Repetition of buildings
The human dimension is completely missed in architecture. We are living in a world of extreme urbanization, – especially in Latin America, Africa, India etc. We as architects have to build, like many buildings in next 15 years as we have built-in Africa and Europe in last 200 years.
The biggest problems we are facing are division, the issues that come out of inequity. architects need to act now for the sake of the future. The attraction of cities is many folds. The history of cities is managing the surplus from the countryside. Agriculture was at its peak, hence the markets were set up and through different processes, more and more job opportunities started existing.
Even today half of us live in urban areas and by 2050 it will be 70%. Every year global population increase by 80 million people. The issue of overpopulation is an urban problem. When many people dream of the same place, the space for dreaming becomes scarce. But to serve this increasing demand architects should not create repetitive buildings. It does not solve the problems but increases them more. Temporary housing or basic human needs for survival for the disaster-prone area or refuge camps should have repetitive and fast construction because its the need of the hour. But experiential architecture with objective reality should be the goal for all architects.
“We are a generation that asks what is possible and not necessarily what is profitable. I have a big hope that we are a generation of architects that do not build for fictional stories, but for an objective reality”.
-Christ Precht
The Impact of technology on architecture
Cities are no longer mono-functional its not just port towns. Ten things happen simultaneously every day in a city. In a globalized world, a hundred things happen simultaneously. The city becomes incredibly complicated in terms of aspiration that it’s trying to respond to and therefore designing the cities becomes more critical because those constant mean architects and urban planners need to resolve them, and space can be a very important aspect. The modern buildings are high rise buildings packed into a very small geographical space. It’s the classic image of urbanization in Asia’s megacities, but in the United States, many cities are growing outwards covering more land.
The fact that urban spaces are growing primarily in these two ways is the result of two technologies the elevator has enabled us to live at previously undreamed heights and the other is the car, making all distances achievable. The designs through the elevator and car have to lead us to social deprivation. These are the fixed ways of thinking in terms of what cities should look like architects as visionaries should free themselves from this notion.
Max vitalar has numerous visions of what a city should look like, his designs have names like Babel town. Instead of showing individual buildings, they show us the entire neighbourhood the parts of the city that appear lifted straight from the science fiction movie.
How the cities of the future look like if we dispense the conventional forms of mobility like the car and elevator.
Bable town had a simple idea that how a train or tramp could be turned into a spiral.
The concept of shelf city is the neighbourhood complex in which no cars is taking up valuable space from where people move from place to place, with the help of so-called micro-mobility solutions which are extremely flexible. Instead of thinking in terms of finished architecture. architects should focus on infrastructure that makes living together in a neighbourhood.
Sustainability
The present-day reality is the stories of consumption, consumerism and capitalism. Stories are what we believe in and later or gradually it becomes reality. The same is true for architecture. For most of history, these stories shaped our buildings and cities. Architects built pyramids for gods, churches and temples for religions. Palaces and cities for kings and their kingdoms. Architects built different architectural styles for different eras, for different political systems. The architecture was shaped by those stories. The stories of culture, tradition and politics. People and architects care about those stories, but our planet doesn’t.
The plastic industry is grown more than ever before and some architects are working towards upcycled materials. Sustainability has many meanings, according to basic understanding is if anyone could work towards the Rs – reuse, reduce and recycle. Here is Michael Reynolds who is working towards sustainability since 1971. His thesis was published in Architectural Record in 1971 and the following year he built his first house from recycled materials. His studio Earthship is an passive solar earth shelter that is made of both natural and upcycled materials such as earth-packed tires, pioneered by architect Michael Reynolds. Energy: Thermal and/or solar heating and cooling, solar and wind electricity.
These stories have bought us the problem of our generation – Climate Change.
So the questions that arise for the future of architecture are-
How can architecture increase the health of people?
Architects should make strategies to build without harming living things or the environment.
Any built form should give back to the environment and not just consume the land.
Structures should reconnect the user with their senses and bring them closer as a community.
