[Music] space whales alright so let's let's talk about space whales now everyone that knows anything about space whales knows that they are solitary creatures they're born in space their parents are transient and leave them behind while they're still in like their embryonic form space whales i know you already know this but this is just like just to make sure everyone's on the same page space whales know nothing of civilization or groups or collaborative existence it's astronomically unlikely that a space whale will ever meet any other space whale space whales are lonely solitary creatures a space whale is such a lonely creature that it can't even imagine a civilization let alone one made of billions of individuals so what does a space whale see with this mindset when it spots the lights of earth at night with no conceptual notion of civilization or collaborative existence it would probably see a single organism because that's kind of what we are and that's kind of what cities are they grow and reach out like this blob thing also a single organism actually a single cell organism i think a city is a kind of super organism it has its own systems that emerge from the actions of its constituent parts which is us that's what we are which is an interesting way to think about it when cars become an integral part of society one major effect it has was that people could live in the garden the tamed wilderness the suburb is it really a kind of eden of course not it's a fantasy just like everything else here that's why you can sell a house in a track development called green hill knolls in a desert a city is an interesting sort of design phenomenon when i introduce this section i talk about design as being something that really describes the entire human-made world and i mean that in terms of things made by humans for humans to use for something so when i'm talking about design i'm talking about applied arts not really art for art's sake but art for utilities sake and that's sort of where the form function dichotomy starts to happen when i when i talk about design most of the time in this class when we've talked about design we talked about good design where form follows function but is still a separate consideration those are two separate considerations and of course there are plenty of examples where form is mostly absent from the equation in as a consideration or in other words where form kind of automatically emerges from function if nobody designed the form there will still be a form if given a particular function it will just be a bad form or a minimum good form the minimal good form the human body even kind of fits this definition the form it takes is the automatic result of the functions it's able to execute the key difference is that when we talk about design and with art we're generally talking about things made made by humans but biology kind of fits all the other parts of this definition in general humans are made by humans sort of but humans aren't designed by humans that's that's what i mean from an evolutionary perspective the population gains things that contribute to survival over time but it's really hard to lose things goosebumps are what is called a vestigial reaction vestigial things are just things that we adopt as a part of evolution but don't need anymore at a point in our history we could make all of our hair stand up to make ourselves look bigger like a lot of other animals can do that's what the goosebump reaction is for since most of us don't have full body hair anymore it's now vestigial it's a relic we can learn things about our past based on these kinds of biological relics cities have a lot of these also actually cities are pretty much mostly relics from pastimes so you can think of cities as kind of like museums of design aesthetics and design methodologies containing all of the cultural dna inherent to those aesthetics and methodologies and you can think of them as kind of living things that always are that are always growing and changing so with cities we have that same form and function dichotomy but cities are unique in that they're designed initially and then they're developed based on functional things over generations and that development ends up usually being really an extrapolation of the city's initial design at least to a degree or an extrapolation of those initial values nothing else in design really has that workflow except for maybe the design of some specialized software like ai technology maybe imagine if a poster was designed once in the 1940s and then redesigned every few years at random intervals by different designers who had to build on what the other designers did it would be it would become chaos over time right but it would also be a record of the different aesthetics the different designers employed so with cities an initial thing is designed in the case of planned cities or at the very least created in the case of most cities unplanned cities and then the result or the output over time is an extrapolation of that design based on environmental factors like natural constraints or maws and regulations or in other words cultural values building up skylines buildings in manhattan look like these kind of tall art deco pyramids because of something called the setback principle to open up more of the sky to the street level a building's maximum height is based on its distance from the street this is because when skyscrapers were first being built in new york city there was a very real fear that everyone would be in shadow all the time and no one can see the sun so if you build close to the street you can't build very tall but you actually sort of can as kind of a workaround if you build floors above the maximum height those fours just have to be set back further from the street this is totally a loophole so the taller you go the further from the street those floors need to be and that's where you get these kind of stepped skyscrapers in new york city if you build very far from the street you can have kind of vertical blocks of buildings but that's not efficient land usage in a place where the natural constraints and land value have really incentivized builders to use land efficiently so architecture and city design are really kind of interwoven here architects building skyscrapers in new york had to build within the constraints of the space and also within the constraints of the law so instead of that being a negative thing they really embraced it in the design of the structure and that really ends up as shaping the aesthetic of the entire city and it kind of becomes kind of a hallmark motif of art deco like art deco architecture other city skylines have no reason to look like this unless they're trying to emulate this or unless they have the same policy in software development that's called turning bugs into features i lived in madison wisconsin for four years they have similar rules about buildings but in medicine you can't build buildings past a certain height at all madison is also on an isthmus so it has those same kind of natural constraints and the students won't let the city tear anything down because of the different historical styles being represented but the demand for housing is high because it's the state capital and because of the university of wisconsin which is attached to the downtown area which is where i taught before i moved here so they just keep building more and more buildings the whole downtown area is like a museum of all the different building aesthetics over the last 200 years you got victorian houses right next to modernist apartments there's even like there was even like a spanish stucco building across the alley from where i lived it's pretty uncommon like architectural style in north america down the road from where i lived there was literally a medieval castle yeah medieval revival the lakes in madison would freeze over in the winter and i lived right by the lake so i used to walk rob my dog i used to walk him out on the frozen lake in the winter as you get further away from downtown when you look back from far away you can't see any streets or any breaks in the buildings it just like it just looks like one giant superstructure this is the form that emerges from the city as a result of the combination of the values of its inhabitants function creates form building down mass transit and the problem with elon musk and stupid tunnels okay to be fair the tunnel thing is actually a pretty good idea on paper flying cars are kind of a dumb idea without automation because you're basically talking about giving everybody a pilot's license which is probably not going to happen also they would require some kind of propulsion which is loud and has a lot of kickback with current technology and it's dangerous because they're flying which means they're potentially falling but you could use current knowledge that people already have in how to drive a car or you could use automated cars and just utilize the three dimensions available by going down instead of up all as a way of alleviating traffic in cities you can have as many downward levels as you like in theory what makes this complicated is that there's a lot of infrastructure if you dig down there are sewer lines utility and electrical systems in some places there are subways also you're talking about boring tunnels underneath people's houses and businesses so it needs to be deep enough and quiet enough to not cause tremors or make the land less stable and all these things also make this kind of tunnel system really really expensive compare the price of digging a tunnel for even just like a regular subway line now in 2021 to what it would have cost in like the early 1900s there is just so much more subterranean infrastructure now that really jacks up the price and complication of those kinds of projects the goalie locks time for building a subway line is like the early 1900s railroads were all the rage cars weren't ubiquitous and car companies didn't have as much political power it's pretty uncommon to see new subway lines being built in american cities now if a city is big enough to warrant a subway line it probably already has a bunch of this advanced subterranean infrastructure that makes it almost impossible or prohibitively expensive to do so when there are other mass transit options like buses and even elevated trains or something like that right likewise plenty of cities and towns in america had monorails and above-ground mass transit trains including my hometown of huntsville which was just a tiny town at the time but still had this kind of mass transit system that you would normally associate with like san francisco or chicago but these train lines were destroyed they were torn up and paved over to make roads for cars literally this was paid for by like ford and gm and it happened in towns and cities all around all around the united states in the early 1900s and from their perspective this made sense trains for short distances were dirty loud and required you to be at a place at a time to get on the train but with cars you can come and go as you please and they're less noisy of course if you add up all of the cars in a city you get a lot more noise and pollution but that wasn't necessarily obvious at that point so if you have a mass transit system in a small town spread out over a large area before world war one it was probably removed in favor of roads but buildings last a long time so the layout of the cities usually don't change that much in the parts of the city that existed when those mines were there and the properties were established as a result you get some really wonky intersections and road layouts older parts of a city can look kind of nonsensical for this reason so a city in its modern form is really an extrapolation of its initial conditions and that extrapolation is influenced by subsequent conditions if you live in a city with a tiny downtown area it's like a tiny sort of city center area historic center but like an immense sprawl surrounding it that means your city probably grew exponentially after world war ii because of the ubiquitousness of cars in the interstate system there are lots of cities that are almost like interstate port towns the same way a river would have port towns where it's almost like there's no city to the city it just looks like suburbs you've probably seen these if you live in a city with a relatively large downtown area like knoxville tennessee or madison wisconsin both of which were state capitals during their initial development so if you have a city with a large downtown and a huge sprawl surrounding it probably means that your city was really significant economically before suburban sprawl really started to take hold after world war ii the cities of the pre-20th century had a look to them that was based on the accumulation of conditions up to that point they were built for what made for good form to the function of the city at that time at the time that they were made in the united states the same thing is true but we had cars and interstates so our cities were built differently and around that form of transportation building out broad anchor city suburban sprawl and traffic systems bauhaus really kind of mixes together the aesthetics of modernism and the utopian thinking that underlies that aesthetic is based on this notion that everything can be designed into an ideal form and an ideal world will emerge out of that design all of those design things will add up to a utopian society well frank lloyd wright was a modernist remember frank white wright from the other lecture this week he made just very quintessentially modern looking buildings he started working in the arts and crafts movement and really redefined his aesthetic as these as these design values became increasingly uh popular after the bauhaus just like ford and disney frank void wright had utopian ideals and instead of just sitting around and waiting for utopia to emerge as the bauhaus kind of figured they would he sought to build it directly frank lloyd wright designed a model for civilization called broad anchor city the difference between ford and disney though is that wright was successful pretty much broadanger city became the model for suburban sprawl in america it was the opposite of an urban city there was almost no apartments every family lived on a pre-portioned acre of land a parcel of land there was no wild mass transit all travel was done via automobile it was natural and beautiful with garden-like settings a kind of city that could not exist in europe with its old pre-existing cities and high population density it could only exist in america where new cities were being built around the automobile the low population density and where there was expansive land with few natural constraints to facilitate that it is suburbia frank lloyd wright invented suburbia yeah the falling water guy the falling water guy invented suburbia suburban sprawl has factors shaping the development and the look and feel of the space and it's largely topographical creating grids has two major problems one there are a lot of stop signs as anyone knows who has driven through a gridded neighborhood it's really annoying and that kind of makes for bad traffic if there is a lot of traffic otherwise it's just annoying depending on which direction you're going but if your city was built before like the 1960s prevailing logic was to grid the land off because that basically makes it more more sellable parcel it's easy to figure out how how how big each square should be and how much each square should sell for based on its based on its size it's like an ideal parcel and grids are the obvious choice if you have mostly flat land and only horse driven traffic and grids are ancient the greeks and romans literally used grids a lot of the time to lay out their cities but when you sprawl out to what would formerly be considered undesirable land like not flat hilly land grids are hard to institute so first there's this problem with cars and traffic of stop signs and later red lights grids create a lot of intersections you can kind of fix that with roundabouts but another problem was just in development costs grids can actually be kind of dangerous if you don't flatten out the land because you have low visibility a lot of the time and a lot of intersections that's a bad combination flattening out the land to a degree was a part of the process of building these grid traffic systems so in suburbia where we're trying to maximize the profitability of the land parcel by minimizing the cost of development it makes more sense to build the roads along the topographical lines of the map have you ever looked at a topographical map they usually consist of a bunch of parallel lines kind of like parallel sort of swirly lines and hey those could be streets why not parallel streets with few intersections that don't require the land to be altered very much and that's why suburbs have these sort of flowy curve linear streets whereas older neighborhoods and city centers usually the oldest part of the city have grids so with curve linear roads in suburban developments you have the street hierarchy system and this system has the advantage of being generally cheaper in most places and it reduces traffic congestion it's also a lot safer when cars were first introduced at the mass level in the 1920s there was a real panic revolving around how many people are getting hit and killed by cars so the street hierarchy system puts the higher speed through traffic roads on the outside of the neighborhood and then puts the smaller house-lined roads on the inside of the neighborhood and since all of these small residential roads terminate in dead ends and cul-de-sacs you can't really use them for through traffic so traffic is very restricted in this system you're funneling all the traffic into high traffic roads but the majority of the neighborhood is on low traffic roads seaside florida and california city seaside is a town that was built in like the 80s i think the whole town is on privately owned land so the designers were more or less able to make their own rules as far as where buildings are placed the land has mixed zoning for example to reduce the dependency on automobiles also to that point all the municipal buildings as well as the main grocery stores are in the town's center literally in the center of town equally accessible to all the houses around it seaside is a planned town and one that was actually built and is actually pretty successful it is not wright's broad anchor city no two houses are the same that's actually a codified rule no track houses or sprawl allowed if it looks familiar it's because it's the town from the truman show that's a real town if it looks kind of eerie it's because there are a few things that make it seem kind of kind of like uncanny valley relative to how we expect a city or town to look most of the time a city is not built by one person or one architect or one architectural firm so there are usually distinct stylistic differences between structures in a given area also buildings are added over a long period of time so different building materials are used in addition to different styles seaside was pretty much built all at once by one group of people i think ironically they were inspired by the city design of madison which was actually mostly a planned uh planned out city it was mostly planned out in like the 1920s it wasn't it wasn't very well planned out which is why it ends up just looking like 20th century uh like a 20th century splat of architectural vomit seaside florida is kind of the opposite of the sprawl it's anti-sprawl and it is pretty successful it's the it's the shining jewel of the redneck riviera they should put that on their brochures and probably one of the biggest factors really shaping the underlying philosophy as to how seaside was built and probably also why it's so successful and why people like living there it's not designed for cars it's designed for pedestrian traffic that is the idea that drives the planning philosophy ford landia failed eventually epcot city was never really built seaside is successful but it's a pretty small town and then there is california city california city is a city made for cars and not really much else if you've never heard of california city that's weird because it's like the second largest city in california by land size it's the second largest city in the third largest state in the united states by way in size by land size and it's kind of the perfect metaphor for this kind of city they staked out the land they planned out the city and incorporated it they built it and nobody came it's almost entirely just empty roads because civilization is something that grows trying to build it artificially is often counterproductive just ask the space whale the space whale knows civilization grows just like humans grow from an embryo just like plants grow from seeds sensation growers and evolve you can't just pop a bunch of herbs in a desert and expect a seed to sprout seeds grow within the system of natural constraints is that david is david attenborough the space whale in this class i talk a lot about the philosophy of design what space really means what color and shape really mean the reason for that is because those are the materials that you're working with when you're designing something everything else is just media paint ink computers stone concrete whatever they are just means to manipulating these things that are deeply rooted in our nature we see color the way we do because of nature we see shape the way we do because of nature design is an extension of nature and you're always working within a system of constraints and the design emerges or grows out of that right space whale high in the mountains of eastern termite we find the human in his natural paradigm pointing away mesmerized by his devices mesmerized talking to himself i have 21 followers on youtube okay space whale i'm doing fine about his business turning michael cart in the machine of society all right that's it that's all i got on cities have a good week