against pasta

A provocative excerpt from the Futurist writings of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.

Above all we believe necessary:

a) The abolition of pastasciutta, an absurd Italian gastronomic religion.

It may be that a diet of cod, roast beef and steamed pudding is beneficial to the English, cold cuts and cheese to the Dutch and sauerkraut, smoked [salt] pork and sausage to the Germans, but pasta is not beneficial to the Italians. For example it is completely hostile to the vivacious spirit and passionate, generous, intuitive soul of the Neapolitans. If these people have been heroic fighters, inspired artists, awe-inspiring orators, shrewd lawyers, tenacious farmers it was in spite of their voluminous daily plate of pasta. When they eat it they develop that typical ironic and sentimental scepticism which can often cut short their enthusiasm.

A highly intelligent Neapolitan Professor, Signorelli, writes: 'In contrast to bread and rice, pasta is a food which is swallowed, not masticated. Such starchy food should mainly be digested in the mouth by the saliva but in this case the task of transformation is carried out by the pancreas and the liver. This leads to an interrupted equilibrium in these organs. From such disturbances derive lassitude, pessimism, nostalgic inactivity and neutralism.'

Fagus Works and Marinetti

"Fagus Works" (see p. 41 of Harries)

It's a beautiful building. What I remember most from visiting it in 2001 was that it was phenomenally energy inefficient. As you can see, it has no insulation. I recall the docent remarking on the financial drain of the heating bill.

Marinetti

In another class this semester we've been called on to remark upon the similarities between the futuristic rhapsodies of the 1900s-1960s and those of today. Needless to say, the content and the language of the predictions are nearly identical (longevity, cures to everything under the sun, etc.).

Even if I hadn't been primed to notice them, I think it would be difficult not to find parallels between the exuberant futurism of today and that of modernist Futurism's manifestos. The rhapsodies about a future of immortality, efficiency, speed, and unleashed energy would not be out of place in the pages of Wired today. What did strike me as unusual was the mysticizing of the technological, something that's not absent but certainly different today. For example:

“You will undoubtedly have heard the comments that car owners and car workshop managers habitually make: 'Motorcars, they say, are truly mysterious...They have their foibles, they do unexpected things; they seem to have personalities, souls and wills of their own. You have to stroke them, treat them respectfully, never mishandle them nor overtire them. If you follow this advice, the machine made of cast iron and steel, this motor constructed according to precise calculations, will give you not only its due, but double and triple, considerably more and a whole lot better than the calculations of its creator, its father, ever dreamed of!'

Well then, I see in these words a great, important revelation, promising the not-too-distant discovery of the laws of a true sensitivity in machines!” (Critical Writings: “Extended Man and the Kingdom of the Machine,” 86)

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance notwithstanding, this “sensitivity in machines" seems out of place today (people buy Japanese cars because they work, right?), yet I wonder if an underlying current of such occult hope runs in the writing of the devotees of emergence. Surely one finds a passing resemblance with some of the ardent supporters of Wolfram's A New Kind of Science, to cite one example.

High Rise

Like the Modernist architectural manifestos, Ballard’s High Rise asks us to believe that the organization of space—the social production of space—is what allows (or does not allow) for utopia. High Rise takes the modernist architectural programme to its logical conclusion; in effect, deconstructing each aspiration of the agenda by pushing it to its extreme, and revealing, in the process, a millennial shortsightedness that we as readers now living awash in glass and concrete readily ascertain. The Modernist impulses: universalization, standardization, mechanization, simplification—satisfying the greatest number of needs with the least amount of capital on the largest scale feasible: this is the High Rise. By moving to the structure, the character Laing feels as though he has “traveled forward fifty years in time, away from crowded streets, traffic hold-ups…” into a building that reveals itself to be “ a huge machine" that "provided a never-failing supply of care and attention” (10). While he does balk at all of the concrete, as it is “an architecture designed for war” (10), he still assumes residency without reservation.

The irony is that these futuristic yearnings prove to be, in a spiral model of progress analogous to Hegel’s dialectical narrative of aesthetics, a re-turn to primitivism. This primitive urge is even apparent in the manifestos themselves. El Lissitzky writes in his "Ideological superstructure" that “In our architecture, as in our whole life, we are striving to create a social order, that is to say, to raise the instinctual into consciousness," and Le Corbusier, in “The Charter of Athens,” similarly declares that the destiny of the city is to “satisfy the primordial biological and psychological needs of their inhabitants” (137). As a “Complete Building,” in a sense modified from Gropius’ conception, the high rise fulfills its purpose by providing its residents with all of their basic necessities, including those we would call social: “By its very efficiency, the high-rise took over the task of maintaining the social structure that supported them all. For the first time, it removed the need to repress every kind of anti-social behaviour” (36). In liberating its residents from the demands of the social, the High Rise calls into existence a subject who ceases to take interest in the exercises of modernity. No religious facilities exist in the High Rise: no airport-style chapels or reflection rooms. In noting what the High Rise does not provide: organized religion, therapy, art (except those pieces hauled up in the freight elevators by the higher floors), an active Home Owners Association or other solid sense of community, we realize that stripped of all the modern enclaves, the residents are left to experience bare life. The simplification desired by the modernists leaves us with these bare essentials: the desire for sex, food, and security.

Does the form of the high rise, the way it bounds space, act as the motor behind this regression? Does the arrangement of space itself call forth these more primitive urges? The high-rise does resemble, albeit on a larger scale, the multistoried cliff dwellings of the Ananzi, whose upper floors were accessible only by ladder, similar to the high speed elevators servicing only the 35th floors and above of the high rise. Quite fittingly, Ballard has the character Laing, in the opening chapter, look out from his abode, his “over-priced cell, slotted almost at random into the cliff face of the apartment building” (7). If, as Karsten Harries attests in "The Dream of the Complete Building," the architect “shape[s] the space and time of everyday experience in such a way that man is recalled from the dispersal into which he is led by the modern world to an order that will reveal to him his vocation,” then the architect has revealed to the inhabitants of the high rise their affinity with a vocationality of more primitive origin (39). The initial stratification of the building relegated Wilder, the documentary filmmaker, to the lower floors/the lower classes, but as the logic of primitivism unfurls, he—by virtue of his physical prowess—assumes the role of hunter-gatherer, becomes chieftain of a clan, reaches the pinnacle of the building, receives the boon (of plunder, death, rape), and then, interestingly, relinquishes himself at the feet of a band of women who have similarly “risen." In the end, the high rise is ruled by a tight matriarchy (note: matrilineal blood lines determined clans in Anasazi tribes as well).

It is not a great leap to grasp modernity as a reincarnation, or at the very least a reconstruction, of the primitive. The triumph of “modern” psychology/Freud’s “id” is the acknowledgement of “primitive” sexual urges. And modern anthropology crystallizes around the study of kinship systems and gift economies. But one character in high rise, astute as we, remarks that the inhabitants are not heading towards “a state of happy primitivism” ruled by the “noble savage,” but are rather moving toward a new age, ruled by “our un-innocent post-Freudian selves…[who] resent never having had a chance to become perverse” (109). It is an age that will go “beyond technology” into a future inhabited by “a well-to-do and well-educated proletariat of the future, boxed up in these expensive apartments with their elegant furniture and intelligent sensibilities, and no possibility of escape” (81). It is the “vertical zoo” (134). And perhaps, if we push Gropius’ “Complete Building” as far as we can, we will arrive at the Total Environment. For Harries, “[a]n environment that is total and complete suggests death” (42). Let us not forget that many inhabitants of the high rise have signed a ninety-nine year lease. Closure—perhaps apprehended as a requisite for unity, for simplicity, is Death. Nothing escapes the system that is the High Rise: garbage, urine, blood, dead bodies. There are few outlets. sexual, mental, physical—Death satisfies all three. If the architect must “wrest a spiritual order from space,” if it must “defend us from the void” (Harries), then what is the void it is defending against?

In the style of Schulze-Fielitz’s “The Space City,” the high rise levitates above ground. Schulze-Fielitz believed that “[t]o regenerate existing cities, structures will stretch above their degenerate sections and cause them to fall into disuse.” The Space City, floating in its ethereal domain, becomes “the structural, systematized, prefabricated, growing or shrinking, adaptable, air-conditioned, multi-purpose space labyrinth that can be fitted together or taken apart at will” (176). We find, again, the primitivism lurking in this dream: the “labyrinth” itself is a mythic figuration that seems to beg the question of whether there is a Minotaur lurking at the heart of the High Rise. But perhaps more importantly, Space City illustrates the aim of modern architecture to get beyond the conception of the building as static. Building was reconceived as “biological process,” a kind of organism, and the Futurists hailed the new architecture’s commitment to an ephemerality that fittingly corresponded to organic life itself. It was no longer a process of erecting monuments and having a monu-mentality, but of generating movable/exchangeable parts. The Space City consists of interchangeable quanta of space that allow for constant reassembling and disassembling. The High Rise, with all of the shuffling of its inhabitants and their cells, presents us with a kind of disassemblage, but we still face the inescapability of its logic. How does the logic of the high rise, projected into the future, come to manifest itself in the social production of space? Does it, true to the "Space City" itself, burst its earthly moorings, propelled by gigantic thrusters into the stratosphere? Is the total environment the man-made space station (the human artifice) positioned against the void of infinite space?

Everyday life in Arcotopia

At Cordes Junction, a cluster of gas stations and fast food restaurants off of I-17, a tiny, nondescript sign and a winding dirt road mark the passage out of one world and into another. 163 miles north of here is the Grand Canyon; 65 miles south is Phoenix, the fifth-largest city in the U.S., flattening out 1.5 million people over 516 square miles of concrete desert. Arizona's other great architect's utopia, Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West, can be found here, though Scottsdale's encroaching strip malls and all-in-one condominiums have begun to make it seem like just another gated community. At Arcosanti we can still imagine we are somewhere else. The above photo is of the entrance proper to the dream Paolo Soleri built.

The term 'Arcosanti' is a portmanteau -- 'Ar': Arcology -- 'Cos': cosa, the Italian word for material things -- 'Anti': anti-, or, Arcology against material things. Arcosanti is as self-sufficient as a technological society can be in the middle of the desert.

Soleri's ecological commune is not, importantly, a retrogressive or Luddite ideal. For him and his followers, arcologies are the future, and the design of each building reflects that -- and yet, there is something, if not quite medieval, then close to monastic about life here now. Students come to learn Soleri's design and construction techniques; if they wish to stay, their work subsidizes their living expenses. There are around 100 residents at any one time, with perhaps 40 of them permanent. Permanent residents get PPL insurance and six weeks of paid vacations a year. Rent is approximately $160 a month.

This is the main dining hall for visitors and residents. The circle is Soleri's favored design form, and expresses perhaps better than anything else the arcology's assumed relationship between the city and its environment, the past and the future, and the community with itself.

Aside from construction and giving guided tours, the other major responsibility of Arcosanti residents is the crafting of bronze bells. Bell-making has been Arcosanti's most consistent and longest-running source of income.

Public spaces. Inside the ziggurat-like structure on the right are the VIP suites, periodically rented out to musicians the community hires to perform. John Lennon stayed here once.

Arcosanti apartments are all unique, with larger units distributed according to seniority. Interior decorating is the responsibility of the individual resident.

The main office, with Soleri's residence above.

Green design means: passive heating/cooling system 'powered' by the cement structures' heat absorption; adjustable canopies to control sun exposure; material and water recycling; organically grown food; absence of cars.

The projected population of Arcosanti is 5,000 residents, a single node in a worldwide network of arcologies. With its completion status hovering at around 2%, it is a structure that exists primarily in the noosphere. By rejecting external funding for the project Soleri has ensured it will never be finished in his lifetime. What really exists, now, is a very fancy co-op, and the people seem to like it that way. Its function is more that of a school and the home of a grand vision than it is a reality, the physical marker of an imaginary space.

Arcology This, Arcology That

We're reading J.G. Ballard's High Rise this week, as well as some architectural manifestos, and we were hoping we would be able to include some of Paolo Soleri's arcological theories as well. Unfortunately, the sinister Duke library conspired against us, managing to lose every single one of his books—and so we turn, hats in hand, to the internets.

Proposed as an alternative to wasteful Western living and especially suburban sprawl, the arcology—an unimaginably immense structure with a huge population density that allows for "total living," an entire city in a single building—is clearly the premier Utopian architecture of our time. I want to draw particular attention to the intriguing dialectic centrally bound up with the imagination of the arcology: a vast supercity that is built in largely or totally undeveloped wilderness.



The arcology concept proposes a highly integrated and compact three-dimensional urban form that is the opposite of urban sprawl with its inherently wasteful consumption of land, energy and time, tending to isolate people from each other and the community. The complexification and miniaturization of the city enables radical conservation of land, energy and resources.

An arcology would need about two percent as much land as a typical city of similar population. Today’s typical city devotes more than sixty percent of its land to roads and automobile services. Arcology eliminates the automobile from within the city. The multi-use nature of arcology design would put living, working and public spaces within easy reach of each other and walking would be the main form of transportation within the city.

An arcology’s direct proximity to uninhabited wilderness would provide the city dweller with constant immediate and low-impact access to rural space as well as allowing agriculture to be situated near the city, maximizing the logistical efficiency of food distribution systems. Arcology would use passive solar architectural techniques such as the apse effect, greenhouse architecture and garment architecture to reduce the energy usage of the city, especially in terms of heating, lighting and cooling. Overall, arcology seeks to embody a “Lean Alternative” to hyper consumption and wastefulness through more frugal, efficient and intelligent city design.

Arcology theory holds that this leanness is obtainable only via the miniaturization intrinsic to the Urban Effect, the complex interaction between diverse entities and organisms which mark healthy systems both in the natural world and in every successful and culturally significant city in history. —arcosanti.org

In combining ecological sustainability with an idealized, hyper-efficient supercity, in crafting a massive superstructure which one would never need to leave (and which therefore there is essentially nothing "outside") the arcology makes two Utopian moves: first, it relocates the imagination of ecotopia from the pastoral to a highly modern, highly technological space, and second it shrinks the national imaginary into a single city while at the same time shrinking the map of the city into a single building.

The world's best hope for a functioning arcology is Arcosanti, Arizona, which has been under construction for almost forty years: In 1970, the Cosanti Foundation began building Arcosanti, an experimental town in the high desert of Arizona, 70 miles north of metropolitan Phoenix. When complete, Arcosanti will house 5000 people, demonstrating ways to improve urban conditions and lessen our destructive impact on the earth. Its large, compact structures and large-scale solar greenhouses will occupy only 25 acres of a 4060 acre land preserve, keeping the natural countryside in close proximity to urban dwellers. Arcosanti is an open project—after just a short workshop, you can become a resident. (Ryan was actually there a few weeks ago, snooping around and taking pictures. I'll let him say more if he likes.)



Another candidate for world's first arcology could be the XSEED 4000, proposed to be the world's tallest structure at 13,000 feet, though it's stalled in the planning and financing stages. (This MetaFilter thread on XSEED from last year is actually where I first heard about arcology.)



So that's the Utopian dream, a dream of ecology and sustainability on the one hand and the usual classless egalitarianism on the other. In a day or so we'll start talking about this in connection with High Rise, in which this dream predictably and perhaps inevitably becomes a hell at precisely the moment when the delicate calibration of services and sustainability begins to breaks down...