Chapter 15
World Planning
2The entire world’s industrial resources are now preoccupied in serving only forty-four per cent of humanity with the advancing standards of living exclusively provided by the world’s progressively enlarging and integrating industrial networks. Making the world’s totally available resources serve one hundred per cent of an exploding population may only be accomplished by a boldly accelerated design evolution which adequately increases the present over-all performance per units of invested resources. This is a task of radical technical innovation rather than political rationalization. It is a task which can only be accomplished by the world’s architects, inventors and scientist-artists. The engineer has been deliberately trained by society to be an unquestionable authority: an engineer must not invent, for his authority is thus violated.
3 Since aircraft and space technology is already operating at high levels of performance per units of invested resources, the recent decade’s realization that space can be enclosed for environment controlling purposes with approximately one per cent of the weight of resources at present employed by the conventional building arts for a given task, indicates that the conversion of the world resources from their present service of only forty-four per cent to service of one hundred per cent of humanity is to be uniquely effected within the livingry arts in contradistinction to the weaponry arts. The latter alone up to this moment in history has been benefited directly by the highest science and technology. Any and all improvements in the home front’s peace-extending livingry advantage have been post-weaponry byproducts.
4 This brings the solution of the forward livingry design problems into direct focus as the responsibility of the architect (as the only technical profession concerned with ‘‘putting things together’’ in an era of the increased fractionation by intensive specialization). Since the practicing architect may operate only when funded by a client and there is no apparent client to retain the architect to solve this world problem, it may only be solved by the world architects taking the initiative, as have the medical scientists, in the development of a comprehensive anticipatory design science dedicating at least its next ten years to making the total world’s resources serve one hundred per cent of humanity at higher standards of living than hitherto experienced by any men through competent industrially producible design—rather than leaving the evolutionary advance to political reforms catalyzed by accelerating frequency of world political crises. Because the economics of the architectural profession, at present, precludes the devotion of adequate time and resources to the solution of this task by the graduate practicing architects, it is in evidence that the architectural profession may activate this comprehensive anticipatory design initiative through encouragement of its professional university schools of architecture to invest the extraordinary intellectual resources and available student time within the universities to the establishment of the design science and its application to world-planning. This could be inaugurated with a ten-year sequence of joined world architectural schools’ annual programs organized for the progressive discovery and design solution of the comprehensive family of economic, technical and scientific factors governing such a world-planning program.
5 Several dramatically communicated solutions come immediately to mind, such as the use of the total façade of a skyscraper or a mountain cliff. The following is an example of a satisfactory solution: the design of a two-hundred-foot diameter Miniature Earth. This Minni-Earth could be fabricated of a light metal trussing. Its interior and exterior surfaces could be symmetrically dotted with ten million small variable intensity light bulbs and the lights controllably connected up with an electronic computer. The whole Minni-Earth array could be suspended by fine high-strength alloy wires from masts surrounding Minni-Earth and at some distance from it. If the sphere were suspended two hundred feet above the ground, the wires would become invisible and it would seem to hover above the earth as an independent asteroid. At a two-hundred-foot distance away from the viewer, the light bulbs’ sizes and distance apart would become indistinguishable, as do the size and distances between the points in a fine halftone print. Patterns introduced into the bulb matrix at various light intensities, through the computer, would create an omni-directional spherical picture analogous to that of a premium television tube, but a television tube whose picture could be seen all over its surface both from inside and outside not as a ‘‘framed’’ picture.
6 Information could be programmed into the computer, and ‘‘remembered’’ by the computer, regarding all the geographical features of the earth, or all those geographical features under a great variety of weather conditions. How exquisite the geographical data may be is appreciated when we realize that if we use the 35 millimeter contact prints of the photographs taken by the aerial surveyors at their lowest altitude of operation, in which individual houses, as homes of men, may be discerned by the naked eye, and paste them together edge-to-edge on a sphere large enough to accommodate them in their respective geographical positions, that sphere would be two hundred feet in diameter—the size of our hypothetical Minni-Earth. Man on earth, invisible to man even from the height of two thousand feet, would be able to see the whole earth and at true scale in respect to the works and habitat of man. He could pick out his own home. Thus, Minni-Earth becomes a potent symbol of man visible in universe.
7 Man recognizes a very limited range of motions in the spectrum of motion. He cannot see the motions of atoms, molecules, cell growth, hair or toenail growth; he cannot see the motion of planets, stars and galaxies; he cannot see the motions of the hands of the clock. Most of the important trends and surprise events in the life of man are invisible, inexorable motion patterns creeping up surprisingly upon him. Historical patterns too slow for the human eye and mind to comprehend, such as changing geology, population growths and resource transpositions, may be comprehensively introduced into the computer’s memory and acceleratingly pictured around the surface of the earth.
8 The total history of world population’s progressive positionings, waxings and wanings, individual and popular migrations and redeployments could be presented and run off acceleratingly in minutes, disclosing powerful eastward, westward, northward and southward swirlings, thickenings and thinnings, with a center of gravity momentum of such trendings permitting the computer to surge ten or one hundred years ahead providing reasonable probability for the planner-designer’s anticipatory advantage. So could all the patterns of man’s removal from the earth’s crust of the various minerals, their progressive forwardings and temporary lodgings in various design occupations—such as in buildings, ships, railway systems and factories and their progressive meltings-out and scrapped drifting into new design formulations in other tasks and other geographies.
9 Our hypothetical Minni-Earth, which the world architectural students may if they wish employ as their design facility, should be located as a major world city’s focal design structure, analogous to the Eiffel Tower in Paris, as a continuing feature of World Olympic Games, to be reinstalled at each successive world site. Or Minni-Earth might be suspended from masts mounted on the ring of rocks in midstream of New York City’s East River, one quarter mile distant from the great east face of the United Nations building, to serve as a constant confronter of all nations’ representatives of the integrating patterns, both expected and unexpected, occurring around the face of man’s constantly shrinking ‘‘one-town world.’’
10 Designs should provide for computer housing remote from the sphere, and for ferries, bridges, tunnels or other approaching means to a position two hundred feet below the Minni-Earth’s surface from which point mechanical means, such as elevators, will transport large numbers of people upward and into the sphere to a platform at the Minni-Earth’s center from which, at night, individuals would be able to view stars in the heavens seen through the lacy openings of the Minni-Earth, giving them the same orientation that they would obtain if they could go to the center of the real earth and could look out with X-ray vision to see those very same stars seemingly fixed above specific geographical points of the earth. (A star seen in zenith over Budapest from the center of Minni-Earth could be checked by telephone with real Budapest as in zenith over that city at that very moment.) A press of a button would show the Minni-Earth central observer the position of all the satellites which men have now sent aloft and, though their circling of the earth is as slow as the circling of the hands of the clock and is therefore invisible, the touch of another button could accelerate their motions so that their total interactions and coursings for a period of years to come could be witnessed in a minute. (A bank of cloud lying apparently motionless in America’s vast Grand Canyon was photographed over a long period of time by a cine-camera and the resultant picture accelerated into a one-minute sequence. To the surprise of the original viewers of the seemingly still scene a very regular pattern of waves such as those on the surface of a coffee cup in a railway dining car was seen to occur in the cloud surface between the Canyon walls.)
11 If the students choose to employ Minni-Earth as their facility, they will find the United Nations rich in economic, demographic and sociologic data. They will find the latest publications on the International Geophysical Year rich in data that may be dramatically displayed on Minni-Earth—for instance, an accelerated historical sequence of all the world’s earthquakes would give startling indications of further recurrences. The world’s electromagnetic field patterns, the varying astrophysical patterns would each provide spectacular Minni-Earth displays.
12 The students should consider their Minni-Earth as a twenty-four-hour visual phenomenon, in contradistinction to the conceiving of buildings as visible only in the daylight, a viewpoint which has recently been compromisingly altered by secondary lighting at night. The Minni-Earth should disclose the world news and events on a twenty-four-hour basis, its patterns being altered periodically for the disclosure of the longtime weather history integrated with the present forecasting.
13 The students will be greatly advantaged by the development of models of Minni-Earth at their own schools which could range from ten millimeters to thirty meters in diameter. Photographs of data arrays on their models would be appropriate for their final project forwarding to the U.I.A. Congress exhibition.
14 In the development of the research for and design solution of this world pattern inventorying facility, the usual procedure in respect to architectural problems may, with the approval of the schools’ professors, be altered so that the students will co-ordinate their activities as a team, meeting daily to consider the whole progress of the undertaking, but deploying to perform their complementary missions in economic, technical, etc., data-procurement and information-gathering, processing and design realizations.
15 In the same way, within any one country, the schools might profitably divide up the many tasks in a manner appropriate to the special kinds of information most available in their respective localities or universities. If the students are willing, the advantages of team coordination might be instituted between countries. The expansion of the rate at which the team coordination advantage might enter into the ten successive years of the world planning and design phases may develop its own logical pace, and students or universities electing to research and design the entire programs themselves would undoubtedly demonstrate unique advantages accruing to concentrated effort and would also serve as experimental controls for comparison with the results accruing to widely distributed coordinate team functioning.
16 The first year’s design program of all individuals, university teams, continental or intercontinental teams should all include prominent citation of the second and sequitur years looming high priority design problems most evidently essential to the accelerated adaptation of man to his evolutionary trendings through comprehensive anticipatory design science.
17 The professors of universities or schools will establish the detailed programs themselves which will be proposed to their students. The time dedicated to the study of the project will be fixed by the program. It depends upon the organization of each school’s teamwork.
18 The international program does not prescribe any particular drawing to provide; the choice is left to the professors. It is the same thing for the scale of these designs. The projects may be presented either in original drawing, or in any other way, under the condition that the sizes are kept (panels or shoots of 100cm x 100cm)—totalling two square meters rather than separate panels. The documents (drawings, photos, etc.) will be stuck on rigid panels (Isorel, light metal, or any other light material). The respective schools or students would be permitted to divide their total two square meters of surface into microfilm increments totalling that amount, and would consequently have to plan to install an automatic sequence-operating microfilm projector at the next U.I.A. Congress exhibition of the students’ work.
19 In the advanced technology which this world-planning program is meant to employ in direct benefit to livingry, the parts production tolerances are held to sub-visible dimensions ranging from one-thousandth to one ten-millionth of an inch. Unlike present architectural practices, wherein prints of detailed drawings are translated by masons and carpenters into components with one-fourth inch errors tolerated, the advanced technology makes conceptually schematic drawings with schedules only of dimensions between theoretical points. The dimensioning is subsequently scheduled into the production work by instruments and indexing machines, controlling dimensions far below man’s direct discernment. For the bold new design evolution to win the initiative in employment of the world’s prime resources on behalf of livingry from its preoccupation in weaponry, will require the architectural students not only to employ the most advanced scientific designing techniques, but also to adopt a progressive, comprehensive education in mathematics, physics, chemistry, economics, sociology and general history.
20 The ten-year world-planning and design programming should at all times be considered in the light of its regenerative potentials. As with the calculus, we cannot ascertain the second derivative’s challenging prospect until we have differentiated our way through the first phases. It may be assumed that the first year’s work when finally presented at the U.I.A. Congress will not only be of interest to world architects and students but that the results of their work will, for the first time, catalyze world attention and recognition of the significance and potentials of their enterprise. The regenerative consequences will probably be of surprising magnitude.