Highrise city hilberseimer6/29/2023 Ironically, the more we learn to control nature, the less nature we have, and the more we change nature, the more complex, strange and unknowable it appears. Preserved/protected nature is always a sanitized, tamed and overall more human-friendly version of the real thing – a domesticated, hyper-natural version that is little other than culture in disguise. Human design (biotech agriculture, plastic surgery, beach resorts, rural tourism, greenhouse tomatoes, hypoallergenic cats) makes so-called nature take on an artificial authenticity. Even those places we call nature reserves (maintained in order to preserve fragile ecosystems and biodiversity) are paradoxically unnatural, since the act of conservation itself can only ever result in something man-made. However, nature in the sense of something non-artificial, unaltered by human activity, hardly exists any more. This idea of “artificiality” has its root in the Latin word artificium, which means “art, craft or skill” and eventually also acquired the meaning of “inauthenticity,” thereby coming to encompass the common associations of “truth” with nature and “deceit” with culture. Man, the conscious cultural being, sets himself against the world of natural things: civilized artificiality versus original wilderness. Nature is a mystified anthropocentric ideal, one evoked well by Caspar David Friedrich’s 1818 painting of a man poised on the edge of the abyss, contemplating its vastness and projecting onto it an extension of his own inner grandiosity. Landscape has become junkspace, foliage as spoilage: trees are tortured, lawns cover human manipulations like thick pelts or even toupees, sprinklers water according to mathematical timetables…”⁶ “Air, water, wood: all are enhanced to produce hyperecologyae, a parallel Walden, a new rainforest. Social polis merged with bucolic arcadia in infinite, site-specific combinations and bred a succession of “transgenic landscapes”⁵ that we now generally refer to as “the urban.” The territory lost friction and changed in more or less awkward ways to the point at which “the urban” itself became a kind of all-pervading (mostly chaotic) cultural background – one might say, a kind of nature. The industrial (modern) city blurred and irreparably damaged this once-stable opposition. The city wall drew the limit between the two worlds, with the cultural object in the foreground, contained and framed against the backdrop of wide-open land. The classical city, one could argue, did the same thing on a communal scale: it contained the agglomeration of civilized inner public spaces segregated from the outer (extramural) countryside. Ultimately, all architecture colonizes space for human appropriation, defining a boundary of domination set against a background of wilderness and chaos – in other words, nature (the excluded leftover of the architectural inside). What is left now is an ambiguous and hybrid condition that has no genetic code and is impossible to describe in typological terms. Engulfed by “junkspace,”⁴ city-as-object and rural-as-background no longer exist. While each has its own particular standpoint, they all address (directly or by implication) the demise of the humanist city³ and that of its analogous dichotomy, city/countryside. This paradigm was the condition of limitlessness and the complete integration of movement and communication brought about by capitalism, which Cerdà saw as the unprecedented ‘vast wirling ocean of persons, of things, of interests of every sort, of a thousand diverse elements’ that work in permanent reciprocity and thus form a totality that cannot be contained by any previous finite territorial formations such as the city.”¹Ĭittá diffusa, metapolis, postmetropolis, global city, space of flows, generic city² – these are some of the recently invented concepts that try to name and define the new kind of urban phenomena that have come to asymmetrically blanket the globe. Conscious of the extreme importance of the phenomena he wanted to describe, Cerdà legitimized his invention of urbanization as elucidating the emerging ‘conceptual’ features of a paradigm. “The word urbanization was introduced by the Spanish engineer and planner Ildefons Cerdà, who theorized the concept in his 1867 book Teoría general de la urbanización.
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