>Queene:
>>( PS if anyone has good references for images that deal with what a city
might look like after nan - let me know)
bradbury@www.aeiveos.com writes:
>>There is a city, I believe in Arizona, (snip)
Thank you! You must mean Acrosanti, which is Paolo something or other's
solar powered mecca....yeah, in fact i visited his 'vision in the desert'
this summer, for my birthday. I also went to the Biltmore in AZ a F.L.W.
masterpiece, and Taliesin West.
Unfortunately at Arcosanti, they are very much "hippies" and weren't very
focused and even more importantly INSURED, and some disasters happened which
caused the whole thing to come to a grinding halt. They refuse any money from
foundations or corperations, to keep the vision "pure" They sell bells and
tiles to support themselves, hardly enough money to keep the colony going,
much less build grandiose high-rises.... Sad. But still *very* cool.
<snip again) triangle-city, box-city, sphere-city, pentagon-city,
bucky-ball-city, blue-city, green-city, red-city, light-city,
heavy-city, soft-city, hard-city, rough-city, smooth-city,
clear-city, opaque-city, sun-city, rainy-city, windy-city,
snow-city, ice-city, water-city, lumpy-city<snip)
Yeah, mind boggling isn't it? I vote for "soft-blurry-floating-light city" I have been formulating a future-cities art series for years, unable to make up my mind even what to BEGIN with!! Then I read Drexler and it got even more
overwhelming!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
> whether we explore all of these
>possibilities to their fullest extent or whether we decide
>that it is meaningless.
The block will not be us deciding it is meaningless. People fear "going out of the box" for psychological reasons. Even Wright had to flat out lie to his clients and/or haggle and cajole them into doing things differently.
As Natasha Vita More points out in her lecture & book, the decision is really whether to learn and explore aesthetics and art and architecture as a core subject. Finding meaning in aesthetics is a learned thing, a skill, which fine tunes the individual, and enhances other areas of study. For whatever reason (& I have my guesses) people shy away from it, considering it "meaningless" or as we say in the arts education field, "fluff" or "desert." This is a faux pas.
>Would you want to live in a city
that through its fundamental architecture promotes violence
or adventure (crim-city, insan-city), or extreme regularity
and safety (bordo-city) or simply chaos (randomo-city)?
>
At 14, I had a dream about this. Game cities. For the extremely jaded. Themes. Reincarnation at death. ..extra lives for finishing levels, etc ; - )
>And would you want to live in a city at all, if instead
you can be uploaded and live in any virtua-city? >>
Well, actually it is even more intriguing in that case, and you better have some damn good animators on board.... without the limitations of physics *at all* , what do our environments reflect, except our pure essence?