Alternate Contemporary Architectural Design

[Oba]

This could involve a POD before the dawn of the 20th century but I put it here as it deals with what architecture could be like from the last decade of the 2nd millenium to the first 2 decades of the 3rd millenium.

What ways could housing, construction, urban planning, materials, form and aesthetics of architecture drastically differ in the contemporary world?

Here are some ideas I came up with: WI the Chinese industrialized around the time of OTL Britain but did so independently and thus we see cities in the Sinosphere designed around the principles of Feng shui and have bilaterally symmetrical houses with courtyards instead of lawns and very large cities without skyscrapers (the Chinese traditionally valued the horizontal over the vertical in architecture; hence the Forbidden City's wide, low halls, for example.)

Another, less drastic method of differing architectural design is to keep the grid plan dominant in new construction in the Western world as opposed to the OTL street hierarchy of so many American suburbs. With this would likely be denser housing, better public transportation infrastructure in the United States and far less automobile ownership.

Yet another idea is WI, during the late 19th and 20th centuries, the Industrialized West adopts more architectural values from other cultures and civilizations along with being mor open to unfamiliar and new ideas in general. Examples include the rubble trench foundation for low buildings, something at least centuries old from Africa and the Middle East, instead of the slab foundations used in most OTL tract homes. Other ideas could be more use of dirt cheap (pun intended) rammed earth, greater use of steel frames and prestressed concrete, use of cheap bamboo reinforced concrete in housing construction, wider use of courtyards and the adoption of thin-shell structures on a larger scale.

 

[Dr. Strangelove]

What ways could housing, construction, urban planning, materials, form and aesthetics of architecture drastically differ in the contemporary world?

Just butterfly away the industrial revolution and mechanization, and the social, economic and cultural conditions of architecture in the past two centuries have changed irrevocably.

Here are some ideas I came up with: WI the Chinese industrialized around the time of OTL Britain but did so independently and thus we see cities in the Sinosphere designed around the principles of Feng shui and have bilaterally symmetrical houses with courtyards instead of lawns and very large cities without skyscrapers (the Chinese traditionally valued the horizontal over the vertical in architecture; hence the Forbidden City's wide, low halls, for example.)

I like how this sounds, but unfortunately I don't know enough about chinese architecture to tell you more. For what is worth, traditional japanese architecture held an immense influence in the development of modern western architecture: Japan began to open up at the same time construction in concrete and steel became widespread, and many western architects from the turn of the century became fascinated with Japanese aesthetics. This is very clear in Frank Lloyd Wright's earliest works, for example. Many tenets of modern architecture like the open plan, flexibility in room distribution, substitution of load-bearing walls by frames, etc. was already present in traditional japanese architecture.

Yet another idea is WI, during the late 19th and 20th centuries, the Industrialized West adopts more architectural values from other cultures and civilizations along with being mor open to unfamiliar and new ideas in general. Examples include the rubble trench foundation for low buildings, something at least centuries old from Africa and the Middle East, instead of the slab foundations used in most OTL tract homes. Other ideas could be more use of dirt cheap (pun intended) rammed earth, greater use of steel frames and prestressed concrete, use of cheap bamboo reinforced concrete in housing construction, wider use of courtyards and the adoption of thin-shell structures on a larger scale.

This would need a complete cultural change. The truth is, during the 18th and 19th century, western architecture did adopt many architectural aesthetics from foreign cultures, but always in a purely aesthetical and, to put it bluntly, paternalistic way -hence the chinese-style follies in 18th century gardens, for example. These adoptions of foreign architectural solutions, however, were always aesthetical. Leaving aside if those constructive solutions would fit the conditions of the western world, I don't think our society prior to 1950 was ready to adopt them out of a feeling of cultural superiority that would not really disappear until the post-modern shift from the 1960's on.

Architecture by itself does not exist in a void like other arts -architects would love that, but it's not going to happen. It is a strange mixture of art, technique and craft whose first and foremost purpose is to solve whatever problems society throws at it in the most efficient way. If you want to change architecture, the easiest way is to change society's conditions in the first place.

 

[Roger II]

Another thought is to give more prominence to garden design in architecture as Persian architecture does(the use of courtyards is somewhat related to this). This wouldn't work in many areas because of the weather, but it could work quite well in the South.

 

[Oba]

I like how this sounds, but unfortunately I don't know enough about chinese architecture to tell you more. For what is worth, traditional japanese architecture held an immense influence in the development of modern western architecture: Japan began to open up at the same time construction in concrete and steel became widespread, and many western architects from the turn of the century became fascinated with Japanese aesthetics. This is very clear in Frank Lloyd Wright's earliest works, for example. Many tenets of modern architecture like the open plan, flexibility in room distribution, substitution of load-bearing walls by frames, etc. was already present in traditional japanese architecture.

Interesting; I have heard of the East Asians (I do not think it was the Japanese originally but the Chinese) who invented the load-bearing frame. I like the idea of flexible, movable walls like in Japan: So much space and labor could be saved without sacrificing comfort.

Architecture by itself does not exist in a void like other arts -architects would love that, but it's not going to happen. It is a strange mixture of art, technique and craft whose first and foremost purpose is to solve whatever problems society throws at it in the most efficient way. If you want to change architecture, the easiest way is to change society's conditions in the first place.

True, but so are the other applied arts, like the fabric arts, carving and ceramics. Some cultures, like the Teotihuacanos of Classic Period Central Mexico, even based their aesthetic of other styles, such as sculpture, on architecture, while the Chavín and the Tiwanaku took many motifs from the fabric arts and incorporated them into various architectural media.

 

[dgharis]

Interesting; I have heard of the East Asians (I do not think it was the Japanese originally but the Chinese) who invented the load-bearing frame. I like the idea of flexible, movable walls like in Japan: So much space and labor could be saved without sacrificing comfort.

True, but so are the other applied arts, like the fabric arts, carving and ceramics. Some cultures, like the Teotihuacanos of Classic Period Central Mexico, even based their aesthetic of other styles, such as sculpture, on architecture, while the Chavín and the Tiwanaku took many motifs from the fabric arts and incorporated them into various architectural media.

Architecture is also dependent on available materials (Before steel frames the practical height limit for multistory buildings was about one hundred feet; beyond that the entirety of the ground floors would have to be devoted to structural support, which would defeat the purpose of building higher.) and local conditions (For instance, Japanese roofs were covered with heavy tile to minimize damage from typhoons.).

 

[Henriksson]

Another, less drastic method of differing architectural design is to keep the grid plan dominant in new construction in the Western world as opposed to the OTL street hierarchy of so many American suburbs. With this would likely be denser housing, better public transportation infrastructure in the United States and far less automobile ownership.

Not very well-versed in the subject, but I found the paper Fossilized Subjectivities: Petro-Privatism, Neoliberalism, and Entrepreneurial Life quite enlightening.

The basis of this way of life was a geography centered on home ownership and automobility (Florida and Feldman 1998; Florida and Jonas 1991). Increasing wages and cheap access to credit formed the formed the basis through which generalized home and auto ownership was achieved among white male breadwinner families (Aglietta, 1979: 157; Harvey 1989: 38). Suburbanization was not only about homes and cars, but also about all the commodified things that allow social life to function in the spaces between the homes and cars – electrified kitchens replete with “necessary” appliances (microwaves, refrigerators, and freezers), air conditioning, furniture, closets and drawers filled with clothing, and so on. As Robert Beauregard (2006: 124) points out, this represented, more than anything else, a profoundly new “way of life” symbolically infused with “images of family life, domesticity, safety, and the innocence of childhood. Here people could live with others like themselves and bring up their children free from the threats and temptations of the city.”

Yet, this entire geography – this entire mode of living, thinking and feeling life – was erected upon a precarious foundation. The great “class compromise” fueling the “golden age of capitalism” depended on a very remarkable ecological compromise as well. Even the notion of Fordism as “mass production for mass consumption” presupposes a mass of material and energy-intensive commodity production, distribution and consumption. Thus, Fordism has enormous implications from a perspective focused on nature-society relations (e.g. resource exhaustion, climate change, air and water pollution, just to name a few).

As postwar accumulation was materialized through the construction of vast sprawling suburban housing tracts, liberal ideas of government intervention and the social safety net were slowly transfixed into more and more privatist forms of politics. As many suburban historians have shown,7 the political victories of the right in the United States – and with it the neoliberalization of American capitalism – depended upon the mobilization of a pettybourgeois strata of white suburban homeowners increasingly distrustful of government handouts, high taxes, and the redistribution of wealth. While this suburban geography was in many ways laid during the immediate postwar period, sprawl and suburban and ex-urban development intensified and expanded after the crisis of the 1970s (Garreau 1991; Duany et al. 2001). Underlying the suburban geography of private homeownership is what Evan McKenzie refers to as an “ideology of hostile privatism.”(McKenzie 1994: 19). The hostility itself emerges from what Edsall and Edsall (1992: 147) call “conservative egalitarianism” which posits that everyone has an equal opportunity to work hard and succeed in life and, moreover, that life success was itself purely a product of entrepreneurial life choices.

 

[Oba]

Architecture is also dependent on available materials (Before steel frames the practical height limit for multistory buildings was about one hundred feet; beyond that the entirety of the ground floors would have to be devoted to structural support, which would defeat the purpose of building higher.) and local conditions (For instance, Japanese roofs were covered with heavy tile to minimize damage from typhoons.).

Reinforced and prestressed concrete are great building materials and can be used to build most things from skyscrapers to small houses more cheaply and durably than wood or metal in most instances.

Another thought is to give more prominence to garden design in architecture as Persian architecture does(the use of courtyards is somewhat related to this). This wouldn't work in many areas because of the weather, but it could work quite well in the South.

A good idea; I always liked courtyards (no "kids get off my courtyard.") Another idea is living roofs, which have many benefits besides aesthetics and a place to relax.