Open World chapter 1

Chapter from "Open World" Book

By John Taylor; 1 October, 2005

Readers who may be interested in the story in Macleans of Shane
Baghai, a Persian-Canadian Baha'i who actually is building new
neighborhoods, might want to check out this site:

<http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/business/article.jsp?content=20050627_108015_108015>

He mentions several innovative ideas he is working on, such as a
so-called "green roof." When I get my quickie book out, maybe I'll
send him a copy. I do not know Shane personally, though it seems to me
that there are several members of the Baghai family in this region;
the name is not unfamiliar.

The following is a draft of an early chapter of my book in progress
whose working title is "Open World." Since I am not in a position to
hire copy editors, I would appreciate any feedback you can give me,
especially critiques pointing out errors of structure, such as
repetition and poor diction.

Mound Architecture in an Open World

By John Taylor; 30 September, 2005

The hurricane season of September 2005 made it impossible to ignore
the urgency for radical reform of our built environment. Our buildings
from the tallest skyscraper down to the smallest cottage are
vulnerable to even the slightest nudge from nature. Politicians have
had to recognize that natural disasters like these hurricanes are not
a distraction from the greater threat of terrorism but are rather a
wakeup call, a warning that present evacuation plans and emergency
measures are inadequate. If emergency response can collapse under the
threat of the relatively foreseeable Hurricane Katrina, what would
happens if the completely unpredictable struck, such as the detonation
by terrorists of a suitcase thermonuclear device in a major city?

This is a proposal for an alternative form of construction with a
rounded outer form to avoid damage from hurricanes, and an inner
structure to take the full force of an earthquake without collapse
that I call "mound architecture." The object of earthen mound
construction would be to come as close as humanly possible to
disaster-proof architecture, designed from the ground up to permit the
quickest, most flexible response to threats from both nature and
terrorism. Although such construction has been a dream for centuries
of science fiction writers, only now with computers, the Internet and
open systems is such a thing a practical possibility.

Rather than independent buildings, a locality built upon mound
architecture would have sunken dwelling space in a series of large
furrows or berms of built up earth. Today's city tenements,
skyscrapers and other block buildings are supported by girders and
concrete. Being structurally artificial, they are subject to collapse.
However, the "girders" of these long mounds would be earth and stone
formed in elongated furrows. All living space would be protected
inside, underground, at least most of the time. Seen from a distance
in an airplane these earthworks laid out in rows would be
indistinguishable from a series of ridges or gently rolling hills.

What could be safer than a hill? After all, hills for millions of
years have undergone fires, floods, hurricanes, tornados, tsunamis,
whatever nature can thrown at them, without falling over or
collapsing. Without any protruding angles, wind and rain blow over and
around without effect. Even the highest mountains erode into hills
over billions of years. Mountain chains like the Rocky Mountains are
sharp and rocky because they are so young; older mountain systems like
the Laurentians and the Alleghenies on the east coast of North America
are much more ancient. Their jutting, jagged edges long ago were worn
down into gently rolling hills covered over by a layer of forest. With
time, geological ages turn all things with sharp endings and
protuberances into hillsides. Why not, then, start out rounded? Why
not build our cities, towns and villages in the form that is literally
as "old as the hills?"

Only dome construction rivals artificial hills for efficiency,
strength and security. A dome was the only building left standing
after the Hiroshima nuclear attack, and in the recent emergencies in
the American Gulf region, many residents found their only safe refuge
from the wrath of Katrina and Rita under the local sports dome. The
problem with domes, though, is that they enclose a single space, which
tends to confine them to one purpose at any single time. Residents of
dome homes soon discover that domed space radiates not only heat right
back to them, but also sound. As the number of residents under a dome
increase, noise and lack of privacy become problems.

Hillside architecture, on the other hand, allows for quiet nooks and
layered privacy within a family and the larger community. It is ideal
for high density and multi-purpose city planning. It would not only
maximize security but also minimize the ecological footprint of
cities, towns and even rural areas. A mound row can be built into,
under or over the roads that crisscross the land, both urban and
rural. Supported of course by judicious legislators using tax
incentives, this design would reduce the need for freehold dwellings,
and therefore suburbs, sprawling segregated subdivisions and other
unsustainable environmental abuses. As high density, high efficiency
housing, mounds would take advantage of the economies of scale brought
about by many people coming together in a small area. High density
housing affords large, central support facilities including sewage and
transport networks, large recreational facilities and the
psychological support of a vital, vibrant community.

As a rule mound-rows would run in an east-west direction to catch the
maximum sunlight on the southern side. This sunny slope would be
covered with ornamental gardens, parkland, agriculture and solar
collectors. The shady northern side would be steeper and consist of
high density housing and other construction running down a steeper
incline. Many floors of layered, compartments in niches down the
hillside would hold factories, commercial structures, schools and
apartments, with noisy industrial activity carried on inside. This
mixed usage would shift according to dynamically negotiated criteria
that I will spend the balance of this book explaining. Inside support
structures of the mound would all be hidden away and designed
exclusively for hosting the outer, moveable, standard-sized building
units.

Imagine a mound design for a small town like where I dwell, Dunnville.
Instead of our present small-town sprawl slowly crushing out all
surrounding fields, woods and other natural areas, mindlessly paving
over dozens of square kilometers, a mound built Dunnville would
consist of four or five long berms or hills extending in parallel
lines along the two kilometers on the left bank of the Grand River.
The exposed south sides are a gradual slope to catch the maximum
sunlight, threaded with walkways, parkland, ornamental gardens,
greenhouses and solar panels. The northern slope is the utilitarian
side, steeper, sprinkled with modular buildings, similar to cliff
dwellings except that the incline is less severe.

At suppertime you can get an idea of how mound rows in a larger city
might look by dragging a fork in a spiral motion around a helping of
mashed potatoes to model the rough outline of mound neighborhoods in
an urban setting, one large hill with terra-formed striations running
around and up towards the peak. The fork's tilling marks represent the
mounded street-rows coming together into a central nucleus or city
square, which could itself be domed over.

Thus a vulnerable city like New Orleans designed with mound
architecture would start at the lowest level, that of the levees and
proceed uphill. The endangered lower mounds going around the city
limits would be devoted largely to warehouses and parkland, using
flood tolerant plants and buildings. As the mounds gradually work
uphill, they would become inhabited. The housing units would be built
to roll up automatically and rapidly to higher ground in the event of
a storm surge. Evacuation measures would be computerized and
responsive.

Mound making, transforming an entire city, would not be the problem it
may seem at first blush. How do you make artificial hills and
mountains? To start with, all you would need is a bulldozer. With
modern heavy equipment it is not difficult to move around massive
amounts of material. Companies like those in Alberta performing
prodigious earth moving processes and then converting tar sands into
usable petroleum could easily converted to mound construction
enterprises. Mobile, on-site factories would follow around the heavy
earth movers, separating out the constituent elements of soil, rock
and stone and producing filler foams of any required density.

Like any technique mound architecture would start off simple and
become more sophisticated with experience. The basic structure would
be a piled up mound of earth, and along country roads and in small
villages the mounds would remain that way indefinitely. The advantages
of having massive amounts of unused housing capacity in the
countryside are obvious to disaster planners. In the event of an
evacuation order, New York City and all its industries and commercial
enterprises could be moved out intact into the mounded roads of New
York state and back again with minimal environmental damage, human
dislocation or even economic loss.

Using mounds, the more evacuations take place the easier and cheaper
they would become. Such an action is not unprecedented in modern
times. The Russians performed this feat, evacuating Moscow and all of
its industries, all the while actually increasing war output, when
attacked by Hitler in the Second World War. Mound construction is
designed to allow such a massive response by a democratic government
and a free enterprise economy.

As mounds increase in capacity in urban and suburban areas, their
design would begin to resemble the compartments of a large ship.
Sections of hard packed earth would give the hills their structural
strength while in between would be stretches of softer earth and foam
material designed to be easily dug out and modified as needed. Urban
mounds would have very thin structural sections and the space between
might be roofed over and not filled in. Window slots running along the
sunny side between the terraced gardens and greenhouses would allow
light to enter the inner space. Leaving the mound empty this way would
allow for the maximum space and flexibility of motion. Filling them in
with insulating foam, on the other hand, would decrease heating costs
and increase structural integrity in the event of earthquakes or other
stressors.

Inside mounds of any capacity, rural and urban, all wiring, tunnels,
roads, railways, encapsulated tubes and other support facilities would
be invisible, buried underneath the outer, visible features. They
would have triple redundancy and difficult for saboteurs to access;
being surrounded by earth and foam the effects of an explosion would
be minimized, if, for example, a terrorist were to flush a bomb down a
toilet.

The defining feature of mound architecture is modularity and
containerization. All features of these artificial hills would be
designed to accommodate mobile, modular, containerized building units.
Factory built home units and even the larger buildings inside the
mound would all be of standard sizes, semi-independent and
containerized. The only complete permanence in a mound would be in its
public areas, which would stay relatively stable and static. The
public thing is the fulcrum around which everything else moves. All
units, private, public and commercial would be built according to
strict standards, enabling each to fit into a standard docking place
in any mound, anywhere in the world. Where any given individual lives
in the mound would be negotiated by open computer processing,
according to criteria that we will discuss later in this book.

Standard building compartments would be transported to new locations
regularly, cheaply in and out of mounds by means of trains or trucks
-- for longer trips they would travel inter-modally using other means
of transport, such as shipping and air transport. Each mound would
afford access from any point to any other by means of internal
railways and roads running underneath or on the upper surface the
mound. As visionaries like Buckminster Fuller have suggested, many if
not most of these independent transport and living containers would be
rented. Where they are owned no proprietor would not have the
controlling share of ownership in order to assure that every unit is
always up to standard and regularly updated and renovated according to
the latest advances in science and technology.

As mentioned, each personal module or unit would be semi-independent
and set into a temporary parking spot somewhere inside the mound. At
night and during wintertime everything would be sunk safe inside the
insulated hillside, so that there would be little need to insulate or
otherwise bolster housing units against the elements. During the day,
weather permitting, apartments would slide outside for light and fresh
air positioned somewhere (not always the same place) along the steep
outside of the northern slope of the artificial hill. The common space
between mounds might be tented over in winter or whenever a need for
larger public shelters arises. This would be especially true in
residential areas, though the spirit of this style of architecture is
to mix residential with commercial and industrial space whenever
possible.

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com