3 & 4 Human-scale streetscapes attract people whereas 5 inhuman-scale ones repel
GLOBALISM’S PRETENSIONS AND MANIPULATIONS I wish to slay a dragon before we can even begin to discuss these questions seriously. Extractive global imperialism, which runs the world’s economy, has very specific goals:
1. Burn fossil fuels as rapidly as possible for the industry to gain peak profits. 2. Design cities so that they consume maximum amounts of energy. 3. Convince governments to replace human-scale sustainable built fabric with monstrous, unsustainable buildings.
4. Utilise only expensive building materials to generate profits from their extraction and transportation over long distances.
5. Fuel a massive propaganda campaign that makes popular heroes of opportunistic architectural mercenaries supporting these goals.
6. Create a monopoly by eliminating local artisans and industries, except for a few that become agents of globalism.
7. Erase local building and design cultures (that evolution made biophilic and human-scaled) by banning them as ‘backward’.
This ‘business-as-usual’ gives us a skyscraper per minute, ignoring real-life data on the futility of continuing in this disastrous direction. Léon Krieriv
and Henrik Schoenefeldtv an antidote to the self-serving propaganda one usually hears.
—to exclusively automobile transport has led us into an unsustainable mess. ‘Throwaway’ buildings are not meant to last for more than 20 years. The built fabric of recent decades cavalierly omits sound and thermal insulation, and is turning into junk. Unloved structures are not worth repairing and are not even salvageablevii
Coupling inhuman design—obscenely expensive and energy-wasting architectural ‘images of modernity’vi
.
Bringing nature into cities is a major step in the right direction, but it’s only palliative if the built geometry remains alien. Unfortunately, our world is largely shaped by typologies that are opposite to what human physiology and psychology requireviii
. This continues because the subservient, sycophantic media praise— instead of condemn—designs that assault our senses.
There exists an additional problem. To perpetuate its hegemony, dominant power co-opts the ideas presented by the humanist side. But the producers of glass skyscrapers don’t care to understand the elements of human-scale design, and only apply images superficially, to camouflage the standard monstrous and unsustainable typologies. Those highly-publicised attempts are classic scams.
GARDENS IN THE SKY
As more and more architects discover the health benefits of biophilia, they understandably wish to take advantage of themix
. But, just like in embracing a lofty goal, there is a price to pay, and most practitioners
don’t wish to pay it. They need to drop their modernist fixations on stylistic dogmatism going back to the Bauhaus, because much of that toolbox is anti-biophilicx gospel in architecture school is simply unthinkable.
. For many, unlearning what was taught to them as
And so, design schemes utilise anxiety-producing entrances, spaces and surfaces that are softened somewhat and made more attractive by including lots of plants. While this represents a definite progress, it also reveals the ignorance of architects about what biophilia really is, as well as their stubbornness in not adapting to human physiological and psychological needs. A minimalist industrial/mechanical building set in a garden is a cruel joke, because it mixes negative with positive biophilic effectsxi
.
A concerted effort is now underway to include green in and on the building itself, in the form of living green walls, balcony trees and roof gardensxii
. Those solutions work, if implemented in an intelligent manner, in very restricted geographical regions with constant high humidity and sustained rainfallxiii . . Such
biophilic elements incorporated into built structures must be adaptive, low-maintenance and low-tech. When successful, they mostly take care of themselves, and merge the built environment with the natural ecosystemxiv
Driven by the modernist fixation on an international style, however, architects sell industrial but unworkable ‘techno-green’ schemes to naïve clients the world over. Journals show images of healthy plants, but fail to mention how resource-expensive, high-maintenance, and thus economically unsustainable those prove to be. Real estate speculators promote this massive deception on a global scale, suppressing pictures of dead vegetation on projects built in the wrong climatexv tech gimmicks when referring to biophilic design.
. Many people unfortunately think of these high- 48 FUTURARC outline the situation clearly, as
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119
