‘How much does your building weigh?'

More thoughts on cities of the future. This one is care of Norman Foster, prolific British architect and Bucky Fuller colleague/collaborator. (GW)

The city of the future: It's a story of camels, penguins and cars you don't drive

By Norman Foster
Mail Online
January 23, 2011

I grew up on the wrong side of the tracks. I mean that quite literally. My childhood home was an unspectacular red brick terraced house in Stockport, Greater Manchester. The nearby railway bridge bore huge steam trains that flew directly past my bedroom window. Under the arch of that bridge, though, down along a path, was a quite different proposition: a nice middle-class area of streets lined with trees and smart detached villas.

Not that a sense of divided society stopped me drawing. I was born in 1935 and as far back as I can remember I was sketching designs. My first subject was an aircraft, which I imagined myself piloting. Other planes were less benign. As German bombers thundered over our house, I would bravely speculate with my mother Lily about what type of aircraft they might be, before breaking down in tears, absolutely terrified.

The only honourable work my parents knew was blue-collar. But while my father Robert ran a pawnbroker’s shop and my mother was a waitress, I moved into a middle-class world with a level of security they never knew.

After National Service in the RAF, I wangled a job as an assistant in an architect’s office in Manchester. I started talking to the architects, asking how I could become one. I needed a portfolio, so I did drawings. With those I got into Manchester University School of Architecture in 1956 and later won a scholarship to Yale University in the U.S., before returning to Britain to start a practice.

The point of all this is that the Manchester I knew was, in many ways, the precursor of the modern global city. More than 200 years ago, industrialisation turned what had been a small town into a vast metropolis, bringing a river of tens of thousands of farm workers to toil in its new cotton factories.

These days – and for much the same reasons – more than half the world’s population lives in a city. In China and India workers can earn three times as much in the country. Those two economic powerhouses will help drive city dwelling rates up to 70 per cent by 2050.

So it’s inevitable that most of us will need to get used to the idea of living in a city. But it won’t be a city as we know it. I know, because making life in these new cities comfortable and rewarding – without frittering away the Earth’s resources – is the architect’s greatest task. We’ll make them higher, closer, safer and smarter. More connected and more efficient. In the words of the U.S. inventor, futurologist and provocateur Richard Buckminster Fuller – we’ll get more from less.

Buckminster Fuller invented the geodesic dome, the sort of sci-fi construction used in the Eden Project in Cornwall. I once flew him to see one of my buildings, the Sainsbury Centre at East Anglia University. After looking around admiringly, he asked a question that floored me.

‘How much does your building weigh, Norman?’ he enquired.

Of course, I didn’t know and it took a week to work it out – 5,328 tons, most of it lost in the invisible concrete foundations. That was Bucky’s point – most of the building’s weight was in its least attractive part; we must always consider whether building materials and land are being put to good use – and the city, in my view, is the best way to do that.

But there’s more to the cities than that. They are also the best place to trade ideas and skills, to make friends, to find a wife or husband. Cities, in other words, are the life and soul of the party. Look up ‘city’ in a dictionary if you want to see what I mean.

The words close to it are aspirational – civic, civilised, civilisation. Then try suburb – ‘without the qualities of town or country, provincial, narrow in outlook’, according to the unfairly snobbish Chambers definition.

One thing that will be different in the new city is the car. I do not wish to bash cars here as they offer huge personal freedom and are a technological marvel, but they are also dirty, noisy, dangerous and waste too much energy.

Our roads will look much more like those sci-fi movies and be controlled and regulated, much as airspace is today. Small energy-efficient vehicles will be allowed to drive informally when on small roads, but once they join the motorway or big roads, they will be locked into a safe, computer-guided system, with the driver merely supervising, just as planes are run on autopilot with instructions from air traffic control.

Google has already tested robot cars in San Francisco. If they can navigate San Francisco, they can probably manage just about anywhere.

We now think it hilarious that medieval streets were used as open sewers. Equally, our descendants will say: ‘You won’t believe this, but people were once allowed to hurl a couple of tons of dangerous metal around smashing into each other.’

The better city will have low pollution, low energy use, the smallest carbon footprint. Compare a tightly knit metropolis like Copenhagen with the suburban sprawl of Detroit. The Danish city has twice the population density – the number of people per square mile – but uses a tenth of the energy, despite having a similar climate. With everything closer, walking and cycling are possible.

High-density cities also offer more freedom and are often more prosperous. It is no coincidence that the areas of London with greatest population density – surprisingly, Kensington, Chelsea, Holland Park and Mayfair – are the richest and most sought-after.

Indeed, Manhattan, one of the most moneyed spots on the planet, also has one of the greatest concentrations of people in its skyscrapers. It’s also, of course, the place where every architect wants to build his tower. (Buckminster Fuller famously wanted to go one step further and cover the whole city with one of his geodesic domes.)

The good news is that my firm now has a tower in New York. The bad news is that it is a very, very small tower – only 46 storeys –but, I am pleased to say, it consumes much less energy than a conventional Manhattan block of its size. Bucky would have approved.

After 40 years working as an architect, it strikes me that what makes a city agreeable is actually not any one building. It is the way you get about, the public spaces, the streets, walkways, bridges, parks and squares – the things I would draw as I cycled about Manchester as a teenager, at a time when I didn’t even know what an architect was.

It was with this in mind that my firm started work on one of its most futuristic projects – Masdar City in the United Arab Emirates. To look at computer-generated images of it, you might think it was a fantasy from a sci-fi comic. The sort I read as a boy. But Masdar City, a university city and environmental technology park outside Abu Dhabi, is already being built.

To find new ways to build in the stultifying heat of the desert, we studied the way animals adapt to and exploit their environment. Just as penguins huddle together for warmth in the Arctic, so camels huddle to create shade in the desert. In Masdar City, tall buildings will crowd together to provide shade in narrow walkways, opening into courtyards with fountains.

In my spare time, I cycle, ski and pilot gliders. I need the silence – not to escape, but to reflect, think through solutions. Occasionally when flying I’ve found myself sharing airspace and thermals with birds. These creatures – displaying superior intelligence to the metal-encased human – achieve astonishing flight with minimal energy and effort. Similarly, Masdar City’s wind towers capture air currents high above, bringing cool breezes into the city. The temperature is 37°C, as opposed to 57°C in downtown Abu Dhabi.

Energy is provided by solar-cell panels. In most Middle Eastern countries, massive electricity bills are run up by air conditioning, but Masdar is efficient enough to be able to sell its surplus electricity to the Abu Dhabi grid. Water and waste are recycled.

Masdar City is an experiment and in its early stages – building only began four years ago. A hundred students are studying at the university so far; there will be 800 when it is finished in 2018.

I know, of course, that this futuristic vision is not one that chimes with British tastes. Surveys often show people would prefer a detached house with a lawn and driveway to an apartment.

I understand this. It’s not my place to presume to tell people where they can live. But perhaps that dream will simply not be possible in the future. We have taken up too many green spaces already. The countryside must remain sacrosanct and open to all.
When talking about the future city, it’s all too easy to speak only of China and India. There is good reason for that. Britain and the West are in danger of getting left behind.

Of course it is easier to build the perfect city if you start with a blank canvas like the desert of Abu Dhabi and have oil money to finance it. Cities like London have evolved over millennia and cannot be changed overnight.

When the Great Fire of London destroyed most of the medieval city in 1666, Christopher Wren was invited to design a new one. Within days he had drawn up an elegant grid of broad boulevards leading to majestic squares, but it came to nothing – the existing landowners wanted things as they had been.

But in China if something is needed, it happens. The emerging nations are thinking big, taking the initiative. Businessmen and politicians act as one to get things done, as they once did in Manchester. Getting a project of national importance built in Britain requires time and inordinate amounts of patience. Worse, while we usually know what the outcome will be when we start out, it still takes years for an airport extension or a nuclear power station to be approved by public inquiry.

Did you know London is the only big city in the world that allows to planes fly right over the centre?

It infuriates people day and night. If a Chinese planner had been in charge of London, a new 21st-century airport would have been designed, approved and built in the Thames estuary by now. London’s current airport, Heathrow, would have been consigned to aviation history, perhaps becoming a new housing or a retail hub. Or, better still, a park.

‘How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr Foster?’, a documentary on Norman Foster, is released on Jan 28