386
Distinguished contemporary architects, inculcating a bravado aesthetic that both
accommodates and bursts beyond any obvious geometrical borders, like the late
British-Iraqi Zaha Hadid, Richard Meier, the Frank Lloyd Wright of the Waterfall
House, the Renzo Piano of Centro Botin art gallery in Santander, Spain, many of the
late Paolo Soleri’s (1919–2013) drawings, all take a vision of interior space far
beyond, for example, the massive urban renewals of a central Paris undertaken by
Georges-Eugène (Baron) Haussmann during the rule of Emperor Napoleon III
between 1853 and 1870.
23
But these one-offs of luminous building materials are no
match for the realities of the current 33 megacities in the world (soon to be 39 and
projected to take up at least “3% of global land mass” and 9% of the human
population).
24
Any more than the tent cities of Haiti have anything in common with
the country estates of Robert Adam, except that people live there. Whether measuring by ancient Egyptian common cubits—elbow to the end of the middle finger;
Royal cubits—the addition of the length of a human palm; or by the feet and inches
inherited from the Greeks and Romans, human occupants have the same wishes. A
warm bath. Clean drinking water. Peace and quiet. A suitably inviting eu-topos—a
good place, seamlessly integrated into our own for our companion animals, whether
avian, feline, equine, canine, or bovine, typically.
Walled and densely populated urban clusters, like Syria’s Tell Brak, or Sumerian/
Babylonian Uruk, dating back 8000 and 6500 years respectively;
25
or the splendid
Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán founded in 1325; ancient Athens and Rome, or Jericho,
Jerusalem, and Machu Picchu… they all fought the same insulation, person-toperson distancing, hygienic, public health, energy fallout, supply and demand distribution chains, and civic disorder, and class-system complaints we would come to
denominate by deep history divides, racial and ecological umbrella categories:
North/South, income inequality, environmental and social justice dysfunctions.
Does natural selection select different choices within our species in the countryside, versus a megacity of ten million+? Of course it does; it must. Our experiments
with built utopias have at times succeeded—certainly for the odd privileged family
over time—but have largely failed when stacked up against the inevitability of a
species’ needs, as depicted throughout the miseries of those behind sheltered walls
of a Florentine mansion in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1353). No amount of
luxury was sufficient bulwark against the infiltrative bacterium Yersinia pestis. Or
Possibilities, by Loretta Lees (Editor), SAGE Publications, Ltd., London, 2004; Design for
Ecological Democracy, by Randolph T. Hester, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2006, the Bible
for an architectural “everyday future.” See also, Megalopolis, the Urbanized Northeastern
Seaboard of the United States, by Jean Gottmann, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.,1966.
23 See “Haussmann’s Paris,” The Art History Archive, “Architecture in the Era of Napoleon III,” by
Emily Kirkman, 2007, http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/architecture/HaussmannsArchitectural-Paris.html, Accessed April 18, 2020.
24 “Mapping the World’s New Megacities in 2030,” by Jeff Desjardins, Visual Capitalist, October
26,
2018,
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapping-the-worlds-new-megacities-in-2030/.
Accessed April 18, 2020.
25 See “The Ancient City,” by Joshua J. Mark, April 5, 2014, Ancient History Encyclopedia, https://
www.ancient.eu/city/. Accessed April 18, 2020.
42 Does Natural Selection Select for Natural Selection?
Distinguished contemporary architects, inculcating a bravado aesthetic that both
accommodates and bursts beyond any obvious geometrical borders, like the late
British-Iraqi Zaha Hadid, Richard Meier, the Frank Lloyd Wright of the Waterfall
House, the Renzo Piano of Centro Botin art gallery in Santander, Spain, many of the
late Paolo Soleri’s (1919–2013) drawings, all take a vision of interior space far
beyond, for example, the massive urban renewals of a central Paris undertaken by
Georges-Eugène (Baron) Haussmann during the rule of Emperor Napoleon III
between 1853 and 1870.
23
But these one-offs of luminous building materials are no
match for the realities of the current 33 megacities in the world (soon to be 39 and
projected to take up at least “3% of global land mass” and 9% of the human
population).
24
Any more than the tent cities of Haiti have anything in common with
the country estates of Robert Adam, except that people live there. Whether measuring by ancient Egyptian common cubits—elbow to the end of the middle finger;
Royal cubits—the addition of the length of a human palm; or by the feet and inches
inherited from the Greeks and Romans, human occupants have the same wishes. A
warm bath. Clean drinking water. Peace and quiet. A suitably inviting eu-topos—a
good place, seamlessly integrated into our own for our companion animals, whether
avian, feline, equine, canine, or bovine, typically.
Walled and densely populated urban clusters, like Syria’s Tell Brak, or Sumerian/
Babylonian Uruk, dating back 8000 and 6500 years respectively;
25
or the splendid
Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán founded in 1325; ancient Athens and Rome, or Jericho,
Jerusalem, and Machu Picchu… they all fought the same insulation, person-toperson distancing, hygienic, public health, energy fallout, supply and demand distribution chains, and civic disorder, and class-system complaints we would come to
denominate by deep history divides, racial and ecological umbrella categories:
North/South, income inequality, environmental and social justice dysfunctions.
Does natural selection select different choices within our species in the countryside, versus a megacity of ten million+? Of course it does; it must. Our experiments
with built utopias have at times succeeded—certainly for the odd privileged family
over time—but have largely failed when stacked up against the inevitability of a
species’ needs, as depicted throughout the miseries of those behind sheltered walls
of a Florentine mansion in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1353). No amount of
luxury was sufficient bulwark against the infiltrative bacterium Yersinia pestis. Or
Possibilities, by Loretta Lees (Editor), SAGE Publications, Ltd., London, 2004; Design for
Ecological Democracy, by Randolph T. Hester, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2006, the Bible
for an architectural “everyday future.” See also, Megalopolis, the Urbanized Northeastern
Seaboard of the United States, by Jean Gottmann, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.,1966.
23 See “Haussmann’s Paris,” The Art History Archive, “Architecture in the Era of Napoleon III,” by
Emily Kirkman, 2007, http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/architecture/HaussmannsArchitectural-Paris.html, Accessed April 18, 2020.
24 “Mapping the World’s New Megacities in 2030,” by Jeff Desjardins, Visual Capitalist, October
26,
2018,
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapping-the-worlds-new-megacities-in-2030/.
Accessed April 18, 2020.
25 See “The Ancient City,” by Joshua J. Mark, April 5, 2014, Ancient History Encyclopedia, https://
www.ancient.eu/city/. Accessed April 18, 2020.
42 Does Natural Selection Select for Natural Selection?