centres and important nodes is always calculating the horizontal scope as base to group the vertical data on it; the logic of transportation network mostly starts from the horizontal; and most of the developing processes and planning theories are displayed by planning patterns shaped by different criteria, that frequently appear in common maps, no matter they were formed naturally or were designed artificially. This method of study on planning patterns, named the urban morphology academically, has become what the urban study majorly relies on and is always meaningful to the current and future urban studies, even if the developing in vertical direction adds more contents and complexity on it.
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The basic planning frame of current cites, that largely inherited from the long-lasting period when the horizontally spread buildings dominated the city design, will continually have reference value to this type of mixture near-future cities. The major difference may be increased capacity in each horizontal function zone vertically as well as the change of the key regions and region types basing on different degrees of economy and productivity. In this frame, the whole metropolis is constituted by many districts or rings, with completed city function structure in each of them. The structure, in the form of different types of centres surrounded by horizontally spread small regions and linked by transportation system, complete the role of the city geographically and socially. In this way, each region itself undertaking the relevant complex city function could be regarded as a completed small “city”. In a more complicated nested relationship now and future, several or dozens of districts compose the larger city, or metropolis, or much larger urban units. Dial back to the later nineteenth century to see this principle in history, smaller single linear city had emerged followed by later “conurbation” growing separated cities together as an industry region, since the spread of the railroad - another significant transportation invention from the century of steam, and the motor vehicle diminished the physical limita-
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tion in distance and enlarge the city. The expanded relationship promoted the notion of “metropolitan district” in 1920 and “metropolitan area” in 1940 to encompass cities conglutinated together for census and administration purpose. 13 This was expanded as “megalopolis” by Jean Gottmann to simplify the whole north-eastern America from Boston to Washington as one entirety, that was soon adapted by Japan as “megaroporisu”. 14 And in twenty-first century, America redefined it as “megaregion”, and in China that is used as “mega-urban region”.15 The paper of “Ecumenopolis: Tomorrow’s City” by Greek planner Constantinos Doxiadis clearly demonstrated that “much larger urban units” mentioned before in SF style, and stated this expansive course from metropolis, to megapolis, than to a larger combo coined “Ecumenopolis”: “All cities will be interconnected in major urban complexes where no distinction between large and small will be possible; they will all have become one … Such cities, growing dynamically over the next two or three generations, will finally be interconnected, in one continues network, into one universal city which we all call the ecumenic city, the city of the whole inhabited earth, or Ecumenopolis. If we speak, therefore, of the cities of the future one century from now, we can state that they will have become one city, the unique city of mankind.” 16 The outspread and interconnection of future cities have its accordance. Just like the past transportation revolution in nineteenth century pushing the extension in size, new transportation in the future would probably again stimulate the horizontal growing of city scope and shape the new structure again. For example, “spinner” in Blade runner mentioned before may take some exciting to these possibilities basing on its faster speed and less road restriction. Other creative SF vehicles would not be worse if they can come out. Return to Ecumenopolis, this is a bold conjecture about the next stage if continuing the wider and taller trend, but this deductive envision of world city or planet city seems to lose more sense in not only the form or structure, but also the planning, the network, the economies, the
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Form and structure: near-future possibilities of megacities based on science fantasy
origin of people and life. Any daily-scale consideration to construct the city system would be hard to touch its scale, as human prefers to live in their familiar circle in most of regular daily life - like going to certain companies, leaving for typical schools, strolling in nearby gardens, shopping in several markets and doing daily social with neighbour people. A much larger activity scope may increase distance between these activity locations and support far more choices, but the number of these daily locations would not increase too much, being still a limited familiar circle.
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Presumably, its experience may be more exciting but may also fall into a deeper level of doubt and anxiety in some situations as our experience now in Shanghai railway stations and London subway lines. The possible complex and inconvenient experience can refer to the journey of Bill in the galactic Hero (1965). When he stranded on Helior, the Imperial Planet as “first city of the galaxy” owning 150 billion population, “the endless miles of metal corridors, the constantly rushing crowds, the slipways, slideways, gravdrops, hellavators ,suctionlifts, and all the rest” made he wander lost after losing his map.17 In this case, the excitement from far wider activity scope seems to start degrading replaced by consequent tiredness that is usual in current metropolitan dwellers. But from an extensive scale, its value would be shown when the activity scope extended into further infinite space with need to increase the size of cites and “centres”. SF works are full of stories in this type of exciting setting. Interestingly, this trend replied to Perter Cook’ s query behind the manifesto of his experimental project of “plug-in” city: “Are cities still necessary? Do we still need the paraphernalia of a metropolis to house the executive function of a capital city? Do we need the agglomeration of five, ten or twenty million people in order to learn, be entertained, enjoy good food or take part in higher productivity?” 18 A farther future might give this notion a life, when the regional difference reduced to almost none in a generally developed and rich social, or the universe level of social relationship asked for the larger units by
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Section one - Horizontal to taller and wider mixture
exaggerating the existing region systems. ENDNOTES - SECTION ONE: 1. Bruce Sterling, Islands in the Net (New York: Ace, 1988), p. 215. 2. Hugh Ferriss, The Metropolis of Tomorrow (New York: Washburn, 1929). 3. Paulms, The Gloriously Unrealistic Atompunk Mage City (2014) <https://www.google.com/amp/s/steampunkopera.wordpress.com/2014/07/11/the-gloriously-unrealistic-atompunk-mega-city/ amp/> [accessed 9th July 2020]. 4. Lawrence Person, Notes Toward a Post-cyberpunk Manifesto (Slashdot: Nova Express, 1999), p.16. 5.Rich Haridy, Science Fiction Cities: How our future visions influence the cities we build (2018) <https://newatlas.com/science-fiction-cities-future-urban-visions-architecture/55569/> [accessed 12th July 2020]. 6. Abbott, p.28. 7. ibid., p.29. 8. ibid., p.28. 9. ibid., p.29. 10. ibid., pp.29-30. 11. ibid., p.28. ; John R. Gold, ‘Under darkened skies: the city in science-fiction film’, Geography 86 (4) (2001): 337-345 (p.339). 12. Gili Merin, ‘ AD Classics: Ville Radieuse / Le Corbusier’, Archdaily (2013) <https://www. archdaily.com/411878/ad-classics-ville-radieuse-le-corbusier> [accessed 15th July 2020]. 13. Abbott, p.63. 14. ibid., p.63. 15. Catherien L. Ross, ed., Megaregions: Planning for Global Competitiveness (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2009). 16. Constantinos Doxiadis, Ecumenopolis: Tomorrow’s City (1968) <http://www.doxiadis.org/> [accessed 17th July 2020]. 17. Harry Harrison, Bill, the Galactic Hero, 1965, (New York: ibooks, 2001), p.95. 18. Peter Cook, ‘Plug-in City’, A guide to Archigram 1961-74, Academy Editions, edited by Arvhigram Group (London: imprint of Academy Group Ltd, 1994), pp.110-123 (p.119) Figure 2: Hugh Ferriss, The Metropolis of Tomorrow, 1929, from book Ferriss, Hugh. The Metropolis of Tomorrow (New York: Washburn, 1929) Figure 3: Ghost in the shell, Cityscape in film, 2017, from film Ghost in the Shell, dir: Rupert Standers, 2017 Figure 4: William Le Baron Jenney, The first skyscraper, 1885, from Chicago History Museum, Archive Photos, Getty Images Figure 5: Le Corbusier, Ville Radieuse, 1924, from article Merin, Gili. ‘ AD Classics: Ville Radieuse / Le Corbusier’, Archdaily (2013) <https://www.archdaily.com/411878/ad-classics-villeradieuse-le-corbusier> [accessed 15th July 2020]
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SECTION TWO
TALLER AND TALLER
“Eight hundred levels with maternity wards, nurseries, schools, shops, museums, zoos, theatres, skating rinks and crematoriums…intoxication chambers as well as sobering tanks, special gymnasium for group sex (an indication of the progressive attitude of the architects), and catacombs for nonconformist subculture communities.” 1 This is the plan of future housing presented by a Japanese delegate in the conference that convened to address seven world crises of urban, ecology, air pollution, energy, food, military, political in The futurological Congress (1971).2 An amazing, giant and complex self-contained seventeen-cubic-kilometres vertical volume was proposed, that would be built from ocean bed to stratosphere.3 This idea of housing, or saying giant residential complex, have ability to bear a city level, even metropolis level of population and functions in the form of one construction. The notion of city complex accompanied by the high-rise are not unfamiliar to twenty-first century, as the common street view in every city, attributing to the lasting cycles of the real estate boom and bust. They mostly appear in the typologies of residential complex and commercial complex (other typologies are not economic enough to develop highrise). Massive public housing in the real world has enriched its capacity, purposes and types as affordable abodes for undeniable effect– whether a Hong Kong example of “Tseung Kwan O” provide housing and life
Form and structure: near-future possibilities of megacities based on science fantasy
zone for approximately 22,000 people and this type of housing resident nearly half of Hong Kong’s 7.8 million population.4[figure 6] It can be dating back to late nineteenth century and developed fast over the twentieth century as social housing to strategically dwell the working-class as the replacement after slum clearance, with frequent criticisms voiced to complain nurture of the alienating environment and less vitality in humanity. The current level of height and complexity cannot still avoid the horizontal design thinking when building up its intricate towering form and system. But the commercial complex comparatively has less functional limitation to reveal much of the potential of system complicacy in the air (or deep into the ground; vertical development are not in single direction but rising height in are is much easier technology and environmentally) in current technology level and social system, but both types indicate a more vertical future as an alternative to the trend of existing city forms. 32
Lonely standing, super-skyscrapers are also common notion but not seen everywhere. This type soars in Taipei, Kuala Lumpur, Dubai and most recently many Chinese cities like Suzhou, Shanghai, etc taking up 5 seven positions of top ten ranking in world highest towers list 2020. But the highest tower in the world till belongs to Dubai. This tower named “Burj Khalifa” was finished in 2010, which soars 838-meters stalagmite form, with “a treelike central core that rises the full height of the building to become a spire” to load 162 clover-shape of floors synthetically mixing the complete functions of residence, office, shopping, leisure and observatory. 6 The complexes of these super-skyscrapers bring a touch of fantasy to glass-and-mental boxes of common corporations. There was a taller scheme for realistic world in 1950, when “The Illinois” was proposed by Frank Floyd Write, climbing 528 stories magically owning fifteen thousand parking stalls and 150 helicopter parking slots, with four-times height of the Empire State Building.7 It is not given birth finally but successfully declared the vertical ambitious. This level of vertical size is not surprising, as lots of avant-garde are keeping trying this kind of developing possibilities to make the height and complexity of
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Section two - Taller and taller
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Figure 6: One residential complex, Tseung Kwan O, Hong Kong, 1988
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Form and structure: near-future possibilities of megacities based on science fantasy
one block expand to urban level. In this way, the definition of city form would be modified to base on the multidimensional scope and the new city form and structure as well as its social ecosystem would also be out of convention.
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Peter Cook displayed the edgy “plug-in” city idea to public, designed between 1962 and 1966, which will be referred to analysis this towering city structure and its social life from a perspective of more architecture- discipline -style science fantasy beyond the current practical constructions. This metropolitan project was labelled as Archigram series, whose major designer was also the founder of this organization, as an avant-garde architectural group, being neo-futuristic, anti-heroic and pro-consumerist with the strong expectation to celebrate the new world while witnessing a series of technical explosion in middle of last century. Archigram created more than 900 drawings between 1960 and 1974 to reimagine architecture as new forms filled by experience and weaved them together in comic books and posters that made a bizarre or ludicrous sense of science-fiction imaginary, in which the plug-in city was in a form of “applying a large-scale network structure, containing access ways and essential services, to any terrain”, into which the replaceable units catering for all needs are placed.8 Because this project was “the combination of a series of ideas that were worked upon between 1962 and 1964”, several phases was contained with difficulties to decide which one formed the definitive version, where all of notions were equally exploded on the quality of city life, being paralleled in the Living City exhibition. 9 The most disseminated one would be selected to discussed here, which reared extraordinary huge turbination shape of megastructures in visual, without exactly setting up the floor number. This metropolitan architecture, that was obviously futurist, contained distinct levels and features. To the skeleton, the Montreal tower was chosen as its model, to link and load those large ‘plug-in’ conglomerations, for the overall megastructure and movement tubes combined in it.10 To deeply analyse
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inside, the structure grid supporting the tower was placed upon a square plan presenting at 45 degree with ground plane, alongside to run a massive channel for hovercraft to make several linked parts in some key functions travel between each other. 11 Service tube system, with richer functions than current city pipes system, was combined into the structure grid to serve and manoeuvre the units by the operation of crane from the railway at the apex of structure. This viaduct-like structure, against which units like housing and shopping could lean, guaranteed the frequent goods serving, exchanging and unit replacements for maintenance, as well as encouraged the development towards the incorporation of different social elements. 12 Pylon with a ‘tray’ hanging off each side was created at the top to contain elevator and service as the hinge to communicate different part that would be exchangeable, where the lift technology was outdated to look at today. 13 As the core to run this city system, the importance of dialogue was acceptable and emphasised by Peter Cook in his design and manifesto. The major principle was kept similar through the regionalization of function in big or small zones, arrangement of the zones in districts following the stratified using relationship and developing objectives as well as hierarchical layout of building or groups in functions along the pedestrian, street, road, avenue and route as rows or regions, which not only describe the detail plan language inside the zones or but also largely connect the zones as ‘vessel’. The alteration of planning theory in this vertical city was majorly reflected in the overturn of reginal distribution and communication from ‘plan’ to ‘section’ and the functions partition basing on the ‘cluster’, as grouping of parts and units, instead of division on ground, with standing-up costly communication network. This is appropriate for many of vertical cities. To look at its planning theory in detail by the drawing shown: Car silos and rail stop were plugged along the central “route” as the core of dialogue and major skeleton that constitute “city centre”; central plaza was put in heart with dynamic shape occupying a large space, as mid-
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dle commercial zone where the idea of automated shopping was considered relying on service tunnel system as part of the main structure and communication (its detail proposal was shown in the Nottingham project); units in column for rentable office “bunches”, being divided as the “front” office and “backroom” office, 14 and information silos were placed on the top alongside the slant structure and movement tube, as the project introduction saying that “diagonalized movement combine with the Plug-in Office tower in a hypothetical ‘business town’ along an international route”; 15 Music theatre, theatre and exhibition zones were distributed at the side for culture and leisure; residential unit zones were dispersed among these public functions as it always do horizontally, but ensure daily life by service system and communication tunnels. In part of the city presented in detail, selective small-scale cultural zones with typical importance to the city design in European culture zone were presented as sub-centre beside the transportation “route”, copying from what most ancient European cities did. This was logic enough structure to run a city-level society vertically and create its unique appearance following its function: “Craggy but directional. Mechanistic but scalable.” [figure 7] 16 Other city models from fictional worlds, being created in a more recent time, would take some new perspectives. Being published in 2010, the City of Dreams and Nightmares in “City of a hundred rows” series by British writer Ian Whates displayed another vertical city, named Thaiburley, which is a high-rising city with a hundred rows, or levels. In the eye of a traveller from rural inland, its “the towering city walls were just as magnificent and awe-inspiring as imagination had painted them. The closer the city grew, the more its sheer scale become apparent” 17 It, differently, shows more consideration of social situation and city life in human scale but less in rational architecture, city structure and whole working method as an artificial ecologies, due to its function as background setting for novel to support ongoing scenario and activities rather than architectural urban project focusing on design theory. Therefore,
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Figure 7: Peter Cook, long section of “plug-in” city, 1964 version
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its social structure decided the basic urban frame, that the City Above is the dwell for the elite and the cavernous City Below is full of hardscrabble folks’ dwell at the bottom, which is not considered in plug-in city. 18 The regional division according to class is not unacquainted in real and narrative world especially in density city background, that always lead to the discrepancy in physical component, cityscape and life scenes.
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Thaiburley is imagined as a completely articulated city, with some similarities with plug-in city in a vertical systematic structure. The communication is kernel for both. Thaiburley’s communication system is segmented, by stair and elevators, with a dozen or fifteen levels as a length, so that one should get off the lift and cross to another platform for next segment. This looks more practical in circulation control, safety and maintenance, compare to the general setting in plug-in city, of which the deliberately exaggerated lift overruns would cause the stress on the essential physical operations. The elevators are paired, in which one rises when the other down. Outside of the body structure have stairways and funicular railways clinging to the surface, where characters flee, or chase and bodies are pitched or die from falling.19 Compare to the “plugin” city ‘s structure and transportation put in middle, this way supports a different possibility in city’s outside appearance, which is normally the feature for building and not prominent in flat city, however, adapting to the towering city with integrity in form. Spaces themselves are ordinary without deviate the basic principle as plug-in city. Much of the space in rows are dwellings, among which terraces are placed for each row that open to the air. The rows function as food supply levels, shopping rows, as well as ground-level market row distributing beyond the base of the city are placed more centrally, being described in rhyme that “from street below to the market row, from taverns and stalls to the shopping halls”. 20 Encircling the shopping and market row, top is for upper class life circle while further down, below to the market level, “the vast cavern which housed Thaiburley’s lowest level” sits in the subsurface levels.21 This structure setting is still full of ancient
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ambience like medieval Europe where cathedral, halls, guilds, cultural buildings and markets shape busy public centre in city function not geographically, interspersed by levels of dwelling zones. Different from “plug-in” city and Thaiburley, a current popularity somewhere from about recent one hundred of year is to place the commerce as centre serving the consumers. Central types are not single but richer, taking in those long-lasting cultural centres, political centres and religious centre, or even industry centre in a kind of new life which is originally rising from later eighteenth century and then, being replaced by commercial economic in earlier twentieth century. It can predict the near-future city centres in function would be probably to continue this richness in a wider and taller form that is not exclusive of central type of “plug-in” city and Thaiburley, while cultural unity or difference weaken would be also possible but more likely to in a far situation. Spearpoint, a much taller vertical city than Thaiburley in Terminal world (2010) by Alastair Reynolds, stands in a shape of cone, which is inverse with the version of “plug-in” city discussed. It has a relatively wide base and a curved taper when going up to finally arrive a spire beyond the habitable levels into vacuum.22 Its footprint of fifteen leagues across at the base, narrowing to one-third of the league across above the ground with fifty leagues.23 This scale is huge enough to house thirty million people.24 Its impressive technology feat is thrown in weird physical principle by Reynolds for tremendous height. Different zones in the horizontal bands physically coexist different levels of technology dramatically, including Horsetown, Streamville, Neon Heights, Circuit City, a Cyborg zone, and the Celestial levels from bot25 tom upwards. It is difficult to have to say a more distinct hierarchy can be avoided either overt or covert in this form of city that more or less influence the city structure in a way. The residential regions constitute the complexity of the city covers its surface and is extended into interior partway, being located similarly with “plug-in” units. Mechanical funicular and railroad running on a curving ramp connect the function
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Form and structure: near-future possibilities of megacities based on science fantasy
regions. This form and connection to circle and recircle the tower make the city much like the Tower of Babel drawn by Pieter Bruegel the Elder [figure 8], and it is similar to planning a rich mountain city to place the complexes on an artificial mountain, comparing to a more artificial form in “plug-in” city with the highly consistent units being inserted into the grid.
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Larger or smaller, these preconceived colossus in imaginary world, bearing billions or millions of dwellers in a comparatively pocket footprint, are not always separated from overpopulation issue as one of major future crises. As those realistic complexes, a further-huger SF vertical city would require a far more higher plot ratio to save the land and efficiently maximum population capacity in concentrated and claustrophobic living. Peter Cook put forward a proposition “that the whole city might be contained in a single building” while thinking of the plug-in city but agreed more on multi-level metropolitan organization in effect because of the consideration of dialogue. A comparatively isolated life circumstances and relevant social problems have already been critiqued in its realistic cases of complex being regarded as smaller-scale epitomes of SF vertical world.26 No matter this result would be of general willingness or coerced by environmental limitation. Exciting visions of vertical supercities from the starting of twentieth century both gave action to the SF writers in the “golden age” from 1930s to 1940s and took the dreams to the boomer generation who grow up with these fantasies becoming part of their universe. 27 The magnificent scenes in those medias and impressions being away from us always show the beautiful illusions, but exact experience of personal immersion in these stacked larger-than-life aggregations would bring the so-called bright city future into questions: just as different bands of Spearpoint live in extremely different technology levels; as the vast underground dystopia space for the poor in Thaiburley is filled by “bazaars, aliens, street gangs, a river that provides power and takes away the waste, docks, factories, and ‘the ruins’ accommodating the taverns, whores, workers, bargemen,
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Figure 8: Pieter Bruegel, Tower of Babel, 1563
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and beggars”, 28 even if though it contains more lives and interests in Whates’ description telling a story of cops, street gang, children running through back alleys and abandoned buildings; as highly similar units and structure in plug-in city operate the everyday lives as machinary components catering to the trend in the middle of twentieth century; as the conference mentioned at the beginning of this section, being hold at the Costa Rica Hilton, that erects 164 stories into sky and outfits bomb-free rooms and luxury space with “an all-girl orchestra that played Bach while performing a cleverly choreographed striptease”, showing a 29 hedonic but actually decayed world. The technological rising-up world may not be illusionary utopian, but “may be artificial bananas, ersatz wine, and synthetic cocktail sausages”, 30 or may be the descripition from “Walking in the City” of Michel de Certeau:
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“The gigantic mass is immobilized before the eyes. It is transformed into a texturology in which extremes coincide -- extremes of ambition and degradation, brutal oppositions of races and styles, contrasts between yesterday’s buildings, already transformed into trash cans, and today’s urban irruptions that block out its space.... Its present invents itself, from hour to hour, in the act of throwing away its previous accomplishments and challenging the future.” 31
ENDNOTES - SECTION TWO: 1. Stanislaw Lem, ‘The Futurological Congress’, 1971, quoted in Carl Abbott, Imagining Urban Futures: Cities in Science Fiction and What We Might Learn from Them (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press,2016), p.43. 2. ibid., p.43. 3. Abbott, p.43.
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4. Hong Kong Administration, Census and Statistics Department <https://www.censtatd.gov.hk/ hkstat/srh/index.jsp> [accessed 13th July 2020]. 5. Unknown, 2020世界最高楼 排名前十对比 /A comparison of the top 10 tallest buildings in the world in 2020 (2020) <http://www.860816.com/aricle.asp?id=1066> [accessed 13th July 2020]. 6. Witold Rybczynski, ’Dubai Debt’, Slate (2010) <http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/architecture/2010/01/dubai_debt.html> [accessed 13th July 2020]. 7. Abbott, p.32. 8. Cook, p.115. 9. ibid., p.110. 10. ibid., p.110. 11. ibid., p.114. 12. ibid., pp.114-115. 13. ibid., p.114. 14. ibid., pp.114-115. 15. ibid., pp.115. 16. ibid., p.114. 17. Ian Whates, ‘City of Dreams & Nightmare’, City of a hundred rows, Vol.1, (Watkins Media Ltd.,2010), p.176. 18. ibid., p.104 19. ibid., p.238. 20. ibid., p.56. 21. ibid., p.56. 22. Alastair Reynolds, ‘Terminal world’, 2010, quoted in Carl Abbott, Imagining Urban Futures: Cities in Science Fiction and What We Might Learn from Them (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press,2016), p.36. 23. ibid., p.36. 24. ibid., p.36. 25. ibid., p.36. 26. Cook, p.122. 27. Abbott, p.42. 28. Abbott, p.35. 29. Lem, quoted in Abbott, p.43. 30. Abbott, p.43. 31. Michel De Certeau, ‘Walking in the City (1980)’, Cultural Theory: An Anthology (2010): 264-273 (p.271). Figure 6: One residential complex, Tseung Kwan O, Hong Kong, 1988, from, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kin_Ming_Estate.jpg Figure 7: Peter Cook, long section of “plug-in” city, 1964 version, from Cook, Peter. ‘Plug-in City’, A guide to Archigram 1961-74, Academy Editions, edited by Arvhigram Group (London: imprint of Academy Group Ltd, 1994), pp.110-123 Figure 8: Pieter Bruegel, Tower of Babel, 1563, from, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel
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CONCLUSION
TOWARDS IT WILL BE
Concluded by Carl Abbott, the twentieth century has seen “as imaginative three-way interaction between real buildings that have reach taller and taller, grandiose proposals from the drawing boards of ego-rich architects, and often beautifully rendered cityscapes from the easels of visionary (or hallucinatory) artists.” 1 Apart from these three catalogues, examples related to more media types are referred to and discussed in the previous body text. Just like what Abbott described about twentieth century, the twenty-first century is still carrying forward the imagining of future through all these media or realistic fields and even more new fantastic methods, that give birth to millions of nifty buildings and enticing utopian schemes through fiction, architecture, art, film…and game. Blending of multiple ideas from various periods is anyway positive to the research of future in frame. Nevertheless, drawing up the blueprint beyond the reality is always easier and enjoyable than practice, even some of imaginations give the logic enough urban structure and social system in remarkable human-level details, such as the engineer-as-hero science fiction Astounding that takes bus operation, transportation planning, utility managing, water engineering, pipeline monitoring, productive vendors, pizza delivering, garbage trucks and more elements like the atmosphere chemistry and air pressure technicians to future to keep the city going, which are always worth memorizing.2 In fact, it is still hard to and unnecessary to roundly
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practice how the whole world exactly work endemically in every scale for those narrative work and “thought experiment”, but those unexciting questions to most of medias are always worth considering, like: how does city frame practice the distribution of air and sunlight as well as supplying of water and energy in data level to maintain the credibility? how is the frame, being affected and take effect on the complex social structure and appeal, reflected on on-gong planning theory?
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Future is various and complicated. It can imagine the a more vertical and complicated communication system in form of staggered bridges between buildings or running through the tower inside or outside, being relied on a more completed goods delivery system. It can predict the basic regional relationship in planning principle will not change too much but inclusively containing all its riches, or new region types and unimaginative new central types would be brought by new industry and new technologies as refactor. It can assume a new energy distribution and transmission in planning to support the life, for example regionally setting up the nodes of different energy stations, of which power from different sources like sea, air, sun, ground would energize different parts near relevant source origins, or single hydrogen or nuclear energy are popularized in every ‘segment’ or ‘cluster’. It can rethink the density or spacing regulars between buildings, that penetrability of air and sun would be increased on account of new materials or equipment for a thicker volume to pile up more spaces, or it would reversely go to a dispersive future to aggrandize the block distance and give more private space, when the density is contrary to the rising need for life quality or the reduction of hierarchy in most population, owe to much more advanced social productive forces as well as richer goods and materials after a sometime technology blast. The prediction is difficult whether the future is to fill the gap technologically to complete the future frames basing on existing conceptions of city and society, or to directly guide an unimaginative reformation in fire-new city form after an technology innovation and accompanying social revolution. The uncertainty of technology will bring massive future frameworks in city and social,
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even only basing on megacity as one big category, not to mention those countless whimsy on dozens of situations. A dramatic past has already seen the rising and expansion of the world in a short time after an extremely long creeping touching the ground. Moving forward, The future can be accordingly conjecture as wider and wider, taller and taller science fantasy mage worlds with those symbolic technological elements, just as the “plug-in” city centring in magnificent structure and delivering system , as the Thaiburley or Spearpoint interlacing magic, ancient and future conceiving, possibly be interconnected as Ecumenopolis that would be as huge as galaxy city Helior. In either case, exciting uncertainties will never be absent, but the city will anyway go towards it will be.
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ENDNOTES - CONCLUSION: 1. Abbott, p.30. 2. Abbott, p.69.
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Abbott, Carl. Imagining Urban Futures: Cities in Science Fiction and What We Might Learn from Them (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2016) Bellis, Mary. ‘The First Skyscrapers: learn the history of skyscrapers’, ThoughtCo (2020) <https://www.thoughtco.com/how-skyscrapers-became-possible-1991649> [accessed 24th June 2020] Blade Runner, dir: Ridley Scott, 1982 Certeau, Michel De. ‘Walking in the City (1980)’, Cultural Theory: An Anthology (2010): 264 -273 Cook, Peter. ‘Plug-in City’, A guide to Archigram 1961-74, Academy Editions, edited by Arvhigram Group (London: imprint of Academy Group Ltd, 1994), pp.110-123 Doxiadis, Constantinos. Ecumenopolis: Tomorrow’s City (1968) <http://www.doxiadis.org/> [accessecd 17th July 2020] Ferriss, Hugh. The Metropolis of Tomorrow (New York: Washburn,1929) Ghost in the Shell, dir: Rupert Standers, 2017 Gold, John R. ‘Under darkened skies: the city in science-fiction film’, Geography 86 (4) (2001): 337-345 Haridy, Rich. Science Fiction Cities: How our future visions influence the cities we build (2018) <https://newatlas.com/science-fiction-cities-future-urban-visions-architecture/55569/> [accessed 12th July 2020] Harrison, Harry. Bill, the Galactic Hero, 1965, (New York: ibooks, 2001) Hong Kong Administration, Census and Statistics Department <https://www.censtatd.gov.hk/ hkstat/srh/index.jsp> [accessed 13th July 2020] Merin, Gili. ‘AD Classics: Ville Radieuse / Le Corbusier’, Archdaily (2013) <https://www.archdaily.com/411878/ad-classics-ville-radieuse-le-corbusier> [accessed 16th July 2020] Metropolis, dir: Fritz Lang, 1927 Paulms, The Gloriously Unrealistic Atompunk Mage City (2014) <https://www.google.com/amp/s/steampunkopera.wordpress.com/2014/07/11/the-gloriously-unrealistic-atompunk-mega-city/ amp/ > [accessed 9th July 2020] Person, Lawrence. Notes Toward a Post-cyberpunk Manifesto (Slashdot: Nova Express, 1999)
BIBLIOGRAPHY Ross, Catherien L., ed. Megaregions: Planning for Global Competitiveness (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2009) Rybczynski, Witold. ’Dubai Debt’, Slate (2010) <http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/architecture/2010/01/dubai_debt.html> [accessed 13th July 2020] Sterling, Bruce. Islands in the Net (New York: Ace,1988) Whates, Ian. ‘City of Dreams & Nightmare’, City of a hundred rows, Vol.1, (Watkins Media Ltd., 2010)