Toyota completes phase 1 construction of futuristic city
www3.nhk.or.jp
www3.nhk.or.jp
It‘s just completely dysfunctional. Architecture professors have focused on “innovation” for 100 years and have achieved little. We still flock to the old, 19th century (or older) city centers and love it. We spend thousands to spend a week or two there on holidays.
Very few modern places exist where this is the case.
In survey after survey, 80% of the people prefer traditional over modern(ist) designs.
So the whole profession has failed, since about the introduction of the Bauhaus.
Modern designs are affected by supply and demand, while modernist designs have been supplanted by many other school.
Innovation has ranged from tiny homes, to livable homes, to new materials, to shipping containers, building heights, concrete types, designs and more.
I’ve seen architectural styles emerge and evolve from different countries, so it’s hard to read this and find the source of your opinion.
The creation of public spaces is highly dependent on the governance of those localities.
I was bemoaning the growth of self sufficient enclaves as a real estate solution in Mumbai, but I acknowledge that this is the market providing for its consumers what the government is yet to provide.
Is this primarily an attack on academia, under the assumption that everyone hates the combination of “innovation” “modernism” and “professors”?
For one, you don‘t need academics to build houses.
It‘s an idea of the 20th century that you would.
Previously architecture schools were part of the art departments. A bit of engineering, maybe, but that‘s it.
Now that you have academics, they need to be innovative.
The old doesn‘t count. Architecture becomes like fashion. Students are scolded if they want to produce anything traditional.
This is true for 99% of architecture schools worldwide. Notre Dame is a noticeable exception, as are several summer schools in Europe (by INTbau for example).
There is zero reason for neglecting or denying traditional architecture. The Romans have already known how to live well. Without artificial air condition. Perfectly climate adapted. Natural materials.
Second, architecture schools are not about education, it‘s about becoming part of a cult. It‘s about telling a story, about winning competitions, and about convincing investors. Not so much pleasing the users of a building.
Heck I know about classical building methods, styles and the economics behind them and I’m not even an architect.
And I was not even born in the west.
Like, I don’t expect a neophyte architect to use methods that can build houses only up to 3 stories based on stonework.
They need to use drywall and construction methods unique to their locality.
But there’s thousands of other and file architects, and thousands more who make insane and wonderful things, along with professors who …
Dear heavens, What happened on your journey?
Besides - there’s always place for new and interesting, if rebellion is your go to motif - have at it.
Modern itself was a rebellion against older forms and thinking.
If you don’t follow this stream, more often than not you will get bad grades or fail tests.
Some people said “architecture is not about education, it is about entering a cult”.
Some more details here: https://youtu.be/syQMTZyzqcg?si=NTz362TrktrIEBhr
And yet so many claim all we need is moooore housing.
I would love to see quality of life become more of a ubiquitous focus and feature of what is built.
We have a new, modern, but as cheap as possible building with the smallest legal unit sizes that went in around the corner from us less than 10 years ago. It's now nearly empty because every unit leaks, the appliances and cabinetry already need to be replaced, and it'll have to be half rebuilt to fix several structural problems.
The developer, fortunately, failed in getting a second building started because of community pushback. In response, the community has been attacked at the local, and recently international, level for being NIMBYs and "stopping necessary progress".
The same folks who promote more sustainable and people focused city design are fighting for these worthless buildings. Their intentions are right in the bigger picture sense, but they leave no nuance for what's actually happening on the ground.
Medieval castles can be very pretty to visit too, I wouldn't want to live in one if given modern choice regardless of wealth, even if ignoring all the red tape for any sort of change or even repair.
The issue is that architecture is not a science. It has nothing to do with the past 100 years. There is simply, to date, no solid theoretical foundation that can inform design. Corbu made a lame attempt in his early phase to establish a set of axioms, and that didn't work out.
So the search in the past 100 years wasn't entirely based on "innovation". The field is searching for something resembling a theoretical framework.
> So the whole profession has failed, since about the introduction of the Bauhaus.
This is a reactionary statement. There are numerous amazing works of architecture from the 20th. And your dragging in Bauhaus indicates you actually are not well read in the history of modern architecture. (This negative fascination with bauhaus carries a strong whiff of the National Socialist Germany, btw ..)
> In survey after survey, 80% of the people prefer traditional over modern(ist) designs.
Well, Architecture (contra building design) is high art. It is not for the unwashed. 80% of the people also prefer drivel for their cultural fare.
No, architecture is not high art. It is the most public of arts and hence needs to serve the people. And people know very well which environments they like and which ones they don‘t. Where they find emotional well-being. That is not a political question at all. The studies are consistent.
We also don‘t need a theory. Architecture is a bunch of patterns and insights into human nature that has been known for thousands of years.
The people should get what the people like, not what the elite likes. Nobody cares what you consider "high art". The term in itself is pretentious.
Your "high art" is too desperately trying to make a name by standing out through being weird instead of better.
Materials change. Scale requirements have changed. Techniques have evolved. The forms are reflecting that. It is entirely correct to note that many of such efforts (mostly copycat rehashing of masterpieces of modernist architects by lesser talent) have proven ineffective, but that it is just the nature of the field. Architecture is not software. It takes generations to iterate through the possible solutions.
> Your "high art" is too desperately trying to make a name by standing out through being weird instead of better.
You have zero idea of what I consider high art in architecture. You are tilting at your own windmills buddy.
+There is nothing pretensious about distinguishing high and low cultural efforts. Let's consider our own field: should we all be forced to code in JavaScript and disavow more powerful constructs such as e.g. Haskell since the "common man" is incapable of groking it??
https://www.historyandheadlines.com/east-st-louis-and-the-ol...
So why "nation-state"?
Even the smallest country can and does make architectural and city-planning efforts. The american (not a nation-state) planned cities, usually built by average companies.
The passageway for deliveries sounds like the best thing, but garbage maybe not so much. I have a feeling that over time it will degrade into a sewer-like environment (without the water) with foul smells, unless the garbage is really well sealed.
Edit: Then again, these underground passageways are way bigger than I expected (shown in the video). I thought those would be just big enough for some rail-based autonomous vehicles. But if people handle the garbage underground, I really wonder if the ventilation is superior as to create a worker-friendly environment. It really looks like some people will spend their day underground delivering packages or collecting garbage.
Edit: I think it’s this https://www.envacgroup.com/how-it-works/the-envac-system/
https://www.npr.org/2017/07/26/539304811/how-new-york-s-roos...
Are you describing "Cut and Cover" ?
As in "Cut and Cover is a method of construction of shallow tunnels"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_construction#Cut-and-co...
It has been used for centuries, e.g. was used to dig the first parts of the London underground in the late 1800s
(It's all a bit sad though: I often see folks who look over 70 standing around for hours on end waving a warning stick and so on... Then there are all these nearly-disabled old-people who have no one to look after them.)
Good planning would heavily involve mixed-use development, reducing the distance to desired amenities (keeping roads small instead of having every block separated by 6 lanes), and a strong focus on mass transit (train, tram, bus).
The city of the future would be a 15-minute city covered in solar panels, broken up by public green areas, with every street lined with trees. I imagine it would also be covered mostly in mid-rises.
I was also thinking having solar panels above tram lines, but that may not be worth the cost.
https://aarhusoe.dk/media/owqjyq0b/dji_0091.jpg - the construction site in the corner is done now, its a very very tall building that looks similar to the one in the center - just... very much taller.
it's a terribly crowded place, and i hate it - but at least the apartment buildings look different than all the ol 'red brick cubes' from the 40s and 50s we have in the rest of the city (You can see some of them in the background in this picture)
Buying car shouldn't be emotional decision but a rational one, its not a small investment, for many second biggest in their lives after housing.
Far future, certainly ICE cars will be mostly dead, what will come we shall see.
I'm certain we can at least agree that leaving out chargers has at least some measurable impact on the transition.
This would be a great improvement over many cities, though definite drop in QOL for delivery and garbage truck drivers. Though I imagine having it underground makes it much easier to manage with autonomous vehicles.
This list of largest hotels ends at 28. The 28th largest has 3000 rooms.
This other argument I do agree with, and more importantly, it fails to qualify as one even according to Japanese administrative definitions (would need to have 50K+ residents). Which I think is the actually important bit, if we want to establish the labeling as misleading.
Apartment blocks are typically in the hundred to a few hundred resident range around the world, only really high density developments will crack the thousand residents bar. So to liken it to one is a bit disingenuous in its own right, just the other way around.
More like a small town?
A hotel?
More or less an institute campus?
The future is expensive, but of course the intent is to advance early-stage (ie expensive) technology toward affordability. It sounds like they want to winnow down to the best option among alternate system architectures, so I expect there's a fair bit of infrastructure-level redundancy too.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/toyota-city-japan-ai-robotics-eee...
Here is the list of a few companies that co-invest with Toyota:
- Nissin (Instant food company) to "Create and evaluating food environments to inspire new 'food cultures'".
- UCC (Japanese coffee maker) to "Explore the potential value of coffee through futuristic cafe experiences".
- Daikin Industries (Air conditioner manufacturer) to "Experiment with 'pollen-free spaces'".
I don't know exactly what they are trying to test (I guess that they don't know either), but it's meant to be an industrial theme park than a real city with municipal authority.
Although upfront cost for city construction is probably negligible compared to the operating cost over the lifespan of the city. If you have even modest labour, infrastructure and service savings every year for decades to come building smarter probably pays off.
Croydon is twice the size of Southend and will probably never become a city.
Not Just Bikes has a video on why that might not be the best idea.
Having Toyota employees as residents just makes sense, since it will be much easier to set expectations.
The wiki page is disappointingly free of all the racism and what would today be human rights violations that George Pullman implemented at the time.
If you're interested in learning more about Japan, I would greatly appreciate any feedback you have: https://oyatsudigest.beehiiv.com/. Arigato!
Similar to Toyota's thinking, EPCOT was originally meant to be a multimodal transport city that utilised new ways to move people about, but that all ended with Disney's death. Many of those transport technologies are simply used in the theme parks today.
More like an over designed village at this scale
- how much raw materials and energy costs building a "smart city"?
- how much to operate and evolve, which means rebuild from scratch?
My answer is WAY TOO MUCH to been able to do so on scale. The humanity CAN'T live in smart cities period. We need more than 7 earths with only one inhabited to create such monsters.
It's about time to understand that the new deal is only possible in small, simple and scalable solutions like homes and sheds with LITTLE infra needed to build and rebuild them. Where local water sources are enough, without needing very long aqueducts, having very large rejects, needing complex road infra etc.
That's the possible high-tech future, the smart-home, smart-shed, not smart city. A digital network of desktops, homes, sheds, not some giants datacenters/mainframes/hubs. Try to compute and you'll agree.