Fuller’s City

 

Gregoire Filcidor

 

 

We are now looking at New York City from a location that’s not NY. We are viewing New York through binoculars across the Hudson in New Jersey. By the year 2156 New York City is covered in a polyvinyl synthetic lightweight shaped material shaped in a dome-like structure. Like Fuller Buckminster, his dome over part of Manhattan, this dome covers all of New York City. From the Bronx to Staten Island and parts of Long Island there will be a semi-clear cover protecting them. This dome does not just regulate the city’s air quality and climate it was constructed to filter out population, social issues, and other human products. New York will be able to filter out what it believes to be best for itself and its people.

 

            By the year 2105 the population of New York has increased to almost 20,000,000. With this population increased mostly due to immigration from foreign countries. With the increase of the population, the coming of new influences, pollution, decrease in space, more competitiveness, and everything that human existence creates New York decides to close its doors. New York City has always been an antenna to the world, gathering people and their cultures and ideals New York sends back innovations, concepts, ideas, and theories. But by the end of 2112 New York couldn’t keep up with all this information. At that time even architecture and politics were easily swayed and influenced by all the many new ideas. The wave of people also came in a wave of new approaches on medicine techniques and technology, religious practices, and other things that were not easily persuaded to change in the 21^st century and earlier. New York City is no longer this antenna that sends new things. New York has become a sponge that absorbs everything and gets bigger and distorted. New York has now decided to become stagnant with the rest of the world to hold its identity. Because of the wave of influences New York has changed its identity over and over like it doesn’t know what to become or look like. And with the progress of new technology and material the construction process has become much more quicker. New York will keep its identity a secret and show it off at the same time. With the dome hovering over the city it is protected from losing its identity and from becoming what the world wants it to be.

Identity conceived as this form of sharing the past is a losing proposition: not only is there – in a stable model of continuous population expansion – proportionally less and less to share, but history also has a n invidious half-life – as it is more abused, it becomes insulting. This thinning is exacerbated by constantly increasing mass of tourists, an avalanche that in a perpetual quest for “character,” grinds successful identities down to meaningless dust.

                                                                                                  The Generic City

 

            New York City was a city that had its own style and character and the people within the city matched its demeanor. New York city residents had a swag that was obvious to outsiders. New York was once a city that braced the sky with skyscrapers, showing off to the rest of the world this is the place to be. In the 1930s New York had the tallest building in the world, and lost that title within the same century. New York lost that title with its head high because it was known for its grid and array of big buildings. New York’s identity was architectural and humanistic. The city had its own fundamentals on how it wanted to build and kept.

 

Identity is like a mousetrap in which more and more mice have to share the original bait, and which, on closer inspection, may have been empty for centuries. The stronger identity, the more it imprisons, the more it resists expansion, interpretation, renewal, contradiction. Identity becomes like a lighthouse – fixed, overdetermined: it can change position or the pattern it emits only at the cost of destabilizing navigation.

                                                                                          The Generic City

 

This quote was New York City. Its identity was no other and always and stubbornly never wanted to change. There was no other city like this one until the year 2100. With the increase in the global population cities around the world became more like New York with its variations in people.

 

            The industrial Revolution was the catalyst New York’s big structure development that contributed to the city’s identity. The integrating of many cultures (mostly European) help developed New York’s key identity. With the help of economy, and politics skyscrapers were created. Now with the creation of skyscrapers New York and its identity and easily be seen from an external perspective.

 

            From 1895 to 2080 New York was the world’s experimental lab. Everyone idea about architecture, art, and other ideals came through New York City. New York was opened to everyone to explore new ideas from thinkers to artists. New York was not the city that represented America like a lot of people thought but it was a city that represented what America can be, and also represented what the world is. New York’s identity was the world covered or layered with concrete.

 

            The dome was created to combat the increasing problem of population, and everything that a large population contributes to. In the 2150 New York City officials had decided to create a barrier surrounding its borders. The city government raised the city’s resident’s taxes and generated a lot of money through fundraisers, sponsorship and selling parts of the barrier to private sectors. The mayor decided to only give this job to only local design firms, engineering firms, and local contractors. The first idea to barricade the city was to construct a tall masonry wall. But with graffiti artists still plaguing the city with their art city officials believed that was the wrong approach. They believed that the wall will gravitate many graffiti artists within the walls and foreigners will venture to paint the walls. With the inspiration of Buckminster Fuller’s dome over Manhattan, the city came up with an approach in barricading the city. City government and designer decided to cover the city with a large clear dome.

 

                        “Bigness has been for nearly a century, condition almost without thinkers, a revolution without program”.

                                                                                                         Bigness or Problem at Large

 

            By the middle of the year 2175 the construction of the dome was completed. The dome hovers over the city protecting its citizens from pollution, climate, and protecting the city’s identity from being breached and change again. When the designing the process was taking forth the dome only covered the 5 boroughs. With the need to use and control its structures and the large size of the population he dome started expanding and growing like a blob. The blob took the Hudson River and took back the Statue of Liberty. It took the New Jersey neighborhoods. The blob took the New Jersey cities that were connected to the Lincoln tunnel. It took the George Washington Bridge and all the bridges that connected New York City to Long Island. This dome extended passed the Bronx and entered into Yonkers. The designers of the dome were like the generals, senate and emperor of the Roman Empire taking what land it wants without much of a threat. The civilians of these surrounding cities willingly went along with New York City expansion. It seemed like they knew that they will be part of something great or was given the same chance the Jews were given by the Roman Empire. Everything that was engulfed by the dome became part of New York City. The dome was designed high enough for flying transportation to fly within the city. Over the airports there were electronic gates that were opened fly airplanes. People were still allowed to travel outside city but there were rules. They were not allowed to bring anything back from wherever they traveled to. This included non-U.S. residents and U.S. residents, reading material (besides newspaper), plants, food, photos, and any other digital materials, animals, personal notebooks, any electronics that can contain information from outside New York City.

 

American sociologist, ideologues, philosophers, French intellectuals, cybermystics, etc… suggests that architecture will be the first “solid that melts into air” through the combined effects of demographic trends, electronics, media, speed, the economy, leisure the death of God, the book, the phone, the fax, affluence, democracy, the end of the Big Story…..

                                                                                        Bigness or Problem of Large

                The dome is cleaned every morning and cleaned again every night. It has a self-cleaning technology that turns on automatically. The dome has small crevasses due to the air infiltration systems that allows very little amount of rain from coming in. This helps preserve the building from weathering away and prevents people from having ideas of changing a decaying building. Manhattan is the only part of the city that doesn’t get snow. With this travel with in the island became a lot easier and safer. With this element New York’s economy grew expanded. The effieciency of New York grew and everyone within the city grew financially. From outside the dome is actually like a blob absorbing New York. The dome hovers a structure taking the form of which it’s hovering over. If the structure was big and tall the blob went up to the sky and was wide, if the structure was short and thin the blob went down toward the earth and concaves between the bigger parts of the blob that surrounds it. This organic infrastructure helps the viewers from outside the dome to have an idea of where the buildings are if they had studied New York

City.

 

                       Division, isolation, inequality, aggression, destruction, all the negative aspects of the Wall, could be the ingredient of a new phenomenon: architectural warfare against undesirable conditions, in this case London.

                                                                                                                          Exodus

 

            Within the city of New York it is now what the early Russian communist think would have dreamed of. New York with its large population has become somewhat of a Utopia. With the taller buildings designers gave these buildings passageways that connecting building-to-building bridging the city. This helps the reduction of pedestrians on the ground and helps prevent J-walking. The people enjoy walking more now because they re also hovering in the city. Because of the cultures that came in New York and the population some things had to go.

 

                        Merciless progress of the Strip performs a daily miracle, the corrective rage of  the architecture is at its most intense. In a continuous confrontation with the old city, existing structures are destroyed by the new architecture, and trivial fights break out between the inmates of the old London and Voluntary Prisoners of the Strip

                                                                                                                                                Exodus

 

 Time Square is no longer needed because there is zero travel to NYC from the outside. Central is also taking away because New York needed the space for new business and apartments. Fish Kills has become the new Central Park. New York now has more public spaces. The New York dome goes 50 miles into the Atlantic Ocean. New York has become a modern Venice but unlike Venice it will not sink into the ocean due to rising water. Boats has become more important way to travel within New York. Underwater passages are also constructed to permit pedestrians to travel without much trouble. Long Island lost chunks of its island do to the New York expansion. New York has now become a sustainable city with water turbines and solar panel on every roof every building.

 

                        The inhabitants of the architecture those strong enough to love it, would become its Voluntary Prisoners, ecstatic in the freedom of the their architectural confines.

                                                                                                                                       Exodus

 

New York’s residents have learned to live with idea of living in a glass prisons. They love the city and they miss the rest of the world all at the same time. With terrorism still infecting the rest of the world New York is safe. But New York is battling a different type of terrorism that does not use explosives, and bullets but uses ideas and influences. New York residents must endure occasional checkups from city officials. This is the price of living in a Utopia.  

 

                        Visitors and residents will have to get used to checking their liberties like a potentially dangerous bag at a museum of antiquity.

                                                                                                  Packaging Utopian Sustainability

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