Vertical, rather than horizontal

In a time when the world’s urban population has surpassed that of rural and urban development is facing a bottleneck, what is the future for a city considering limited land and energy resources?

An exhibition, “Three Dimensional City: Future China,” now held in the Beijing Centre for the Arts, may provide the decision makers an option to address those issues.

With the collective efforts from world’s leading architects, artists and intelligence on urban planning and city ecology, the exhibition presents an ideal blueprint of future urban development.

MVRDV, an avant-garde architect and urban design practice from the Netherlands, brought the exhibition a city occupying “1x1x0.5 cubic kilometers” in 2020, China Hills. Their ideal of “beyond scarcity, beyond separation, beyond pessimism and protectionism,” is presented by these “terrace towers”, an experimental alternative for skyscrapers that maximize the densification of architecture to allow the greatest possible area to be used as residential and green space.

Paolo Soleri, an Italian American architect, also launched his first exhibit in China. Soleri’s exhibit, Reformulation, presents to the Chinese audience the model of “Lean Linear City” and “Two Suns” scroll images, representing his concept of “Arcology”, a word combining architecture and ecology. The concept proposes a highly integrated and compact three dimensional urban form that is the opposite of suburban sprawl, with its inherently wasteful consumption of resources and tendency to isolate people from each other and the community.

Soleri, now 90 years old, has carried out his great vision of building “Acrosanti,” a self-sufficient sustainable city located in the high desert of central Arizona, since the 1970s.

These are the dreamers’ dream cities. Hopefully, those dreams may come true one day. China at present is probably the only nation that could make these Utopian cities achievable regarding its speed of urbanization, its peerless land scale, and its future which may be beyond people’s imagination. On that day, people would be grateful to those dreamers for their efforts of making the Earth a better place.

Video & Story: Huang Lan

Photo provided by the Beijing Centre for the Arts