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A&C
INTERNATIONAL DOCUMENTS iussue
N.4 |
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Foreword
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IS THERE STILL HOPE ?
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Novels, it is known, do not describe
reality, but get very close to it. So, it is not unlikely what happens
in the London steel-and-glass skyscraper depicted by James Graham Ballard
in "High Rise": a thousands apartments over 40 storeys provided
with swimming pools, gyms, sauna, restaurants, schools, supermarkets,
banks, and the related events, sometimes funny, sometimes painful for
its inhabitants. The series of violence, rivalries, hates, controversies,
disputes, and, finally, the individual alienation. Because, one cannot
escape as often as he/she desires from the high-rise, because the relationships
among people are impossible, because it is impossible to establish a
dialogue with people: it is only possible to look at them as minuscule
anonymous crowd, from a distance, from above.
If then those edifices are not residential, but strictly public or private offices, there is no need to invent a novel over the series of damages, inconvenients, difficulties for the entire urban community, that is the specialists and the thousands of ordinary citizens that daily have to raise and descend that building. Direct and indirect damages, for the many negative physical and psychological consequences caused to everybody: damages that somebody, sometimes, will evaluate and quantify. The specialists in mass psychology are maybe able to give a scientific explanation to those events, while we can only think that the race actually performed all over the world -even in the poorest areas for a kind of revenge- among so-called evoluted countries and "developing" ones as to build the highest possible, as to get closest to the sky, is just the materialized expression of the contemporary spiritual deficiency in our daily life. We would not be able to find other reasons for the frantic willing to raise from ground by building vertiginous edifices, straightforward, contort, pyramidal, curved even where there is plenty of land to build (if not a real desert) and the chaotic sprawl of both constructions and motorized traffic would indeed suggest to expand the city elsewhere, through interconnected neighborhoods and villages, organically complementary. If the results of a century-old town planning didactic -accompanied by a moltitude of conferences, debates, workshops and publications aiming at improving our way of life, and teaching how to understand and interpretate the role of the city- is almost to deprive citizens from the human touch, to transform them into useful "objects" for the economic growth; if -as said by G. B. Angioletti ("I grandi ospiti")- "Only the youngers, perhaps, dream the sad and fatal hour of skyscrapers"; if Mario Botta laments that we have to accept a "gigantism without soul", a representation of a total disgust for the millennial architectural culture that ends being defeated by the sad story of a modernity made of sole technological conquests, completely separated from the human condition, if all this happens, then it is better terminate any discourse on both architecture and urbanism. In fact they are, by definition, made to serve the human being, his/her spiritual and material wellness. Higher and higher, materially always higher the human being for whom they pretend to design and build: what an incredible mistification! Nowadays, it is not the architects to elevate edifices for the human being, but space artists without any relationship with the human condition. Eventually interesting forms, sometimes beautiful, however always alien to any sane and experienced criteria of civil behaviour. The race for the highest tower such as the Fordham Spire of 609,60m with 115 storeys plus a spire over the Michigan Lake, the Burj Tower of 700m with 160 storeys in Dubai on the Persian Gulf, the Agbar Tower in Barcelona like a missile launched by Jean Nouvel and Fermin Vazquez, the Sear Tower in Chicago of 443m, the newWTC Towers in New York of 541 m, the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur of 452 m, the skyscraper 101 in Tapei of 509 m with the fastest elevators in the world, the Jin Mao Tower in Shangai with its 88 storeys…these and many other similar buildings can really make any sense for the human being who daily works and seeks to feel alive? And when David Childs will have won his competition against the statue of Liberty through a crown of buildings conceived to facilitate the ascensional wind stream, when the 4 km-tall skyscraper will be built in Japan, with its 800 storeys and a million of inhabitants, then what kind of benefit will get the ones who will be forced to live in? In fact, we all know very well that today it is not a sign of an extraordinary talent to design and build tall buildings as engineering softwares are everywhere available, as computers can easily simulate the highest edifice. Let's finish here. We are very good in destroying the humanity by astonishing it. Shelley was used to saying -when buildings were still made for human beings- that: "it is difficult that the human being's destiny is so low that he/she gets born to die only". |
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A Vision of Europe |
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