Right from the end of the ‘60s, apocalyptic topics broadened up in a cultural genre mixed with SciFi, urban myths, real environmental disasters, blockbuster movies, TV shocking documentaries, the statistics of ending resources and the maps of pollution..
We either seem to speed up the end with irrational social practices and technological carelessness (I think at the bitter end of Mihalis Kakogiannis’ comedy, The Day the Fish Came Out, in 1967, but also to the recent tragedy at Fukushima), or we have a terrible bad luck if we get on the orbit of an asteroid or a jet of gamma radiation coming out from a stellar explosion…
An American investor bought an abandoned warehouse for nuclear missiles in Kansas, to convert it into a 14-storey underground block, for survival in the case of various apocalyptic scenarios (varying from biological attacks, to solar disasters or geo-magnetic ones), only for the privileged who have at least one million dollars to buy half a storey… The vertical underground tube may host luxury flats, a school, library, hospital, cinema, pool or even a farm able to provide fresh food (fish and vegetables) on an unlimited time… As an irony, à la Delirious New York, such a conversion may actually turn soon into a new “social reactor” model, far from a luxurious spa for the paranoid communities with lots of money.
In the 75th issue of our publication, the “Another future” article grouped projects for a degree to the Birmingham School of Architecture, focused on the idea of prospecting the future, especially the unfavourable scenarios. The “Floating London – A Vertical City” project, for instance, speculated about the opportunity of an amphibian city, able to convert existing high buildings in the case of a catastrophic floods due to the greenhouse effect, in agricultural and urban megastructures, obviously sustainable ones. Another project, “Sarajevo: Situation Normal All Fouled Up” offered a viable model both for war and for peace, for a post-conflict ingenious survival in a well-defined context, recovering and recycling almost everything at hand, as in Mad Max or Waterworld…
I’m almost afraid to say that there is a good side in that collective and ancestral team to the cosmic extinction or to technological dystopia, which disregards borders or nations. This links to the positive impact of a new way of thinking life after a disaster which is not up to us, or to avoid, or at least postpone the catastrophe in the case of unreasonable actions we are responsible for. I would like to think that survival, in the case of disasters, will not be about only the gloomy view of the efficiency of martial law and new paramilitary and self-defensive sects which learn now to use a high-precision rifle and get Molotov cocktails for imaginary terrestrial or extra-terrestrial invasions. I can only feel comfort at the thought that the architecture schools in Chile know to make emergency architecture for everybody (#90), that someone from Arup invented photobioreactors (an article, right in this issue), and that next year, if we survive, we will be able to see them work at IBA Hamburg, right where a former air anti-defense bunker from the war (a historical monument) will be the typical model of conversion in an energy co-generated central based on top passive and active environmental technologies, to support a whole smart area and, I hope, an equally educated society.
Photo credit: “Floating London – A Vertical City” , Robert Adam Lloyd, Birmingham School of Architecture, 2009
