In 1900 world population was 1.250.000.000 inhabitants. By 2000, world population reached 6.000.000.000. The least optimistic forecast is that we shall reach 12.000.000.000 by 2050. Over the past 100 years, cities have transformed their urban physiology, featuring important concentrations of skyscrapers and large residential low‐density areas. Ecologically speaking, the consequences of this evolution have been the progressive destruction of vegetation, the irrationality on energy consumption and the deterioration of the environment.
10 MILLION PEOPLE CANNOT LIVE UNDER THE SAME CONDITIONS AND RULES AS SEVERAL TENS OF THOUSANDS PEOPLE.
Dying urban models:
20th Century urban planning models seem ineffective to solve problems of urban growth in huge overpopulated areas. Even those mid size populations show similar symptoms of traditional models dying. Current urban philosophy appears established on a worrying reality divorce.
WE SHOULD REPLACE THE OVER‐USED TERM “MINIMAL ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT” WITH “ENVIRONMENTAL IMPROVEMENT”.
Solutions to future urban problems should face up to the new mega‐cities reality. The inevitable technological progress must find its balance with the “bio‐ecological” recovery of the natural environment.
Bionic Science appears as an alternative to the philosophical thinking and scientific development of humanized urban models.
BIONICS AND BIO‐ECOLOGY, ARE TWO INNOVATED CONCEPTS OF URBAN PHILOSOPHY.
The 800 meters high limit:
Accepting, under the logic of the rational use of energy, that the alternative to the conquest of vertical space opposite to the “non‐limit expanse”, the present model of high rise building appears inappropriate for its des‐humanization and its technological limit, in order to carry out this conquest. Since the Empire State Building (1931), with its 380m. high, up to the Taipei 101 (508 m. – year 2004) it was possible to increase just 70 meters high, despite such a large quantity and quality of different technostructural models developed for high rise construction, confirming the technological limit.
BIONIC THEORY OF GIANTS HOLDS THAT IN ORDER TO SURPASS THE PRESENT FRONTIERS OF HEIGHT ARE NECESSARY MATERIAL AND CONSTRUCTION TECHNIQUES CONCEPTUAL CHANGES.
The challenge assumed in conquest of vertical space is not that one based on beating height records, but that one based on re‐defining with dignity the life of large communities. The real social compromise consists on developing an innovative model of vertical construction that unifies in a new philosophy of life the revolutionary technological concepts which are able to surpass the frontier of 800 meters high, with the new urbanism and architectural bio‐ecological models.
IN MASSIVE NUCLEI AND SCARCE OF LAND, ‘VERTICAL CITIES’ ALLOW THE ECOLOGICAL EXPANSION OF THE CITY.