Doomsday Structures (Part 12) - Cities of the Underworld. Structural inversion.

(EWHA Women's University.  Seoul University Campus, South Korea -  designed by Dominique Perrault (2009).  Images: perraultarchitecture.com)

If we slightly turn away from the popular culture references, with its fictional idealisms and science fiction story telling.  What we've seen in Singapore as an example, where there is now an intent to build beneath the city, to create a new urban complex, this is the beginning of an invigoration of structural design that, even though its not entirely publicized, will become in its construction; a necessity.   Of course, the wording used by state officials for the purpose of reconstruction is on the basis of less land and a growing population, but the governments and their city planners are maybe more concerned than not, about a junction point that is an urgency with coping with the natural environment changing.  That building inward into the Earth may offer an attempt at sustaining our existence, not just for the future, but also for the present.  Time is short and climate change is now beginning to impact on us everyday and this is now a global phenomenon.  However, the changing climate is not only the single aspect facing the human race, but it is an immediate issue to deal with, in our adjustment of the way we have lived and have taken for granted.  

The other perspective of looking at this massive change that will take place within our cites and there is an economic term titled Creative Destruction, which in its semantics doesn't really explain what is about to occur on a global scale.  It however offers a glimpse that of the creative holds a bases, the introduction of new technologies, as the enticement of replacing the old – in its redundancy, with the more efficient.  But, I wonder though, if creative and using a less harsher word than destruction, could be conjoined to the restructure of a city: in this pending gloom of our natural environments beginning to encroach as a negative to human life. This change, in utilizing doomsday as a reality of possibilities, maybe not be a detriment, rather the beginning of a motivation to shape a city.  Which doesn't have to be an autocratic process, that, very well might be the case at an 11th hour crisis.  Rather then a future dystopia concept, is it possible for the architect in his or her discipline to offer a reprieve, to devise a new city complex, that is both subterranean with above ground facilities.  At least with what is occurring in Singapore, that despite the novelization of living beneath street level, it is prepared to set a precedence as an alternative to the above ground dwelling.  

And this has happened before in our history when Napoleon commissioned Georges-Eugene Haussmann, a French official, who was appointed to rejuvenate and effectively destroy a medieval Paris in the 1853, to rebuild it into what is viewed today. The Paris of the mid 1800s does not resemble the city that we know and admire, it was was rife with decay, crime and disease.  Haussmann flattened out and expanded the city, which he knew that it was critical to create, under Napoleon's vision to free up space and allow natural light into the once decrepit and narrow streets.  However Haussmann also ventured into the underworld as away of utilizing this space, in creating the massive sewage channels of the city, he also encourage basements and sub-level storage places to work in conjunction with the above ground.  Everything was to be utilized as an equilibrium of both above and below.

So with terms like doomsday and dystopia, within the idealism and necessity of cities changing to deal with overpopulation, climate change and even conflict.  Utopianism has all but been dismissed as a sociological fallacy, particularly when discord, regardless of ideology, always seems to permeate in any ideal society. But, can it be dismissed completely?  In Seoul, South Korea the architect Dominique Perrault designed the EWHA Women's University, completed in 2010, it is a striking example of an subterranean building complex, built into a slopping hillside, blending into the natural environment – from some angles appearing to be hidden, yet when viewed in its directional imprint, opens up as a seemingly protective enclave.  South Korea as a country lives under the spectra of a Nuclear War, a divided country with North Korea as its border neighbor, which has shown on many occasions its ability to launch an intercontinental ballistic missile.  Yet, Perrault's structural inversion does not reflect the doom, but at the same time does not deny it.  In 2009 the University won an award for its ability to use the insulation of the surrounding soil that the complex is embedded into, to heat  and cool the complex naturally.  Thus, this underground University has been able to reduce its energy use up to 60%.  And it is this impressive aspect of inverting a building into the Earth, which holds an upside to the fatalism of a city; that climate change and even what maybe perceived as an 11th hour doomsday scenario beholds.   We find a balance with Perrault's structural inversion, between what could be seen simultaneously as a Dystopia and Utopian vision.  To harmonize the aspect, that humanity may have to live an accept that we are both apart of the destruction and creation of life and what we know as nature.  That looking inward, it is not always a metaphor.  It is to reign.  To survive.