Building to Heaven: Expanding the Earth

Apparently mega developers architects can never seem to be satisfied until they have broken a world record or gotten an obscene amount of publicity. It's probably not completely ill-intentioned, but the abundance of exceedingly tall buildings is ever increasing and it makes me wonder what massive effects this unstoppable trend will have.

There is speculation that a skyscraper in Taiwan has caused earthquakes! If this is true (or even if the possibility is real), then building bigger doesn't really seem like a step in the right direction to combat the extreme weather that looks like it might wipe out civilization. (Although, like this Entropist article points out, it is interesting to think of physically affecting the surface of the earth in such a massive way).


earthquake-causing tower. courtesy Entropist.

I feel like it is very often that I read about someone proposing or building what will be the tallest building in the world. There is Frank Lloyd Wright's proposed mile-high , The Illinois, or the new Beijing airport (the largest building in the world right now), or the Burj Dubai, which when completed will be the world's tallest tower. Only something as culturally destructive as tourism could possibly drive this insane desire to be bigger and bigger and bigger; those who really could benefit from high design are left in the dust. According to Geoff Manaugh's BLDGBLOG, Hyder Consulting have announced that they will be building a hotel skyscraper "somewhere in the Middle East" that should be close to a mile in height.

One Shell Square is the tallest building in Louisiana, located in New Orleans (you guessed it - it's an office building for Shell Oil. Appropriate?). In a few years, the tallest building in Louisiana will be (in New Orleans) a Trump tower to be a condo hotel. I can think of nothing more inappropriate for New Orleans than that.

It may be an obvious comparison, but we've seen this obsession before: a Bible story about the people of Babylon and the Tower of Babel. The story is meant to explain the existence of so many different languages, and to establish the authority of god, so that he can assert that the only way to enter heaven is by doing what he has instructed in life so one may be lifted in death. God stops the people from reaching heaven by striking them with the inability to understand each other's languages. I have no doubt we can build to heaven these days with our technology. We are an unstoppable race. [Can you imagine people translating things on their iPhones after god strikes everyone with a different language so that they can still communicate enough to reach heaven?]

What is interesting about art depicting the Tower of Babel, is that it usually looks as if it is in the form of some sort of spiraling ziggurat, which is a typical architecture for any decent polytheist ruler's tomb.


painting by Abel Grimmer (sometime around 1600).

On the contrary, I always pictured some sort of tumbling tower of stacked up useless junk, teetering with the weight of curious sinners.


Trash Tower in Madrid. courtesy some blogger.


leaning tower of Pisa. Gravity is calling. courtesy NTU.

If we built a tower out of trash, I have no doubt we'd reach heaven. But shouldn't we go to hell for having that much trash in the first place? If some god was going to banish anyone in humanity to eternal suffering, I'm pretty sure destroying his/her planet is up there on the list of deadly sins. I guess the point is moot since they weren't allowed to build to heaven anyway.

If it was a race to heaven (and I'm sure it would be), the United States would get there first. Or, possibly, there would be a second Cold War. Communists can't go to heaven, though. Mike Huckabee for President.

Back to the literal architecture of a tower beyond its implications, is it going to take gravity getting the best of these monstrosities before we understand the value of keeping our feet on the ground? Somehow height as become associated with happiness: social status (the penthouse suite), elevation from the pain of daily life, a closeness to god (building crosses on the mountain!). What is the obsession with going up?


cross atop the Valley of the Fallen in El Escorial, Espana.

When civilization grows so tall that it wipes out plant life and we are forced to live in Paolo Soleri's Arcologies, will that be an elevated level of evolution, or making the best of a terrible situation? What about if we literally grow the size of the planet by covering it in raised civilization, arcologies? Adding new layers to the Earth, so that you have the core, mantle, crust, steel structures, and ecologies. The steel becomes a buried level of civilization. Would going below the surface of the Earth mean descending into the steel - the new underground?


an arcology. courtesy Arcosanti.

Can we expand the size of the earth as we continue to grow, overpopulate, and be forced to build up?





Would temperatures rise?

Would we live in the clouds? Would we evolve to live off of less oxygen? Would we use space shuttles instead of airplanes? Would our bodies not be able to take the pressure of traveling to its previous crust? Would the greatest archaeologists in the world be masters of repelling down through steel trusses?

Would people still try to build to heaven?

Perhaps it is a general unhappiness with the world on which we stomp; there is an appeal to getting into the clouds, being raised off of the world we've paved with waste. Once humanity reaches the clouds, will it stop building up?

Anarchism, I'm Not Convinced.

-Anarchism is the stuff of Sacco and Vanzetti, the Braintree Mass. duo falsely tried and executed by electric chair in the 1920s.-

It is a remote and detached ideology; divorced from hope for change it provides an unclear path for change in our society, our consumerism, our architecture, our political structures. In positing a more "honest" view of the superstructure of human society, anarchism and anarchists target the very persons whom they seek to help realize a better future. Anarchism degrades man's current state as an attempt to return him to his natural state, a state perhaps far removed from the Hobbesian nature of the life of man as "short, brutish, nasty..." An anarchist refers to a "capitalist pig" or "corporate stooge", as though debasing his fellow man positions the anarchist as a moral superior. To get someone to change to your way of thinking, you don't first charge the conversation with insults, satisfying as it may be.
When personal anarchism is oriented towards mobilizing the masses; in protest against governance, in barn-storming McDonald's restaurants, in assassinating public figures, in resisting contemporary models of the "good life", anarchism renders itself useless. Sheer and uncompromising opposition to what is will be met with a counteracting force of either criminalizing suppression or complete apathy (sprinkled with revulsion). Taking to the streets without petitioning is cheap and temporary publicity. Sticking anti-authoritarian necks out at WTO summits changes nothing. Martyrdom in this "cause" falls on largely unsympathetic ears. It is not like the cause of Civil Rights, with direct and easily identifiable results, specific laws to be changed, specific persons to whom one may point and say, "that person and her family, or you, or I, will be more free if I seek to make it that way." Anarchism has the vainglorious mission to liberate us all, even those who do not seek liberation. It is largely a self-serving ideology, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but has the pretense of working towards the greater good.

Resisting and fighting the public will result in the criminalization of anarchists, who have long suffered the fate of Sacco and Vanzetti, immortalized by few, ignored by most, and misunderstood, perhaps, by all.


-After tapping out this post this morning, I came across the story of the McLibel case in England a few years back, involving two "anarchists", Helen Steel and Dave Morris, being sued by McDonald's for libel. The pair had been spreading anti-McDonald's leaflets around London. The ensuing trial, though not favorable in verdict for the two, resulted in a public relations fiasco for Mickey D's. I'm actually really impressed.

Although this post has little to do with architecture, as is the stated intent of Front Porches, it brings up some of my fundamental questions surrounding the ideas of "anarchitecture". I think I'm also in some way giving body to my reactions from a very recent trip to New Orleans.

Apocalyptic Prediction #1: The Ratarchy

As we humans creep toward environmental destruction, famine, drought, flood, storm, total war, and religious rapture, what will become of the super-survivors of this planet (the roaches, the crows, the rodents)? What will be the roles of these creatures - namely the rats?

Recently it was discovered that rats were once the size of bulls (see article). Peter Ward’s Future Evolution outlines the fact that animals are becoming smaller as evolution progresses – that the big species are being made endangered and becoming extinct due to the human footprint on Earth. As our population explodes, farmland becomes scarce, animals become smaller. Even with man's livestock breeding practices, I would venture to guess that animals like horses and hogs may become extinct (even though according to Ward, cattle also count as a “champion speciator”) – whether from disease from their unhealthy human-controlled lives, or because we become unable to consume such unnaturally produced meat. Then there's the inevitable problem: humanity is running out of farmland space. Ward asserts that the biggest animals that will ever exist from now on, exist today, and they will continue getting smaller. The enormous animals of the past were the most enormous that will ever be; the elephants and giraffes and whales of today will never again be rivaled by another creature; evolution through time has seen a reduction in the size of the animals that walk and swim the earth.

In human-centric apocalyptic scenario, small animals that easily adapt rule; they will continue to overpopulate and live off of the waste of human society because it is the one resource that will always be plentiful with the existence of humans. Will our omnivorous nature have us resorting to farming rats? Setting aside the issues of disease, let’s think about this: what will happen if the only animals that can survive human existence are the very animals that humanity loathes? Rat farms, rats for pets, rats transportation? Rat rodeos? Rat hunting? It would seem, that the only way rats would become big is if human population receded somewhat.
"Tyranasaurus Rat." courtesy Bella's spectacular rat-art website.

Phase One of Self-Destruction: Humanity Exhausts all Resources Except the Rats and then Ends Up Declining In Population Due to Plague

You’re not supposed to eat rats. Rats spread diseases. But when the planet is so overpopulated that they have made extinct all other sources of sustenance, people are bound to take their chances. In the face of famine, we will make desperate choices. Let's guess that a third of the planet will be wiped out by plague.

Rats will get more space! They will evolve bigger, in the absence of other animals! They will be pets, they will be ridden, they will be farmed (humanity, avoiding mass-starvation, will face the plague with what they think are new and improved medical advances, but the plague will probably evolve). Perhaps their societies that had been so prevalent in the underground corners of cities, will come above ground and exist alongside humanity.

Phase Two of Self-Destruction: Humanity Exhausts the Rat Resource and/or Blows Itself to Oblivion as a Result of Religious Squabbles

Either way, this results in the ultimate demise of humanity. If humans don’t use up the rats (over which they rule over but depend upon to survive), there will be a nuclear holocaust. As a “champion speciator” the rat is expected to survive this mass destruction (along with his roach buddies and most of the animals of the sea).

The “champion speciators” are many of the most hated animals on the planet; is this some sort of innate jealousy, with the knowledge that when it comes down to life or death, disgusting, disease-carrying rodents will win? In the wake of nuclear destruction, when the rats and roaches come out to play, what role will they take?

Phase Three of Self-Destruction (more of an epilogue, really): Ratarchy

Living off of the skeletons of human society, will rats become the new humans? Will they be war-waging, god-worshipping, resource-hogging, waste-producing, money-hungry, sex-crazed, yelling, crying, laughing, puking humans? Or will the develop a society that lacks all of these characteristics, but exists nontheless? Will they create a concept of possession, or develop a moral code? Will they steal from each other and terrorize each other until they manage to cause their own demise?

[What if they evolve before humanity ends? Who would rule? Would rats understand the concept of a ruler? Since they are super-survivors, would they destroy humanity? Would they take ownership of the earth and its inhabitants, or would they share it and compete only for survival rather than control? Would there be "new humans"?]

Just as humans become larger by the generation (it's true!), will rats revert to their prehistoric sizes and continue to grow? May the entire scale of life on earth change? Will they occupy the remains of human society in the same way the humans did? Or most importantly, will they use tools, build, develop and progress as a society? Will they have rulers and servants? Will they develop weapons far more destructive than anything humans could have ever come up with, or live in harmony with each other? What is animal nature?

[Something to chew on: what if rats evolved before the end of humanity? What if humans and rats went to war against each other? Who would you bet on?]

More on this later. Definitely.

All illustrations original unless noted otherwise; image credits as follows:

• "Princess Hyacinth" by Alphonse Mucha. Courtesy ABCGallery
• War/Destruction Photos: all courtesy Library of Congress
• Others courtesy:
• Pets World
• The Ealing Council
• American Extermination
• iStockPhoto
• RomanCatholicBlog.com
• CharletonHestonWorld
• BizarreBrazil
  

thoughts, plans

Front porches: an everyday slice of architecture symbolic of the segregations between public/private space/life and natural/man-made environments, representing the ability to blur these demarcations through design.

Front porches often act as catalysts for expanding ourselves outwards towards interaction with others to whom we might not have any other ties, as we form relationships for the sake of knowing one more person, without planned benefit for either party. This leads to (among many other things) the exchange of information -- news, education, aid -- and building of community through the crossing of personal paths: knowing of and relating to others positively. Front porches are a step (albeit small) towards giving up the fear of unplanned interaction which an enclosed lifestyle instills in us.

Just as one of the many functions of a front porch is to serve as a place of congregation, this website will serve as a forum for thoughts (loosely) regarding our ever-growing built environment and the ways in which it influences our lives, particularly relating to the varied locations and backgrounds/interests of contributors.


Some future topics-in-the-works include borders and security design, "anarchitecture," architecture as marketing, and improvised design.