The Imaginarium of a Solarpunk Architect

Solarpunk I suspect is more important that we know, because I think rich subcultures are the seeds of massive growth.

It's just some funny drawings and internet fanfic twigging our sense of novelty on HN now, but when you see it as representing the desires and longings of young people for wilderness, and also know people who left cities in the last 10y, they were the thin edge of the wedge, where post-pandemic, younger people are leaving cities to get on the real estate ladder, with remote work and amazon-style supply chains, and they are family-inclined. It incorporates passive and renewable energy techs, argritech, biotech, cannabis-driven value added production, organic and small scale food production, brewing and distilling, civic minded prepping, local vs. global, etc.

I'm interested in when solarpunk blips on the radar because to me it is an aesthetic that represents new growth.

This is the first time I hear the term "solarpunk". So this seems to encompass visions of an optimistic future when exploitation of nature, pollution, climate change etc. And strikingly, looking up the definition made me feel an almost juvenile excitement about an idea again which I haven't experienced in a long time. That made me realize that most contemporary visions of the near(er) future seem so bleak and dreadful in comparison. But, if we paint our future as this thoroughly unattractive place, then what motivation remains to make progress?

I removed a comment of mine saying Schuiten was a famous belgian comics drawer ("dessinateur de bande dessinee") and his style was kinda unique (and I love that style)... I removed it because I was thinking of Francois Schuiten, not Luc Schuiten.

After some research it turns out apparently these two are brothers!

Most of the things in this article are deliberately avoided in cities these days. Sufficient seating, public transport, and walkable streets make things easier for poor/homeless/other untouchables, and making their lives worse is prioritized above making the space better.

If we can fix that, we'd be well on our way to realizing better living spaces like the artist (among many others, myself included) dreams of.

Apparently "solarpunk" is now the zietgiest. Here's another interesting one:

https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/drawing-pictures-of-cities

Connecting solarpunk to art nouveau is pretty insightful. I think any new movement like this pulls from some historical reference to frame the idea.

Having visited Barcelona and seeing Gaudi's influence on the architecture there, I understand how a few notable buildings could actually influence the peoples' mindsets.

There has been a ton of advancement in ecological solutions and biomimicry, but tying those changes to design that mirrors nature in an art nouveau way could translate the underlying complexity to something our lizard brains will understand at a glance - it is a powerful abstraction that ties together our innate desire for a safe corner of nature and our social desire for something new and cool.

I find solarpunk really interesting. On one hand, it's the most "fresh" aesthetic of futurism we've seen since cyberpunk. On the other hand, most of this architecture isn't environmentally sustainable at all -- the massive amounts of water and energy it takes to keep trees alive on a rooftop is antithetical to an "eco city".

The artists appear to be inspired by fad concept renderings for sky-garden towers that were never built:

https://99percentinvisible.org/article/renderings-vs-reality...

This is a beautiful reimagining of a different way to do cities. We need more of this in the world right now.

Solarpunk is a continuation and rediscovery of the Techno hippie movement that began in the Bay Area in the late 70's and early 80's. Apple Computer was part of it (while IBM was not.) This era is described fairly accurately in Adam Curtis's "All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace" (a reference to the Richard Brautigan poem) and John Markoff's excellent "What The Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry" Highly recommend them, even if Curtis does go a little off the deep end at times.

This looks sleek, but isn’t that a _lot_ of glass? I had read something recently (e.g., https://www.wired.co.uk/article/stop-building-glass-skyscrap...) suggesting that too much glass was bad for the environment.

There's currently a huge push online to make Solarpunk a thing, as a kind of an optimistic counterpart to Cyberpunk, but I'm skeptical about whether it can attain the same level of cultural traction as the other big *punks.

Cyberpunk and steampunk both fetishize aesthetics from the past - 80's corporate Japan and the Victorian Britain, respectively, - there's a sort of nostalgic longing that keeps them culturally relevant. Solarpunk tries to fetishize sustainability in a similar way, but I'm not sure if there's enough foundation there to build onto.

Solarpunk is a cool concept. I saw it in 2067 (the movie -I haven't actually time-traveled).

I love the solarpunk aesthetic, but hasn't Roger Dean been doing this since the 1970s?

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Roger+Dean+art&iar=images

Some of the structures in Singapore(Supertree Grove) feel like a step towards this! Although I don't think they are fully there, I would be absolutely thrilled to see more architecture and design like that.

In order to build a better future, it's necessary first to imagine it.

Any open world games with this type of aesthetic? I would love to play.

Recently read this on the topic, the artist in the post is great: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/drawing-pictures-of-cities

For more inspiration and positivity: https://solarpunkanarchists.com/

In many contexts, solarpunk is related to anarcho-communism and gift-economies. It can be difficult to see how a solarpunk-like society could sustainably grow directly out of our current economic system.

The images in the article can be divided in two groups:

* ideas from new urbanism to greenify the urban core with its dense streets, to make them a nicer place, which is a good idea. * the old modernist ideas of detached houses, now in "ecological" form, which is a total utopia, exactly as it was stated in the Athens Charter.

They also seem to look like Frank Lloyd-Wright's words that "sometime people will live in an entirely rural landscape with houses 100 meters apart from each other and greenery and trees between them" (he hated cities quite a lot) (here's one of his houses, sometimes posted with a motivator text below: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=frank+lloyd+wright+waterfall+house...)

The first part of these, is generally a good thing, but has to be done moderately. I see some images have curves and round forms, which is not a necessity, but rather an attempt to make a nicely looking bird view, which causes various inconveniences -- like park paths that are never walked by, or cut corners.

Curved grass strips are especially a problem: if people walk over them, they have to be protected by fences, or by elevating them -- in this case it 1) will require artificial watering, 2) will produce side pockets, unusable for walking (but hopefully used for benches).

Andres Duany said a lot about this in his lectures, and I can only sum it up as greenery in the city is needed, but has to be done cautiously and reassessed critically. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hO3CaJtSfjg

The other half of the images are mostly reshaped detached houses or modernist apartment blocks. Same Duany criticizes the detached house concept a lot -- it costs much, it makes people have tons of stuff, drive cars, live in isolated way, unlike the urban dwellers (I followed these ideas when buying apartment, and never regret -- I felt a lot better near a small city center, than before that living on the fringe.)

The modernist concept of apartment blocks and large green spaces between them appeared as an answer to extremely dense cities of 19th century, which were hardly livable without our modern tech (tap water, sewer, central heating, electric light and active ventilation). The most promiment responses were Garden City Movement (basically, make towns not more than 60K ppl, put them at some distance with forests and fields between, and connect with railways), and Athens Charter (build cities of large apartment blocks standing apart from each other, no closed perimeter like in traditional cities, have greenery betwee, and make city blocks large to let cars go without intersections).

The latter was widely implemented in the Socialist block from East Germany to Vladivostok, and failed in many ways.

Jan Gehl saw this development in socio-democratic Denmark and criticized for 1) places devoid of any street retail and other local business, because streets are too wide, which made people commute or drive a car to city center to get services, and 2) de-socialization. In a large apartment block it's hard to meet and get along with neighbors for many purely physical and psychological reasons.

The Human Scale documentary sums up Gehl's points: https://vimeo.com/458139267

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I read their manifesto that appeared earlier, and that's fine.

The problem is with these pictures: to me they seem simply a fashionable landscape design with lots of trees, or detached houses with strange shapes. The former is just arts, and I don't see it reflecting any new thinking. The latter is new attempt at century-old failed ideas.

What would I offer instead? High-speed commute rail in Germany, Netherlands and maybe Scandinavia, made Garden City ideas actually happen. You can work in a large city, but live an a town in 30 km (20 mi), commute in 40 minutes, but near your home you have both, all the great things of a city (cafes, services, meeting friends in the main street) and of countryside (10 minutes to the city edge and hike or bike). Or you can have a business that is entirely in a small town but has easy access to large markets in big cities -- just 1 hour in train.

Very cool, but I don’t want to dwell on all the bugs one would swallow cycling through one of these cities.