By 2050, more houses will need to be replaced and the population will increase by doubled as now. Assuming four people per family by then, the world needs to build more than 2-billion "houses" of various types if everyone is to have proper shelter. And it is as important as providing a sufficient number of houses to plan carefully how to distribute and organize them keeping a balance between cities and rural areas. Furthermore, there is an urgent need for a multi-functional house-both as an cozy home and facilitated office. Here comes the question. How on earth can we make them possible?
I'd like to discuss about the efficient city planning quoting theories of some scholars first, and describe the change virtually happening in the concept of office now sharing its position with private home. Also, I'll introduce an eye-opening technology as a new construction method which practically make some changes more plausible.
We all know that what we need to do is create places where people really want to be, rather than the urban structure that we have now, which is primarily a place that people want to escape.
According to Marcia D. Lowe, there are three conditions to make wise land-use decisions. First, the general public and decision makers need better access to information about the characteristics of a community's population and the probable consequences of various planning decisions. Second, cities and surrounding areas need a grater degree of regional cooperation to prevent land use in one jurisdiction from producing problems in others. Third, urban areas in virtually all countries need stronger support from their national governments, giving them grater budgetary power to plan their own long-term development strategies.
Risse, Pittas manages to put a positive spin on these developments. He has a vision of the city in which today's skylines remain frozen because no one is building new office buildings. The old ones, abandoned by business, will be converted into affordable housing. Pittas says that "this resource of vacant downtown office space adjacent to mass transit, shopping, education, social services, health and cultural attractions may be a major answer to providing the infrastructure for affordable housing in our cities for traditional large families, the working poor, and SRO populations...." Another scenario for the adaptive reuse of the obsolete city comes from William J. Mitchell, dean of MIT's architecture school. He said that "You don't have to set foot on Wall Street if you can trade electronically, and you don't have to shop on fifth Avenue if you can purchase fro an on-line catalog."
And like Professor Mitchell said we can see the downtown abandonment. The phrase presages a further leeching of the eccentric cities. White-collar workers who no longer have to come downtown to work may sever their ties to the city altogether and move further into the countryside, draining more valuable corporate tenants, affluent renters and owners, and tax revenues from the centers, and siphoning them outward.
This trend has been also projected into the work place giving home a new name "an office". Telecommunications companies are aggressively selling the idea: "People are bringing their work home in record numbers," declares a "resource guide" for home offices that US West recently mailed out. "Experts predict there will be 39.6 million home offices in 1994 used by full-time and part-time self-employed individuals, and corporate home-based employees - about one-third of all adult workers in the United States! By 1995 the number is estimated to reach 41.5 million." These successful transition can be attributed to computer-an indispensable tools with indefinite potentials. It saves workers time to commute to jobs, tons of paperwork, and immobility as well as providing them more free time and less stress. The companies are the beneficiaries, too by cutting back the expenses to manage people and run the place where the workers can work together.
The new technology plays a great role both in suppressing the expansion of cities by transmitting rural areas into better places to live and work, and enabling more people to work at home by crating a whole new environment. It may be the principal force for change in architecture and lifestyles, because it will give architects new materials and techniques to design whatever suits their fancy. New construction methods, new materials, and new electronic technology will greatly change homes and homelife in the years ahead.
Many analysts predict that within a few years, more than half the residential units built in the United States will come from factories. Many firms now manufacture modular apartments, single family homes, and motel unites. Prefab housing is not necessarily cheaper, but the quality is better and construction is faster, thereby reducing labor costs.
In Japan, an apartment can be purchased at a department store and then transported to a central tower containing wiring, water pipes, and other utilities. The Japanese companies are even starting to build hoses like they build cars and computers. Japan's manufactured-housing industry already accounts for over 15% of its housing construction. Their computer-designed houses include high-tech materials and techniques such as floor panels that contain tiny hot-water pipes for heating and precast wall panels made of aluminum and foam or ceramic instead of concrete. The bathroom of the house is single precast waterproof unit made of plastic, with everything from toilet to washbasin molded into it. Japan has also developed two new structural materials. The first, called ultra-high durability concrete, slows down the neutralization of concrete and the rusting of reinforcing rods by ten times. The second material, super-concrete structure, has three to ten times the strength (for only one-third the thickness) of traditional ferro-concrete. This material will make it possible to build ultra-high-rise buildings of more than 100-stories with 40% lower than that of steel frames and 20% lower than ferro-concrete.
So far, I brought forth three important needs for a better living in this transitory period: The efficient city and rural planning: Home office: and new construction technologies. And we come to a simple conclusion. With the aid of new technologies an architect can be a true planner of the environment from a two-bedroom house to a 100 story business building.
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