Drapac 1

Brittany Drapac

21 December 2009

Felicity Scott: Architecture After 1948

Escapist Ecologies: the survivalist logic of postwar modernism

EXTREME COLD, TYPHOON FLOODING, SEA SWELL, HIGH WINDS—and somewhere in the envelope of these intense climatic conditions are isolated, densely populated cities designed to not only survive but comfortably thrive in these precise environments. Postwar meant post-nuclear, and devastated cities in and Europe led young architects to reconsider the notion of land-bound permanence and outward urban expansion. What resulted was a series of hypothetical urban designs that maintained simultaneous escapist and survivalist mentalities. I will analyze select designs in detail, two on land, Ralph Erskine’s Ecological Arctic Town of 1958 and Kisho Kurokawa’s

Agricultural City of 1960, and two at sea, Kiyonori Kikutake’s Marine City of 1959 and Hal Moggridge’s Sea City of 1968. Freed from mainland geographies, these postwar escape-cities developed architectural adaptations to extreme environmental conditions while regenerating the social-urban interior. In this way, the resulting megastructures were able to realize a permanent flexibility that could address multiple scales.

It is critical to note that these urban plans are neither nomadic agglomerations nor objectified megastructures, both of which predominated postwar . They are exceptions from the projects of their contemporaries in the integration of four principles: escapism, survivalist logic, environmental adaptation and social urbanism. In Urban Structures for the Future, Justus Dahinden describes the importance of microzoning within megastructures to ensure the existence of a human scale, a process that democratizes planning through inner proportions.1 Although he criticizes the impersonal nature of Metabolist megastructures, he latches onto

“metabolism” as the renewal of natural growth. In a planning sense, Dahinden explains that there are two ways for urban forms to grow, by simple expansion or through a process of metabolic regeneration. An urban area should expand to its prescribed boundaries, much like the defendable wall or moat surrounding a medieval town, and then begin to expand inward, or microzone, through the increasing density of the urban nucleus.2 The fact that each of these schemes has proposed a type of inward growth, both articulated and spontaneous, can be significantly attributed to their survivalist conditions of enclosure—it is the existence of the medieval fortress that instigates

1 Justus Dahinden, Urban Structures for the Future (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1972), 16. 2 Ibid., 17. Drapac 2 metabolic growth. “The relationship between urban structures and social forms is reciprocal,” Dahinden iterates, “a change in one of these spheres automatically produces a reaction in the other.”3 In this respect, each of the following principles, though used as independent structures by which to understand the designs, are vitally linked, escapism generating survivalist logic generating environmental adaptations and inner social urban renewal.

Each design physically escapes from society in their geographic isolation, Ecological Arctic Town above the Arctic Circle; Agricultural City a farming town in Aichi, Japan; Marine City floating in the Japanese Sea; and

Sea City fifteen miles offshore Norfolk, England. Wartime destruction on the mainland led architects to consider a more adaptable, survivalist lifestyle—which meant a move away from the urban and expanding sub-urban towards more deserted land- or seascapes. After moving to Sweden, Ralph Erskine became fixated with the architectural implications of cold climates, and while studying the vernaculars of the Laps and Eskimos, realized that northern towns must reject colonial attitudes and develop a culture based on local ways of life.4 In A+U, Oscar Arenales-

Vergara describes Erskine’s concept of extreme architecture as encompassing “the qualitative improvement of open spaces, new social relationships and organizational forms”.5 Arctic Town escapes cultural and architectural norms to develop alternative ones in an extreme environment, a clean slate not dissimilar to the cultural erasure present in

Japanese Metabolist thought, to varying degrees of regeneration. In fact, NASA has recently rediscovered Erskine’s

Arctic work to use in simulating design for other planets,6 not only the most climatically extreme environments, but also the most culturally vacant.

The rising postwar population and pollution levels in Japan were only superficial instigators of escapist mentalities. Devastation, displacement, and food shortage were secondary, but first was defeat itself followed by seven years of US occupation. A form of cultural nihilism developed, and as Cherie Wendelken articulates in

Anxious Modernisms, “it is the very denial of time and place that gives Metabolism its meaning in postwar Japan,” and in order to analyze the movement, we must “re-contextualize this deliberately acontextual architecture.”7 It is

3 Ibid., 19. 4 Ralph Erskine, “Building in the Arctic,” from AD, May 1960 in Peter Collymore, The Architecture of Ralph Erskine (: Academy Group Ltd, 1994), 217. 5 Oscar Arenales-Vergara, “Ralph Erskine on Extreme Environments Design,” in A+U, Issue 414 (: A+U Publishing Co. Ltd., 2005), 101. 6 Ibid., 101. 7 Cherie Wendelken, “Putting Metabolism Back in Place: The Making of a Radically Decontextualized Architecture in Japan,” in Sarah Wiliams Goldhagen, and Réjean Legault, eds., Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 280. Drapac 3 the coupling of escapism and architecture that allows the acontextual to exist—blank space awaiting prescriptive generation and subsequent metabolic re-generation. Tied to the Buddhist concepts of transmogrification and reincarnation, Metabolism fuses the biological with the spiritual to reject nostalgia and arouse a vision of the future that is more post-apocalyptic than optimistic.8 While Kurokawa’s Agricultural City hovers over the flooded rural landscape, Kikutake’s Marine City floats on pontoons across the Japanese sea, away from a firebombed Tokyo. The anxiety of each is palpable after considering the re-contextualization Wendelken underlines; however, in deciphering the proposals themselves, a regenerative, survivalist nature is just as certain. “The Metabolists proposed the acceptance of Japan as ground zero,” Wendelken explains, “a site of rebirth that would be generated by an underlying spirit.”9 Metabolism rejects the prewar, the familiar, and the politically restrictive—hovering above, floating away from, growing and surviving.

Both permanence and enclosure render architecture survivalist by nature, but postwar devastation led designers to reconsider the built environment’s impenetrability. This is especially evident in the destruction of

Japanese cities, so thorough they were left without ruins.10 In his essay “Metabolism 1960” in AD, early Metabolist theorist Noboru Kawazoe reflects restless post-nuclear sentiment:

"Everything will come to an end if a nuclear war covers all the earth with a shower of radioactivity…the next

war will bring the destruction of mankind…[which] arouses a feeling of anxiety all over the world…. We hope

to create something which, even in destruction will cause a subsequent new creation. This ‘something’ must be

found in the form of the cities we are going to make—cities constantly undergoing the process of metabolism”11

Survivalist logic pervades each of these escapist schemes through two types of defense mechanisms, both related to

Dahinden’s description of growth: exterior fortification and interior regeneration. However it is significant to note that they are not necessarily designed as bomb shelters, but rather to withstand natural disasters through adaptive, chameleon defense.

8 Wendelken, 287. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. Drapac 4

Erskine designed Ecological Arctic Town in a landscape depression to protect from the north wind,12 the only scheme that actually uses existing environmental conditions as its initial line of defense. A sloped “wall building” with integrated housing envelops the town on east, west and north sides, similar to a medieval fortress, but protecting low-rise housing and community areas from prevailing winds and blizzards.13 The agglomeration of structure becomes an elastic surface treatment, covering the Arctic valley in the most advantageous and efficient way to ensure survival. Like the chameleon, adaptability is the key architectural defense, central to Erskine’s philosophy. In an interview with Ken Tadashi Oshima in A+U, he relates, “Each situation makes its own rules: the shape of the ground, the kinds of weather and the sorts of people who live there will all vary so much that they make a new design problem for every case.”14 Agricultural City raises its artificial land on pillars, hovering above the landscape to protect from flooding. In fact, a typhoon destroyed Aichi’s farming towns in 1959, and Kurokawa proposed Agricultural City as a replacement.15 In this sense, the underside of the town actually becomes a fortified defense, adapting to natural disaster for survival. The rigid geometric form of the city grid is outlined by a “massive, bamboo-inspired city wall,”16 an exception to Dahinden’s warning against the endless sprawl of Metabolists’

“endless spatial grids”.17 With the underside and city wall as exterior boundaries, or membranes, the city above becomes a nucleus for metabolic growth. The urban grid controls an internal regeneration where the structures themselves adapt through the use of pre-fabricated components that can be transformed or reused depending on need.18

Marine City and Sea City offer contrasting methods of protection, rooted in the way each addresses its environment. Pontoons carry Marine City on concrete decks, or “artificial land,” pierced with 900-foot concrete cylinders that extend at least a hundred feet below the water.19 The “underwater, sectional dwellings”20 on floating pontoons not only render an escapist desire, but a survivalist one as well. Kikutake developed Marine City in a

12 Dirk van den Heuvel and Max Risselada, ed., Team 10: 1953-81: in search of a utopia of the present (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2005), 72. 13 Peter Collymore, The Architecture of Ralph Erskine (London: Academy Group Ltd, 1994), 23. 14 Ken Tadashi Oshima, “Reflections on Six Decades of Design: Interview with Ralph Erskine,” in A+U, Issue 414 (Tokyo: A+U Publishing Co. Ltd., 2005), 9. 15 Ian Abley, “Beyond Little Britain,” AD, Vol. 76 (West Sussex: Wiley-Academy, 2006), 16. 16 Wendelken, 285. 17 Dahinden, 16. 18 Felicity Scott, “Megastructure and Metabolism,” (lecture, Columbia University, NY, October 20, 2009). 19 Architecture International, 1959, in Michell Joachim and Ioanna Theorcharopoulou, eds., ECOGRAM II: Architecture for a Crowded Planet (New York: GSAPP + Parsons the New School for Design, 2009), 1. 20 Scott, lecture. Drapac 5 variety of schemes under different names, and it was in the design of Aquapolis in 1975 that he developed his most dramatic defense strategy. During inclement weather, the floating city was actually designed to “submerge itself fifty feet into the ocean…by pumping water into or out of the lower hull”.21 With all its technological detailing, this act of submersion imitates one of nature’s most frequent defense mechanisms. Sea City, on the other hand, returns to the impenetrable fortress, replacing land for water. The design team included Hal Moggridge as architect, John

Martin as structural engineer and Ken Anthony as climatologist and oceanographer. Their main survivalist concern was protection from high winds, for which they developed an experimental S-shaped wall that surrounds a lagoon.

The wall encompasses a myriad of low-rise housing and public buildings that float on the same concrete pontoons as

Marine City. A belt of floating, synthetic breakwaters protect from sea swell, placed outside of the wall and filled with water to ninety percent capacity. A third barrier of compressed air protects the lagoon’s entrance, released from an underwater pipeline when needed.22 The s-wall, breakwaters and compressed air translate the medieval barriers of fortress, moat and drawbridge to a sea-bound, high-tech megastructure.

The extreme environmental conditions of each instance require adaptability at various systematic levels, resulting in a heightened sense of ecological design. Having devoted his life’s work to climatically and socially attentive architecture, Erskine’s proposal for Ecological Arctic Town is the most specifically adaptive to its environment of all the schemes. The survivalist positioning of the town within a sloped depression and the perimeter wall create an enclosed suntrap, maximizing the heat economy of the low-rise housing and public facilities, and allowing cold air to drain to still lower levels.23 By orienting the town on a south-facing slope, Erskine minimizes shading of the houses from the Arctic’s low-rising sun. While the north-facing facades of the town’s perimeter wall have minimal windows, those facing south are expansively glazed to allow solar gain.24 He goes on to attenuate the interior façade by suspending balconies by steel cables to prevent cold bridging of indoor and outdoor concrete.25

The environmental detailing of the town’s protective wall makes evident the mutual relationship between eco- and survivalist logics. In his Grammar for high latitudes, presented at Team 10 Otterloo in 1959, Erskine outlines further climatic adaptations such as rounded building corners to aerodynamically repel snow drifting, raised buildings to

21 Michael Franklin Ross, Beyond Metabolism: The New (New York: Architectural Record Books, 1978), 190. 22 Dahinden, 136. 23 Collymore, 23, 28. 24 Van den Heuvel, 72. 25 Collymore, 19. Drapac 6 prevent thermal instability from the permafrost layer, night shading of the continuous summer sun, sheltered outdoor walkways open to the sky, and heated streets for inclement weather.26 Erskine’s synthesis of Lap and Eskimo vernacular with technological innovation creates an adaptable, ecological architecture that can be realized in any arctic or sub-arctic climate.

Besides its survivalist protection against flooding, Kurokawa’s Agricultural City offers little description of additional environmental adaptations, despite its theoretical integration of high-density housing and agricultural production. In Investigations in Collective Form, Fumihiko Maki describes the concept of environmental engineering in the development of megastructures, necessitating light skin structures and large-scale climatic control. “A new type of physical structure, environmental building, will emerge,” he states, pointing to Agricultural

City as a useful multi-functional structure.27 In section, a lightweight housing and social network hovers above agricultural production, with agro-industrial machinery filling the in-between. The idea for Marine City arose from

Kikutake’s belief that the root of Asia’s poverty was the disproportion between population and agricultural productivity, and its solution was to harvest the sea, envisioning it as a place to build and live.28 As an environmental megastructure, his design for Aquapolis in 1975 included technology for seawater conversion and its own sewage disposal system.29 Like Agricultural City, its methods of food production are left obscure, each providing an artificial, livable landscape while cultivating the natural. Charles Jencks points out the success of such utopian schemes in developing the “notion of the city as an organism which changes at various rates…the constant renewal of organic tissue.”30 Marine structures, Dahinden stresses, enjoy not only climatic advantages of sunlight and atmospheric pressure, but are surrounded by new potentials for energy, such as the rise and fall of the tide,31 without dismissing wind energy and solar radiation. The design team behind Sea City begins to utilize such potentials, as the s-wall’s generative underbelly becomes evident in section. Within the power complex, high-speed gas turbines paired to generators convert natural gas from the local Hewitt Field to electricity. Meanwhile, “waste heat from turbine exhaust gases would be used for a desalination plant, heating, refrigeration, fish farming, and to

26 Ibid., 27-30. 27 Fumihiko Maki, Investigations in Collective Form (St. Louis: Washington University, 1964), 13. 28 Architecture International 29 Ross, 190. 30 Charles A. Jencks, Late-Modern Architecture and Other Essays (New York: Rizzoli, 1980), 100-101. 31 Dahinden, 33. Drapac 7 warm the lagoon.”32 Sea City, similar to Marine City and Agricultural City, merges high density living with the level of food and energy production necessary to maintain this type of isolated population.

It is perhaps the most important, if elusive, topic that remains—the social-urban conditions of these isolated cities. Intangible only in their presupposition, each scheme accounts for new lifestyles that are as socially engaged as they are escapist. As Jean Baudrillard asserted on behalf of the French Group at the 1970 International Design

Conference in Aspen, “Nothing better than a touch of ecology and catastrophe to unite the social classes…”33 Eco- and survivalist logic emanate from a coupling of two philosophies, that of self-sufficiency and social reliability. This is where Dahinden’s notion of microzoning comes into play, a system that humanizes the megastructure through architectural regeneration on a human scale, balancing public and private spheres. “If our megastructures are to be habitable,” he warns, “we must acquire a new sense of scale values. Otherwise the sheer size of these structures will prove intolerable…”34

It is fitting to begin with Erskine, who considers participatory design processes essential to the community development. “The concept is actually very simple,” he explains, “good architects should like people.”35 The driving notion behind Ecological Arctic Town is to create a human environment in the desert where intensive, active communities can thrive.36 Thus in this first proposal, the emergence of a social fabric within isolated, escapist geographies becomes evident. Erskine goes on to delineate a series of community design strategies essential for arctic environments: “Within this milieu there should be formal planting with exotic vegetation…with a view over the surrounding landscape, well-heated and lit communications, piazzas and gardens, covered for bad weather but open to good weather…”37 Circulation and interstitial space are prevalent ideas in each scheme’s social-urban articulation. The notion of semi-public space actually grew out of Team Ten, specifically Van Eyck’s concept of

“in-between space,” offering a sense of “communal living and identity through controlled, shared ownerships”.38 In this manner, Erskine activates pedestrian streets and squares outside the front doors of living units and semi-private

32 Progressive Architecture, Vol. 49 (New York: Reinhold Publishing, July 1968), 151. 33 Martin Beck, ed., “Environment by Design: International Design Conference in Aspen, June 14-10, 1970,” for Panel 2 (London: Gasworks, 2008). 34 Dahinden, 16-17. 35 Clelia Tuscano, “At the heart of the matter is life: two days with Ralph Erskine, strolling from Rome to L’Aquila,” in Dirk van den Heuvel and Max Risselada, ed., Team 10: 1953-81: in search of a utopia of the present (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2005), 325. 36 Collymore, 217. 37 Ibid. 38 Jencks, 101. Drapac 8 interiors within dwelling clusters, termed “gossip groups” of thirty to fifty units. He defines the space between buildings as play spaces, outdoor living rooms or areas for special planting.39

Kurokawa and Kikutake also emphasized the importance of semi-public space, termed engawa by

Kurokawa, meaning the space between buildings.40 In Agricultural City, he proposes three functional levels above the agricultural infrastructure: work place, social area and individual living units. Activated pedestrian streets, similar to those of Arctic Town, become the “urban connectors,” laterally linking the three-dimensional grid while leaving open in-between space.41 While Agricultural City is organized through a system of horizontal layering, both

Marine City (in the Aquapolis scheme) and Sea City integrate social functions into a circular harbor encompassed by living units. Marine City, designed to house 5,000 people per concrete cylinder, includes a hotel, commercial facilities, office space, research center, and exhibition area.42 Housing is attached only to the walls of the 900-foot cylinders, a system that has yet to realize a continuous social microzone, unlike the pedestrian streets provided in the terraced designs of Arctic Town and Sea City. In the design of the latter, public buildings become floating islands within the central lagoon,43 and among the various amenities are shopping centers, schools, churches, parks, sports facilities, cinemas, and even a zoo. The terraced s-wall is designed to accommodate 21,000 people while another

9,000 would be housed on pontoons in the lagoon. These island-units are modular triangular structures that can be can be joined together to form larger living spaces.44 Both Arctic Town and Sea City create a density gradient from close-fitting vertical terraces to a less crowded, low-rise ground/water condition. This gradient, in addition to the social conditions existing throughout the terraced living units, generate a thriving microzone, open to regenerative growth. The horizontal layering of Agricultural City, though less articulated, has the potential for a similar density- pattern through the multiplication of transformable living units above to the rural production zone below.

When catastrophe meets ecology—when escapist desire meets its isolated geography, an adaptive logic emerges, free of existing social and technological norms. Suddenly it is extreme climatic conditions and unknown environments that provide a tabula rasa launching ground for new cultures, infrastructures, and modes of production.

39 Collymore, 21-22 40 Jencks, 101. 41 Jencks., 103. 42 Ross, 191. 43 Geoffrey Jelliocoe, The Studies of a Landscape Designer over 80 Years, Vol. 1 (Suffolk: Garden Art Press, 1993), 53. 44 Progressive Architecture, 151. Drapac 9

In each hypothetical design scheme, survivalist reasoning intercedes to offer protective enclosures and defense mechanisms, hinged to ecological building techniques. The notion of enclosure or membrane in turn activates an urban core susceptible to the spontaneous, metabolic growth necessary for an animated social fabric. Through the integration of escapism, eco- and survivalist logics and social urbanism, a systematic adaptability emerges at every level of design, allowing each of these schemes the potential to be iterated in similar environments, since context becomes more negotiable in isolated zones—when the horizon line is always visible and when architecture begins to drift, and change. Drapac 10

Bibliography

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Architecture International, 1959, in Michell Joachim and Ioanna Theorcharopoulou, eds. ECOGRAM II: Architecture for a Crowded Planet. New York: GSAPP + Parsons the New School for Design, 2009.

Arenales-Vergara, Oscar. “Ralph Erskine on Extreme Environments Design,” in A+U, Issue 414. Tokyo: A+U Publishing Co. Ltd., 2005.

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Guiheux, Alain. Kisho Kurokawa: Le Métabolisme 1960-1975. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1997.

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Ross, Michael Franklin. Beyond Metabolism: The New Japanese Architecture. New York: Architectural Record Books, 1978.

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Image References

Figure 1: Ecological Arctic Town, Source: Peter Collymore

Figure 2: Ecological Arctic Town, Source: Peter Collymore Drapac 12

Figure 3: Agricultural City, Source: Fumihiko Maki

Figure 4: Agricultural City, Source: University of Greenwich

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Figure 5: Marine City, Source: Cherie Wendelken

Figure 6: Marine City, Source: Michael Franklin Ross Drapac 14

Figure 7: Sea City, Source: Justus Dahinden

Figure 8: Sea City, Source: Justus Dahinden