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Satya Jyoti, this is a very important topic, thank you for bringing this to our attention.
What you are asking for has yet to be built. Of course, we have many architects who devote themselves to sustainability and to the human condition inside those rooms. At least verbally they devote themselves to this; I recently saw the new chapel from the famous architect Zumthor: a straight block of concrete, raising vertically in a very flat landscape. Alien, cold, ugly, and in my opinion far away of what a chapel ought to be.
What is sustainability? You already made a good definition of it, and you pointed out that it is not clearly defined, that there is a big space for interpretations. As many examples of modern architecture prove, there are a lot of so-called sustainable buildings which do not turn a Hitler in a normal being, it is the other way round, this architecture drives you nuts, aestetically and psychologically. Like all humans, I have the ability to feel a room, to really enter that room, and let the form and appearance of that particular room resonate with me. Therefore we must differ from the definition of sustainable and ecological architecture that is quite common in our times and the definition you made in your above comment.
Of course, I'm with you entirely. As every form of art, architecture has the duty to empower and transform the inhabitants. Also a stable and a hut for a dog should be built according to the animals. Good architecture has the tendency that the inhabitants feel at ease inside, and that they spend more time than necessary in it. I know a story of a small newspaper shop at a highway. They renovated it to a dome-shape, the main room has the shape of a hemisphere. What happened? Suddenly the shop was overcrowded, and the owners faced a new problem that they didn't know before. The shop, a room for short business and transit, turned into a welcoming location for meeting and spending time.
I want to quote some excerpts from an interview with the architect Michael Habeck:
q: What do modern settlements lack of?
MH: With the exception of light and air, almost everything that is needed for a good place to live (ger.: Lebensraum).
*The ground-plans of the houses are in fact quite big, normally, but they can't be used flexible enough, if the life circumstances change.
*The houses are generally much too high. After the 5th floor, the contact to life in the general area is cut, which lead to mental disorder and reduced social competence. This is scientifically proven.
*The public area between those big buildings is a dead, unused plain.
*The transit from private to public area is too direct and there are no niches for unconstrained meeting.
*There are not enough protected outer areas, where children play, teenagers hang around, or other people talk and relax.
*The car dominates the public space. ". . ."
*There are not enough places for hobbies and self-sufficiency, that means ateliers and gardens.
q: This could be, with the exception of the cars, easily be done.
MH: Yes, but big and high buildings are cheaper to build, the financial gain is higher. Furthermore, the the big block (ger.: Mietskaserne) is an impregnating, stiffening pattern. In settlements with life-quality, people are more independant and less controllable. And this is - despite the liberal values of those who decide - not desired. Besides, this has tradition: in the settlements for the workers in England in the second half of the 19th century, there were watchtowers, and the big avenues of Paris have been build that large, so that in case the army could better control the masses.
q: Is that sufficient to decribe our misery? It needs also the architects for it.
MH: The propagandistic task of the modern time was not to build good life-rooms for the people. "..." Corbusier studied the small-room-architecture of the mediterranean, but he found no investors. The investors wanted breeding-machines. They were much better than the old blocks, but had still a lot of mistakes. When architects don't find investors for their visions, they adapt. I can understand that.
q: So this concept is wrong, and we can escape this with our cars. Today, the car has become an almost unsolvable problem in town-planning.
MH: Indeed. Actually, you can't live near traffic. Besides the noise and the bad air that make sick, cars cut the personal mobility of the people, especially the children. One lives with applied handbreak, so to speak. Cars bind the attraction of all participiants of traffic, because we react to everything that is moving. The drivers, they have a limited perception of the town, the pass it by almost. The whole thing lead to a disorder in perception, to a cut-off contact to the environment. Then there is the big need for space for the rolling and the standing traffic. ". . ."
q: Why are there not more car-free settlements?
MH: The car is still the utopian symbol of the industry society for the freedom of man. To be mobile, to be agile - not with the spirit, but with the arse. Car-free settlements are only for owners, not for renters, and the owners still keep their car. The laws even say that everyone should have the possibility to drive right before his house. Settlements are planned according to this. A single owner, who does not build the entire settlement, can't change that.
q: A completely neglected aspect of architecture is the aspect of crisis and security (ger.: Krisenfestigkeit). The banlieue of Paris show with all clarity, that it can't handle the high unemployment rate. The people there just go crazy when they can't go to work and have no money for small refuges and relaxation.
MH: Crisis-security means security of energy, long-living, recycleable materials (concrete only where it is really necessary), flexible ways of using room and space, places for self-sufficiency, workshops, and places for meeting and sense-ful spending time.
This is the first part of the interview, in the second part they discuss more political and philosophical areas. If someone is interested, I will translate it as well.
Personally, I find the 5th-floor-thing very interesting. Since a year or two, I am working on my "bee-house", a modular building system that is based on the hexagon, with the idea to come closer to the circle than with a square-based ground-plan. I created a single cell, and put those cells together to a cluster. I found out that I did not put more than 5 levels, after 5 levels it started to look skyscraper-like, and ugly. So I believed Habeck instantly as he mentioned that, although I don't know this particular scientific study. I find that building in the country is not very difficult. You have so many possibilities and few laws, you can make a straw-bale settlement without much investments and risk. What I find a real challenge is urban buildings, urban architecture. The traffic and the financial conditions make life-supporting architecture almost impossible. In that context we may mention that other sociological study that communities (villages) with more than 100-150 people are not stable.
Because we can't change these rules, we must find new ways of urban architecture, and probably also a new way of living and working. That's why I say that these concepts have yet to be invented and built.
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