Lilypad Cities
by Lewis DerkinsJuly 7th, 2008, 10:51 pm
“Less is More” – Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
Architecture doesn’t need to beat you over the head with the fact that it is superior when done correctly; it’s self evident. Mies van der Rohe knew this all too well. We don’t need to know how ecologically friendly a building is. If designed correctly, it will inspire people without you having to point out that it’s the perfect little self contained sociological ecosystem. That’s the problem with Vincent Callebaut’s new lilypad city – it just has to prove how much it cares about all the world’s problems.
I love architecture, but I’m not under the delusion that a building is going to solve the earth’s woes. The pages of architecture history are filled with visionaries that embraced some new design ideal that would revolutionize the way people interact with and treat each other - Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius – all made beautiful buildings, but the social change never materialized.
Another thing they did was spawn an endless procession of hack imitators who think that they can squiggle some curvy lines on a paper, attach some mindless drivel about the meaning of form and the capacity of materials to embody societal ideals, roll it out with some pompous fanfare, and call it a masterpiece.
Mr. Callebaut’s lilypad city falls into the latter category – the one full of hack imitators.
Why should a guy writing on a transportation site care? Well, it turns out that Mr. Callebut proudly proclaims this “an amphibious city without any roads or any cars.” (The article actually mentions this sentence twice in the process of trying to unabashedly write the newspaper review equivalent of a pair of panties thrown onstage at a rock concert.)
So here we have it - we’ll solve all of our transportation problems and get rid of the evil cars in one fell swoop. In the process, we’ll turn a large portion of the human race into eco-friendly world travelers, and their “independent and fully self-sustainable” cities will be their new vehicles as they “drift around the world following the ocean currents and streams.”
Not so fast, smarty pants. This reminds me of the classic complaint I hear engineer friends express about architects – all grand vision, no reality.
There are endless ways that I could mathematically destroy this foolish little “project,” but I’ll stick to the most basic. Food Supply.
This thing is supposed to house 50,000 people. It takes about 1.2 acres to feed the average person by current US dietary standards. That’s 60,000 acres of space that you’ll need to grow food.
In terms of area, that’s 93 square miles – or three times the size of Manhattan. And this is supposed to float? Maybe if it’s filled with the hot air that occupies Mr. Callebaut’s head.
There is a reason that boats only get about as big as they currently do – that size is about the limit of our current technology. There is theoretical science – where there is no reason we can’t travel up to the speed of light, and then there is reality where we are limited by mundane things like propulsion, fuel consumption, friction, gravity and technological limitations. This thing lives in the world of theory. There are enormous forces operating on the hull of a ship, and if you build them too long, they’ll just break in half. To have that much surface area for crops, this thing would have to have a diameter of 10.88 miles.
The new Gerald R. Ford class aircraft carriers are expected to be about 1092 feet long. This floating junkheap would be 50 times longer – in every direction.
This simply isn’t seaworthy, and I don’t care what it’s made of. If you want to take a ride on this dumb thing, have fun. Play “Octopus’ Garden” by the Beatles as you sink down to see one firsthand.
Oh, “well, we’ll stack the gardens, so we won’t need as much area.” So what. Even if you only had one third the diameter of this thing, it’s still too big to float. And that’s not your worst problem. Salt water is bad for crops, in fact, it kills them. Why do you think ancient historians made reference to Romans salting the Carthaginians’ fields? So tell me again how exactly will anything grow on this floating tub while it’s exposed to nearly constant salt water spray?
And since these things float, and are designed to follow the currents, your growing season is limited by how fast the current carries you, which means nothing will grow. Crops tend to be climate sensitive. They don’t like to live in the tropics one day, and in the arctic five weeks later.
The only thing you’ll be eating on this floating turd are the other inhabitants while you wait for someone to rescue you, which will take a while since 50,000 people aren’t exactly easy to accommodate on the everyday cruise liner that responds to your SOS.
The ‘Lilypad City’ would float around the world as an independent and fully self-sustainable home.
Not exactly. When your crops don’t grow, you’re going to have to be resupplied somehow. And while we’re talking about self sustainable, what does that even mean? Are you going to have no consumer products at all? The plan calls for shops, entertainment centers and workshops. Exaclty what is going to be on the shelves, and where is the raw material for the goods going to come from? Are you going to live a life of mind numbing boredom, or are you going to have TV’s, radios, computers, washing machines, furniture, books, toys, I-pods, video games, tools, kitchen utensils, etc..? Where is all the waste from those products going to go?
How many houseboats do you know of that are self sustainable? If we can’t do that. we probably can’t do this. Ooops sorry, there I go again, applying critical thinking to something that’s obviously stupid.
How exactly are people going to make a living aboard the good ship ecotopia? Will it involve some naive circle of labor where the barber cuts hair in exchange for groceries that come from the store that’s cleaned by a janitor who also gets free groceries and buys his clothes by doing the gardening for the lady who sews the hems? Or are all of the people who would live aboard this floating paean to social karma too rich to stoop to such plebian pursuits? My vote is they’ll all be rich and won’t want to get their hands dirty, so this system will take exactly 3.14159265 seconds to fall apart. (Note the pi reference that echoes the mathematical form of the structure.)
Here’s the problem with the self sustaining commune economy – it’s wealth neutral at best. Nothing is coming in to increase the value, so when this thing runs aground or hits an iceberg (which it will since it doesn’t seem to have a propulsion system) and needs a repair part, guess what that does to everyone’s wealth. Oh man, where’d all our money go?
But instead if investing our time and resources into finding alternative fuels, let’s build this, if only in the spirit of tackling a non-existent problem. We have to avert a possible 20 inches of sea level rise according to this article.
Pay no mind to the fact that the seas rose 7.67 inches between 1870 and 2004 without causing mass starvation, droughts or societal upheaval. In fact, the population of the earth has quintupled in that time.
Also ignore that the Dutch live in a nation that is mostly under sea level and don’t seem to have any problems controlling the water.
Let’s rush out to build this thing to fulfill Mr. Callebaut’s messiah fantasy. We’ll finally get rid of evil cars and replace them with enough Segways to transport the dork army that will man this floating asylum.
‘The goal is to create a harmonious coexistence of humans and nature.’
Are you serious? Name me one thing more antithetical to the idea of harmonious coexistence than humans in floating cities. One thing missing from the artist’s conception of this thing is the huge dragline net that’s trawling all of those delicious sea creatures from the depths to feed this moron-mobile.
Have fun floating the high seas. Say hi to Davy Jones for me.
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Posted in Environmentalism, Technology, Uncategorized Rage |
If Mies said that “less is more” why did he add “van der Rohe” to his own name? His father’s surname was plain “Mies”. I dream someday of setting a 100-foot glass shoe over his grave. A fitting memorial to a man who spent his life building big glass shoeboxes (on stilts!) I enjoy taking people past the MLK library downtown and mentioning that it’s an “architectural treasure” and watching them stare uncomprehendingly and shrug “But it looks like any commercial building in any city?” To which there is no real answer. I defy anyone to look inside that building and not be horrified, and the poor maintenance excuse doesn’t fly either. The lobby is as welcoming as any high school cafeteria, you can almost smell the mystery meat. The elevators are so unreliable that I take the stairs, but they’re a horror: dark, dingy and naturally no signs to tell you where you are, and with those bomb-shelter doors. Then you come to the grim, Nixonian upper stories. But the best part of all, the windows! Those huge windows right next to the stacks to admit way too much sunlight so the book jackets can fade, and way too much heat to damage the books themselves. (There’s a reason the Library of Congress keeps all their books in windowless, climate controlled rooms. They were doing this back in the sixties when Mies designed his library, but far be it from the master to inquire how a library actually functions. After all, form doesn’t follow function, it follows the Bauhaus cookie-cutter. )
Steve -
I enjoy your sarcasm.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of Mies. Another of his buildings that I feel is particularly awful is the chapel at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Look at this picture, what about this says to you “spiritual fulfillment”. I would expect this to be a business that rents cheap office furniture, or perhaps an indoor paintball range, but I would never equate this with a house of God.
I use his famous quote because despite my distaste for his stylistic approach, there is wisdom in those words that I feel is applicable to Callebaut.
I don’t care much for Gropius either. Corbusier I can go either way on. I like Wright, but in general, I hate his tendency to design every detail of the building down to the furniture and color scheme.
I don’t want to live someone else’s version of an ideal life. They’re pretty to look at, but I think of them more as art pieces than functional housing.
lewis, whats wrong with an architect participating in every aspect of his building- down to, as you say, the furniture and color scheme? its called gesamtkunstwerk, which translates roughly as “total work of art” and its an artistic methodology co-opted by german architects from the composer richard wagner.
from your musings on this site, surely you agree that there is less to be gained by bringing other people into a project whose talent or intelligence is in question. if you have a vision, and know you can get it done on your own merit, why outsource to others? the odds of your vision collapsing due to the incompetence of others skyrockets. i’m pretty certain this is where frank lloyd wright’s head was at.
gDubs -
Don’t confuse my personal preference with a condemnation of Wright, or any or the rest of them, in general.
I recognize that there is merit to the ideas, and I’m familiar with gesamtkunstwerk - but as I pointed out, that makes a very beautiful piece of art, not necessarily the most functional residence to fit my needs.
I happen to enjoy Frank Lloyd Wright’s work, but I enjoy it as art, not as a space that I would consider for any functional purpose for myself. Since I view architecture as art, I judge it as art. I recognize the thought behind the product, but I still pass a value judgment related to personal taste that is independant of that thought.
I would agree that in achieveing a total vision - a one man approach is often best, though not necessarily always. But if I’m designing my house, I would never surrender full creative control to someone else’s vision that may not match my needs. A good architect would take those into account of course, but some architects don’t, thus my reluctance to surrender full control - especially if I’m the paying customer.
But again, I can appreciate the beauty of total vision - Falling Water is one of my all time favorite buildings.