Treading Down

The Day of Treading Down

 

By John Taylor; 2006 May 19

 

"At thy rebuke they fled; at the voice of thy thunder they hasted away. They go up by the mountains; they go down by the valleys unto the place which thou hast founded for them." (Psalms 104:7-8, KJV)

I am just finishing Moshe Safdie's "The City After the Automobile, An Architect's Vision" and I have had to make some adjustments to my master plan for reforming the world. For one thing, he proposes to solve the automobile problem with what he calls utility cars, or "u-cars," which would be along the lines of the free bicycles that you can use and leave wherever you please in cities like Amsterdam and a few others.

A U-Car parking garage would store several times more cars than the current lots because u-cars in it would be stored close together, like sardines, and would enter and leave on a last in first out (LIFO) basis. Any cleaning and maintenance it needs would be done while it is in line. You drop off your u-car in the parking garage and when and if you come back there you pick up the next u-car in line on a conveyer belt. That way you never need bother to park or maneuver your own vehicle into a small parking space. Unlike the free bikes though, u-cars would not be free, you would be charged according to mileage and the wear and tear you subject it to, which can now be easily monitored by tiny RFID sensors. It would be a combination of rental car and public bus, a kind of self-driven taxi cab. This, according to Safdie, in combination with trains and other mass transit, would change the vocabulary of architecture, allowing for what the title of his book says, a city after the (private) automobile.

But for me this Israeli architect's most exciting idea is one that should have been obvious to me, given my attempts to be a Baha'i all my life, but it was not. It is the quest he has undertaken during his entire professional career for diversity. The great failure of 20th Century architecture, in his view, was to spawn malls and cityscapes around the world that are stultifying in their sameness, dull, flat, and unmarked by notable landmarks. He was called into the ill-fated superconducting supercollider project in Texas and designed a huge super-office that would have been built around and over a small lake; that is, like the old London Bridge, there would be offices situated inside a couple of bridges over the lake. That way the physicists' workplace would not be a nameless, placeless, timeless cubicle lost in a sea of identical cubicles, it would be placed in an attractive, memorable location relative to the lake and other architectural landmarks.

Safdie started his career with Expo 67's Habitat, an attempt to open up apartments to the maximum amount of air and give each a panoramic view of the surroundings. He used Lego blocks to design it and decades later found out that his design had been fractal in nature. Under a protective dome a series of modular apartments like Habitat would be fractal, it would approach the ideal of visibility and flexibility for its inhabitants, though it would take some doing to make it a beautiful feature itself. But for me his greatest triumph was the design of a small planned city between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv called Modi'in.

In every other development around the world the first thing planners do is whip out the bulldozers and flatten every hill and even out every valley, and culvert over every stream and watershed. Is it any wonder that structures on that same flat surface look the same, and that life inside is boring, suicide inducing, and that if you try to park anywhere and try to find your car you are out of luck, for it is lost in a sea of total sameness.

Modi'in was situated along a long valley surrounded by hills. Safdie's great master stroke was to leave the bulldozers in the garage and build around the valley and hills and streams. That way one could orient oneself to one's surroundings wherever one happened to be. He left the valley for parks and roads and built the housing and other buildings up the sides of the valley. He further differentiated areas by planting one species of plant and tree in one park, another in another. On the top of the hills he made tall buildings to give a further perspective on where you are, long views of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. To think, the Master traveled through here several times on the way to Jerusalem, and now a model city for the future is being built here, the first of its kind. I am certain that this style of taking advantage of the natural features of local landscape (and, I am sure will happen soon, using bulldozers to increase variety, rather than erase it) will soon be the way of the future. Isaiah prophesied our traumatic phase of suffering and monochromatic conformity:

"For it is a day of trouble, and of treading down, and of perplexity by the Lord GOD of hosts in the valley of vision, breaking down the walls, and of crying to the mountains. (Isaiah 22:5, KJV)

To me the possibility of building cities up and down mountainsides offers wonderful prospects. I still remember visiting Juneau, Alaska, and seeing its streets and buildings run up and down the foothills of the Rockies. To walk from point A to point B was a very strenuous activity indeed, and I was only 19 years old at the time.

Some months ago I saw a travel documentary about Turkey that focused in on two little towns in Turkey, one built on relatively flat land and the other in a mountainous region. The inhabitants in the latter town had to climb a steep incline to go anywhere, and as a result obesity was unknown. Young, old, in between, everybody was thin as a rail. The other flatland town was more like here, some individuals were fat, some thin, others in-between. Just to emphasize the difference, the filmmakers showed the cuisine of the mountain villagers. They prepare the fattest, richest, most cholesterol loaded dishes of any place on earth. Eat like that here and you would be dead of heart failure or stroke in a few years. But there it does not make a whit of difference. Their energy output is so huge that they burn the fat before it can clog up any arteries.

The implications of this diversity of planar surface for my modular city plans are clear. Last night we had an 86th birthday celebration for "Gramps" and I indulged in more junk food than I should have. If I were living in a modular home in a town like Modi'in the result would be automatic: I would wake up the next morning a little higher up the hillside. I would stay up there, climbing more stairs and fighting my way uphill until I burned off those extra calories, after which I would slip downhill again. I might not even notice it, nor would there be a sense of being punished or shamed. I took in more calories so I have to burn more off for a while, so what is the big deal?

As always, the physical just reflects the spiritual. The spirit, being essential, has to be flat, the same, obligatory in the same way for every soul, even as the Christ prophesied,

"Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be brought low; and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways shall be made smooth; And all flesh shall see the salvation of God." (Luke 3:5-6, KJV)

But in every other, outer way, variety is good, diversity is as essential an attribute of divinity as is standardization. We will talk more about that next time.

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John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com