The Fantasy of Architecture, Asia’s Ideal City
Two most significant urban prototypes produced by Modern Movement are Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City – where every family with its own separate home on its own separate acre of land. Wright’s Broadacre City is a prescription for today’s suburbia on a bigger scale.
At first glance, these two prototypes appears to have absolutely nothing in common, but they do share one significant flaw: neither can possibly work without elaborate transport systems.
The ‘Walking City’ seen here approaching Manhattan Island, technically in the real world, supercarriers or also known as aircraft carriers loosely fit the definition of a walking city. Source: Archigram.
The old saying goes: “If you can’t beat them, join them.” Preoccupied with mechanized mobility in cities seemed to increase in the 1960s. Archigrammers were fascinated by the space hardware – the huge transporter that move the Saturn V rocket from the assembly building, suddenly they found the answer both Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright was searching for – Form Follows Fiasco.
Francois Dallegret’s Space City, code name Astronef 732 was designed in 1963. It was a proposal to launch 7000 people on a trip to Mars and back. Francois Dallegret is an imaginative designer, not an architect to begin with, but the proposed space city in the form of a huge rocket that could launch into orbit seems to be somewhat beyond mankind’s league.
Source: Archigram.
Mobility in today’s world, is of course a perfectly desirable objective, especially if you don’t care for your present place of residence and want to get away from it all as often and as rapidly as possible.
Modern Movement like Le Corbusier and many more have misinterpreted the ideal city for mankind, an ideal city, if indeed any, would be the one require fewer transportation system. Ideal cities, it seems clear, are pedestrian friendly cities like those in Europe, not all of the cities but a big number of it.
The ideal city is a place of crowd, and of confrontations, not highways or monorails that are symbol of alienation.
While Asian cities rushed to embrace these Western concepts that exist only in blueprints and Hollywood movies where the futuristic ‘ideal city’ with flying cars, elevated highways, and concrete rail system erected between two buildings, the west itself was rethinking those concepts.
Souce: Flickr
Urbanities made restless by these concept of ‘ideal city’, and they the best part is, they have no idea what hit them. A conversation with one of my non-architecture friend ended up with a debate, it appears that the ideal city are those from the west – which is true, and when asked why, the answer is the neo-classical architecture the city has, it is not the pedestrian friendly city nor the idea where newer building should respect the existing architecture in the surrounding.
A stretch of elevated highways in Guangzhou. Source: Flickr
I’m not sure what the politicians are thinking, but we’re heading the wrong direction with our head high thinking that we’re reaching for the ideal city with the elevated highways and monorails.
Tags: Architecture, Cities, City, Form Follow Fiasco, Frank lloyd Wright, Guang Zhou, Ideal City, Le Corbusier, Pedestrian Friendly, The Fantasy of ArchitectureRelated Articles
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China, A Country Without Memory
Image Source and Copyright: Sze Tsung Leong
Clearing of the old and making way for the new, tall, definitely soulless apartment blocks. The McDonalization of architecture is China has lead to the birth of disposable architecture, in short, a society that is disposable and not worth caring, cities that are not worth defending.
Ming and Qing Dynasty neighborhood of traditional courtyard houses in Beijing being demolished to make way for luxury housing; a city razed as a result of the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, now the largest dam in the world; a new city built to accommodate the relocation of populations whose former cities will be flooded by the Yangtze River; a traditional district in Chongqing waiting to be destroyed, surrounded by new construction; anonymous construction sites marking the empty moment between the erasure of the past and the arrival of the future. – Sze Tsung Leong
As new buildings went up, many old buildings fell. Before long the Beijing that the world had once known began to disappear as the city became an industrial sprawl. And in the rapid modernization in the past 10 years, more vernacular architecture have been demolished by real estate developers to make way for shopping malls, hotels and high-rise apartment complexes, to an extend where newly discovered historical site and artifacts are destroyed if it were discovered accidentally by the developer on the construction site, this is to avoid the government from sealing off the construction site and stop all works during the excavation of artifacts. Sad but true.
Image Source and Copyright: Sze Tsung Leong
Image Source and Copyright: Sze Tsung Leong
Quote from Trevor Howells, “Of all the arts in the world, none is more fundamental to the way we live than architecture. It is a mirror of our own time and of times gone by, a diary that is written in mud and timber, in brick and stone, in iron and steel, in concrete and glass. Our homes, our public buildings and cities reflect what we are, what we once were – and what we hope to become.”
Tags: Architecture, Beijing, China, Chinese, Cities, City, Demolish, Destroy, Memory, Shanghai, Vernacular
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