It seems odd to me, abstracting a bit from society as is, that architecture isn’t the main occupation of nation-state level entities. It’s like the single most important defining feature of the cities and yet totally under explored. Anyways I’d love to visit (another) planned city. They’re always amazing and terrible in exactly the inverse of the amazing and terrible in (relatively) unplanned cities.
It‘s not under-explored at all. Millions of people work in architecture and city planning. Every city has several departments that deal with planning and construction.
It‘s just completely dysfunctional. Architecture professors have focused on “innovation” for 100 years and have achieved little. We still flock to the old, 19th century (or older) city centers and love it. We spend thousands to spend a week or two there on holidays.
Very few modern places exist where this is the case.
In survey after survey, 80% of the people prefer traditional over modern(ist) designs.
So the whole profession has failed, since about the introduction of the Bauhaus.
This is some strange no? It looks like you are talking about city planning more than architecture when talking about city centers.
Modern designs are affected by supply and demand, while modernist designs have been supplanted by many other school.
Innovation has ranged from tiny homes, to livable homes, to new materials, to shipping containers, building heights, concrete types, designs and more.
I’ve seen architectural styles emerge and evolve from different countries, so it’s hard to read this and find the source of your opinion.
The creation of public spaces is highly dependent on the governance of those localities.
I was bemoaning the growth of self sufficient enclaves as a real estate solution in Mumbai, but I acknowledge that this is the market providing for its consumers what the government is yet to provide.
Is this primarily an attack on academia, under the assumption that everyone hates the combination of “innovation” “modernism” and “professors”?
For one, you don‘t need academics to build houses.
It‘s an idea of the 20th century that you would.
Previously architecture schools were part of the art departments. A bit of engineering, maybe, but that‘s it.
Now that you have academics, they need to be innovative.
The old doesn‘t count. Architecture becomes like fashion. Students are scolded if they want to produce anything traditional.
This is true for 99% of architecture schools worldwide. Notre Dame is a noticeable exception, as are several summer schools in Europe (by INTbau for example).
There is zero reason for neglecting or denying traditional architecture. The Romans have already known how to live well. Without artificial air condition. Perfectly climate adapted. Natural materials.
Second, architecture schools are not about education, it‘s about becoming part of a cult. It‘s about telling a story, about winning competitions, and about convincing investors. Not so much pleasing the users of a building.
Who the heck denies traditional architecture? My friends were studying architecture along side me in college, they have tons of studies on classical architecture.
Heck I know about classical building methods, styles and the economics behind them and I’m not even an architect.
And I was not even born in the west.
Like, I don’t expect a neophyte architect to use methods that can build houses only up to 3 stories based on stonework.
They need to use drywall and construction methods unique to their locality.
But there’s thousands of other and file architects, and thousands more who make insane and wonderful things, along with professors who …
Dear heavens, What happened on your journey?
Besides - there’s always place for new and interesting, if rebellion is your go to motif - have at it.
Modern itself was a rebellion against older forms and thinking.
It is a well-known fact that 99% of architecture schools are about making students follow a particular set of tastes we call “modernism” - an ideology that states that buildings need to be innovative, that traditional methods should be neglected. It favors minimalist forms, neglects art forms like ornament, idealizes the “genius architect”, and favors “modern” materials like concrete.
If you don’t follow this stream, more often than not you will get bad grades or fail tests.
Some people said “architecture is not about education, it is about entering a cult”.
There's a bit of survivorship bias in your reasoning. The extremely wealthy built beautiful things that we still enjoy. But the horrible places that common people had to call home in the 19th century are not treasured in the same way.
Agreed. I think people prefer what’s familiar, and what’s familiar is what we can afford. Compare traditional to tasteful billionaire penthouse and most people will choose penthouse
Agreed. We do need more housing, but it can also be more quality housing. This is the part that most of the "YIMBY" folks miss out on.
We have a new, modern, but as cheap as possible building with the smallest legal unit sizes that went in around the corner from us less than 10 years ago. It's now nearly empty because every unit leaks, the appliances and cabinetry already need to be replaced, and it'll have to be half rebuilt to fix several structural problems.
The developer, fortunately, failed in getting a second building started because of community pushback. In response, the community has been attacked at the local, and recently international, level for being NIMBYs and "stopping necessary progress".
The same folks who promote more sustainable and people focused city design are fighting for these worthless buildings. Their intentions are right in the bigger picture sense, but they leave no nuance for what's actually happening on the ground.
Aesthetically pleasing it is, but also way less practical and way more costly to build. Nice stone facades can't have any thermal insulation on them (and having it inside is less than ideal), in Europe this would be a big problems apart from very south regions. I think mcmansions are trying to find some middle ground, but they don't seem to receive much love (those are not so common in Europe so just judging from far).
Medieval castles can be very pretty to visit too, I wouldn't want to live in one if given modern choice regardless of wealth, even if ignoring all the red tape for any sort of change or even repair.
those places are nice for vacations, but without denser apartment buildings the city tends to expand a lot horizontally and after a while it's very expensive to have a decent public transportation system. it's mostly impractical for large cities to be built this way. i've seen very few cities that managed to make this work.
> Architecture professors have focused on “innovation” for 100 years and have achieved little.
The issue is that architecture is not a science. It has nothing to do with the past 100 years. There is simply, to date, no solid theoretical foundation that can inform design. Corbu made a lame attempt in his early phase to establish a set of axioms, and that didn't work out.
So the search in the past 100 years wasn't entirely based on "innovation". The field is searching for something resembling a theoretical framework.
> So the whole profession has failed, since about the introduction of the Bauhaus.
This is a reactionary statement. There are numerous amazing works of architecture from the 20th. And your dragging in Bauhaus indicates you actually are not well read in the history of modern architecture. (This negative fascination with bauhaus carries a strong whiff of the National Socialist Germany, btw ..)
> In survey after survey, 80% of the people prefer traditional over modern(ist) designs.
Well, Architecture (contra building design) is high art. It is not for the unwashed. 80% of the people also prefer drivel for their cultural fare.
Your reasoning follows the exact playbook that is repeated by architecture professionals around the world. It is exactly these kind of statements that lead me to comment in the first place.
No, architecture is not high art. It is the most public of arts and hence needs to serve the people. And people know very well which environments they like and which ones they don‘t. Where they find emotional well-being. That is not a political question at all. The studies are consistent.
We also don‘t need a theory. Architecture is a bunch of patterns and insights into human nature that has been known for thousands of years.
People do get what they like and they should. We are discussing Architecture with a capital A. It has always, since day 1, been an elite concern. No one took polls of e.g. Greeks to see if they approve of the Parthenon. The English common man was not consulted by Christopher Wren. The list goes on and on. What is ironic is that this "traditional architecture" that reactionary ones like you keep raving about is nothing about recyclying "high art" of their ancestors.
Materials change. Scale requirements have changed. Techniques have evolved. The forms are reflecting that. It is entirely correct to note that many of such efforts (mostly copycat rehashing of masterpieces of modernist architects by lesser talent) have proven ineffective, but that it is just the nature of the field. Architecture is not software. It takes generations to iterate through the possible solutions.
> Your "high art" is too desperately trying to make a name by standing out through being weird instead of better.
You have zero idea of what I consider high art in architecture. You are tilting at your own windmills buddy.
+There is nothing pretensious about distinguishing high and low cultural efforts. Let's consider our own field: should we all be forced to code in JavaScript and disavow more powerful constructs such as e.g. Haskell since the "common man" is incapable of groking it??
Architecture has a generally modest cost, as compared to the more "as usual" construction. Except when you go nuts like trying to cross a desert.
So why "nation-state"?
Even the smallest country can and does make architectural and city-planning efforts. The american (not a nation-state) planned cities, usually built by average companies.
> The city will have an underground passageway for deliveries and garbage collection. It will test advanced digital technologies and autonomous robots.
The passageway for deliveries sounds like the best thing, but garbage maybe not so much. I have a feeling that over time it will degrade into a sewer-like environment (without the water) with foul smells, unless the garbage is really well sealed.
Edit: Then again, these underground passageways are way bigger than I expected (shown in the video). I thought those would be just big enough for some rail-based autonomous vehicles. But if people handle the garbage underground, I really wonder if the ventilation is superior as to create a worker-friendly environment. It really looks like some people will spend their day underground delivering packages or collecting garbage.
Makes me think of Pipedream Labs' concept of a network of tubes with an internal robotic conveyance systems for home/office delivery[1]. It seems like something that large new buildings could benefit from, even without a connection to a broader network. People don't love having to go down to a front desk to pick up packages, property managers don't like handling them, and delivery drivers don't like wandering around trying to find a random unit. Would be interesting to see if it's viable on a larger scale.
Maybe the garbage will be like in Sweden? In some city or neighborhood they have this modern setup where each garbage disposal chute is connected by pneumatic tubes to a central garbage dump in the area. So when garbage needs collected the truck doesn’t need to drive around the neighborhood stopping every 5 meters making a ton of noise and spreading garbage around accidentally. It enters this underground area and collects it in bulk out of the huge bins.
I don't know what they're doing in your city (outsourced to lowest bidder private company?) but I've never once found any garbage on the ground here after garbage collection by the city.
I wonder if anyone has done a economic study of all the old-people being employed to keep all this (and other things) clean and working properly.
(It's all a bit sad though: I often see folks who look over 70 standing around for hours on end waving a warning stick and so on... Then there are all these nearly-disabled old-people who have no one to look after them.)
Having a car manufacturer design a city is like having a shark design a ship: there's a strong incentive for things to be done poorly.
Good planning would heavily involve mixed-use development, reducing the distance to desired amenities (keeping roads small instead of having every block separated by 6 lanes), and a strong focus on mass transit (train, tram, bus).
The city of the future would be a 15-minute city covered in solar panels, broken up by public green areas, with every street lined with trees. I imagine it would also be covered mostly in mid-rises.
I was thinking it would be better to have solar in the city and wind around it, as turbines make some noise and as the roofs are gonna go unused otherwise. But I can see how putting solar on the roof can make it harder to maintain than having a solar park on the ground.
I was also thinking having solar panels above tram lines, but that may not be worth the cost.
Looks a bit like "Aarhus Ø" in my city. a part of the city that is quite new.
https://aarhusoe.dk/media/owqjyq0b/dji_0091.jpg - the construction site in the corner is done now, its a very very tall building that looks similar to the one in the center - just... very much taller.
it's a terribly crowded place, and i hate it - but at least the apartment buildings look different than all the ol 'red brick cubes' from the 40s and 50s we have in the rest of the city (You can see some of them in the background in this picture)
Near future? Maybe less than you would think, EVs are still financially unreachable and utterly impractical for most of the world. For me they are easily reachable but I just don't find the appeal, the limitations, range anxiety, everything proprietary and not fixable in normal garages, thats not how I run my cars in relatively low cost manner.
Buying car shouldn't be emotional decision but a rational one, its not a small investment, for many second biggest in their lives after housing.
Far future, certainly ICE cars will be mostly dead, what will come we shall see.
Interesting POV! Because batteries plus a motor is so easy, electric bicycles and similar are the vehicle to look at, not cars. I know that in the Philippines, EV carts are slowly taking over on certain islands in places where a car doesn't make any financial sense.
Having a lot of slow chargers (ac, very cheap to build) around would solve like 90% of the reason most people (not you) give for not being able to switch: Living in an apartment without chargers.
I'm certain we can at least agree that leaving out chargers has at least some measurable impact on the transition.
> The city will have an underground passageway for deliveries and garbage collection.
This would be a great improvement over many cities, though definite drop in QOL for delivery and garbage truck drivers. Though I imagine having it underground makes it much easier to manage with autonomous vehicles.
You make a good point. Away from the noise and traffic -- assuming quiet EVs which they would of course have to be. If it has nice lighting and ventilation.
I wouldn’t enjoy the lack of fresh air, but I think the lack or traffic and (perhaps?) not having to worry about where to park while sprinting to drop off a package in a narrow road would really reduce the stress of that job
The final phase is going to be 2000 people, which is small even for a town, or even for a midsize real estate project inside a city. Calling it a city just feels ridicolous.
Cool, but that's not the argumentation you started off with.
This other argument I do agree with, and more importantly, it fails to qualify as one even according to Japanese administrative definitions (would need to have 50K+ residents). Which I think is the actually important bit, if we want to establish the labeling as misleading.
Apartment blocks are typically in the hundred to a few hundred resident range around the world, only really high density developments will crack the thousand residents bar. So to liken it to one is a bit disingenuous in its own right, just the other way around.
Around 35.22N, 138.91E, right between Mishima and Gotenba in Shizuoka. Up to about 700k m^2 or 7500k sqft, max, about twice as big as the Las Vegas Convention Center or Boeing Everett factory. Used to be a smallish car plant next to a Toyota test track. Not at all an unpopulated area.
2,000 people for $10 billion.[1] That's $5 million per person.
The future is expensive, but of course the intent is to advance early-stage (ie expensive) technology toward affordability. It sounds like they want to winnow down to the best option among alternate system architectures, so I expect there's a fair bit of infrastructure-level redundancy too.
This "city" is actually more like a Disneyland park, except that their main focus is on to experiment with futuristic commercial ideas/concepts.
Here is the list of a few companies that co-invest with Toyota:
- Nissin (Instant food company) to "Create and evaluating food environments to inspire new 'food cultures'".
- UCC (Japanese coffee maker) to "Explore the potential value of coffee through futuristic cafe experiences".
- Daikin Industries (Air conditioner manufacturer) to "Experiment with 'pollen-free spaces'".
I don't know exactly what they are trying to test (I guess that they don't know either), but it's meant to be an industrial theme park than a real city with municipal authority.
Although upfront cost for city construction is probably negligible compared to the operating cost over the lifespan of the city. If you have even modest labour, infrastructure and service savings every year for decades to come building smarter probably pays off.
It’s more like a small scale real life testing ground. Not a city but maybe meant to prove technology and design that can scale to a city. Toyota hasn’t had a great track record with alternative mobility historically - just some quirky experiments - so I’m curious what they’re working on that justified this big investment for this “city”.
I didn't get the impression that the city was focused on creating housing for Toyota employees; rather, it seemed to be about understanding what will work and what won't. Toyota, like many Asian companies, has many different verticals, and I think whoever better understands the needs of the future will be able to stay relevant.
Having Toyota employees as residents just makes sense, since it will be much easier to set expectations.
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I've always been interested to see an EPCOT style city come to life, and it seems odd (as others have mentioned) that this isn't the focus of the state.
Similar to Toyota's thinking, EPCOT was originally meant to be a multimodal transport city that utilised new ways to move people about, but that all ended with Disney's death. Many of those transport technologies are simply used in the theme parks today.
So the things I thought I was referring to were pneumatic tubes for the sending and receiving of small things. But yeah, I'd hope vacuum tubes are there too!
Sure, as long as passenger transport is foot and bicycle. The bin lorry comes once a week, the Amazon van once a day, but people are driving their cars around all day. I don't see how removing utility vehicles would make the slightest difference.
Ladies and Gentleman's maybe it's about time to discuss a thing:
- how much raw materials and energy costs building a "smart city"?
- how much to operate and evolve, which means rebuild from scratch?
My answer is WAY TOO MUCH to been able to do so on scale. The humanity CAN'T live in smart cities period. We need more than 7 earths with only one inhabited to create such monsters.
It's about time to understand that the new deal is only possible in small, simple and scalable solutions like homes and sheds with LITTLE infra needed to build and rebuild them. Where local water sources are enough, without needing very long aqueducts, having very large rejects, needing complex road infra etc.
That's the possible high-tech future, the smart-home, smart-shed, not smart city. A digital network of desktops, homes, sheds, not some giants datacenters/mainframes/hubs. Try to compute and you'll agree.
