The Fantasy of Architecture, Asia’s Ideal City

April 12, 2008 · Filed Under Architecture Debates · Comment
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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.