http://search.lycos.com/web/?q=Future+Cities+Laboratory+-+Singapore+ETH&keyvol=009098a7a07f54b50a91
There is widely accepted concern that the suburb, as an urban form, is problematic, for a number of reasons. Then what is proposed as an alternative to it is - we don't want to be too esoteric - another conventional phenomenon - an environment of towers. Some of them are residential, and some are clerical. To some limited extent they can be commercial - some retail, perhaps some warehousing or wholesaling.
This is what evolves. Any other notions, regarding what the urban environment could be, are necessarily radical.
The environment of towers has some advantages over suburbia. There is some benefit vis a vis energy consumption. This is rather dry, but perhaps important. Of more interest in a human sense, as well as in an ecological and aesthetic sense, more people can live, and perhaps even work, on the same horizontal tract of land. And if human interaction, or even simply presence - activity - correlates to liveliness, then there is the possible benefit of that effect.
too complicated
My idea is to build very tall towers of very, very large apartments. Redefining the apartment. It isn't any longer an interior space, it's an exterior space, a platform in space ... essentially a ranch, a farm ... build many proximate towers and abundantly connect them at every elevation ... one is habitation, homes, farms, ranches ... the next is public space, gathering places, shopping, schools, government ... the city not as an assemblage of discrete towers but as a matrix in space ... the tower not as a spire of enclosed space but as a support for a matrix of outdoor space ... units of indoor space - houses, and then complexes of apartments, offices, halls for performance and the like, shopping streets, these are features in the environment, not the environment itself. Residents will not, as in today's tall cities, go down to the street every day ... they will explore more horizontally from their elevated homes across elevated neighborhoods and districts.
A new relationship to nature, to wilderness, no longer seeking to move into it, so much, as to view it from above, living on catwalks, bridges, bridge cities, that meander across the landscape, which flows beneath them, undisturbed. And also, creating not only habitat, but nature, too, in our architecture: gardens, streams, even wilderness.
Treating existing cities as a feature of the primordial earth. Building above them, just as we build above the wilderness, leaving it and them undisturbed.
Thinking about the home, in our planning, whether in these imagined places, or in the city of today, whether that is the urban core or suburbia, exurbia, or something in between, thinking of it as something more or other than a place for our solitary moments, thinking of it as a place for living, a place for industry, this in our planning, so that the home can become something other than what it has tended to be.
The idea that what our architecture is originates in planning. It sounds obvious, but I believe it is unconventional, even radical. I see planners trying so hard to respond to perceived imperatives, to accommodate them. We should accommodate them, but we can also imagine anything, and should do that. Imagining something completely other. It is problematic if we imagine, with it, the destruction of what is, the rejection of what is, but if we at once embrace what already exists, revere it, care for it, then maybe we can imagine and even create freely.
And isn't it true we are living in a world of new technologies, with new capabilities? The technology of imagination, the mind, remains unchanged. The technology of representation is almost like a whole new thing, although it seems, in some ways, like we don't realize it. But my hypothesis is that out of complete representation, implementation will spontaneously emerge. And technology for building ... it is as if there exists, now, a new realm of the possible, that is only waiting for us to seize it.
