8 ms·

The city of the future looks like a former military bunker in Taipei (2016)

120 points by georgeoliver 3y ago

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
> Unfortunately, there was still a problem–the city couldn’t overlook the building codes. But Casagrande found a loophole: He declared that since the houses had been handmade, they were a form of art. “The city commissioned me to make a public artwork, and Treasure Hill is the artwork. That’s where [people] live now,” he said. “That’s how they rationalized it.” That ignores the purpose of the building codes even artists can die in fires (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Ship_warehouse_fire https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Ship_warehouse_fire). This is especially worse when you have families and children living there. This city of the future sounds like nothing I want a part of.
- tdeck 3y ago
  Not only fires, but also earthquakes which are common in Taiwan.
- aaron695 3y ago
  Good to see a Hacker is now being a bureaucrat reading books of city codes over Neuromancer. These are peoples homes, the danger is probably less than many US ghettos or homeless encampments, how about we start bulldozing those which are unsafe and ugly if people homes have no meaning. There's no reason you cant make communities not up to spec with current building codes safe. This is normal for historic buildings which have exceptions. The Ghost Ship fire was a concert, I don't believe any killed were residents. > This city of the future sounds like nothing I want a part of. Nothing like never leaving the safety of the suburban home I guess, the new hacker ethos.
  - whythre 3y ago
    Surely there is middle ground here- I agree with the general sentiment though; the perfect need not be the enemy of the good.
  - hutzlibu 3y ago
    In general I agree with your sentiment, but I think one can do alternative living without building codes, that is safe and clean unlike the ghost ship apparently was, and also: "The Ghost Ship fire was a concert, I don't believe any killed were residents." "One victim of the fire was a building resident." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Ship_warehouse_fire https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Ship_warehouse_fire They knew they had faulty electricity and they had a small fire before.
  - vidarh 3y ago
    I don't really think your comment contradicts the comment you reply to - as you point out one way of addressing the failure to meet building codes is to make those communities safe. But just defining their around the lack of safety is a poor option. It's hard to tell from the article whether they just worked around the bureaucracy without fixing the issues or if they made it safe in non-standard ways too. And so everyone would probably be better served if there was a process for handling exceptions that actually assessed and documented that a non-standard method was used and that someone signed it off as safe enough, so that ambiguity wasn't there. (And the world of Neuromancer isn't one I'd like to live in, as much as I loved reading about it)
- alwa 3y ago
  Sounds like it’s all masonry construction, isn’t that fireproof? Not to be flip: I too wouldn’t want to live in a society where improvisation were the construction norm. But it’s not clear to me that all code requirements are life- or safety-critical. It sounds like Treasure Hill was in fact emptied and “renovated” in the course of this “artist village” process [0]. One imagines that such a process may have addressed the life-critical deficiencies even if it couldn’t meet the more nitpicky code requirements that might apply to normal development. [0] https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/treasure-hill-taipei https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/treasure-hill-taipei
  - bruce511 3y ago
    >> But it’s not clear to me that all code requirements are life- or safety-critical. It depends somewhat on your definition of "critical. The 50s didn't have seat belts, and clearly most people survived. So "few" died in cars that there was opposition to year introduction. I was recently in a country where smoke alarms are not "a thing". As is no-one had one, they simply don't exist. Sure there's the odd residential fire , but they're rare - single digits per year. Ladders kill more people than fire, but we sell a ladder to anyone, and you don't need a degree to climb one. Building regulations are an important way of keeping people safe. They're a stamp of quality to buyers. Unfortunately they also seem to want to cover 100% of all cases all the time. And that final 0.01% is expensive, and time consuming. Which delays, or denies projects. Which results in fewer places to live. Which, dare I suggest, leads to homeless deaths. Safety standards -are- important. Buildings falling down, or going up in flames, is obviously really bad. But equally not-building-at-all is dangerous. And regulators seem to give very little weight to that when adding another regulation.
    - lostlogin 3y ago
      Your view is a common one, but the flip side of that is cost. Ask someone to make a flood, earthquake and fireproof building and they can price it up and decide if they want to proceed. One maimed human from an accident/incident/event that could have been prevented, and the cost can dwarf the expense of building better. The Pacific rim is somewhere that is fairly prone to natural disasters. Here in NZ, an earthquake in Christchurch [1] killed 185 people, 115 of them in a single building that didn’t meet the building code. If that building’s defects were known, and it had been classed a work of art, that makes the situation worse in my view. As others have noted, you can make old buildings safer. Can’t they do that? [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Christchurch_earthquake https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Christchurch_earthquake
- the__alchemist 3y ago
  This is a controversial take. As an example, compare apartment buildings in the US, (2 stairwells required for exit in case of fire) vice in Europe. The tradeoff: The US apartments are theoretically easier to evacuate in case of fire. They are also consequently poorly laid out of use, with ugly central hallways, and only one side of windows on most apartments.
thsksbd 3y ago
The future city is ugly and built with and upon the scraps left by our military largesse. Sounds about right.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
airstrike 3y ago
> This is Treasure Hill–a prototype for what one architect believes is the future of sustainable urban living. Title should be "One architect's idea of the \"city of the future\" looks like a bunker"
- akomtu 3y ago
  I'd go even further and say the heresy that "urban living" is not the future, so making it sustainable is like scaling horse-riding to 10 billion riders.
  - abenga 3y ago
    What do you think is the alternative? More sprawl? All global billions living in idyllic farms? On what land?
    - akomtu 3y ago
      I think it will be small multi-generational houses. Outside of a few overpopulated cities, most of the land, even in NY, is farmlands or just undeveloped. Living in hives isn't really in human nature.
      - abenga 3y ago
        More than half of the global human population (and growing) lives in urban areas, so _by definition_ it is human nature. The artificial restrictions artificially limiting the number of new apartment blocks, causing lack of affordable housing is what's forcing younger people to move back in with their parents increasing the number of multi-generational houses. It's pretty hard for me to see this as an unalloyed good that should be the future of living.
        mantas 3y ago
        If humans use electricity, is it by nature? Is doom scrolling by nature? Or just abusing our instincts? Same applies to urban living.
yellow_lead 3y ago
(2016)
Apocryphon 3y ago
Solarpunk brutalism
- atleastoptimal 3y ago
  Abandoned town: :| Abandoned town (overgrown): :O
  - wardedVibe 3y ago
    it's... clearly not abandoned. Pretty sure you mean dilapidated.
makeitshine 3y ago
Taipei has an ugly beauty to it. Individually, the typical concrete, tiled covered buildings, are ugly, but cram them together, throw up some neon lights, a tiny park with a Daoist temple crammed in the mix, add a few street vendors and the bustle of people and its downright charming. Cities in Japan are much better put together, but I prefer the chaotic, gritty feeling of Taipei, and Treasure Hill is an interesting segment of that.
- maxglute 3y ago
  Taipei a little too grimy more often than not for my taste, takes time for the charm to shine through compared to JP. But it's certainly there. Wouldn't hurt to have their conscripts do a few days of pressure washing if water wasn't so scarce.
  - jeffparsons 3y ago
    Would pressure-washing using sea water be viable? If it's all going into storm water drains and out to sea anyway, what's the difference? Or does it go via, e.g., sewage treatment, first? (I suppose this is a bit of a lazy question, but I couldn't easily find anything conclusive when I searched, and I bet there are interesting angles on the idea that I haven't even considered.)
    - maxglute 3y ago
      I'm guessing salt water bad for rebar in cracking reinforced concrete.
annabyrd 3y ago
Dilapidated urban landscapes == internet catnip.
konschubert 3y ago
The city of the future has abundant energy from solar. Especially during sunny days, when no storage is needed, it will be extremely cheap to air condition and desalinate seawater.
raziel2p 3y ago
The article doesn't say anything about what makes it actually the city of the future, apart from them recycling and filtering water. Looks cool though, and has a nice backstory.
throwuwu 3y ago
An inaccessible favela? Really? What is up with this apocalyptic view of the future?
- dappermanneke 3y ago
  greens and environmentalists write shit like this and then wonder why none of us elect them to flush our prosperity down the drain
  - Abekkus 3y ago
    Meanwhile, what you call our prosperity is quickly becoming one dude’s prosperity.
    - harvey9 3y ago
      Sure we're gonna get the inaccessible favela anyway, but that doesn't mean we have to vote for it.
    - kcplate 3y ago
      One dude’s prosperity, and a whole lot of other people’s still comfortably living. And for what it’s worth, other options don’t change the “one dude’s prosperity” part.
darkhorse13 3y ago
Call me crazy but I really find cities like the one in Taipei really charming. I grew up in one, and there's something very human about this aesthetic.
cbilson 3y ago
Thanks a lot for posting this! I actually used to live in a rented "house" in the place the article is about, probably around 1994-1995. Most of my neighbors were very old veterans, with a handful of NTU students who were rarely seen. Talking with my veteran neighbors was fascinating for me. Most of them had stories of the Civil War and some had fought in WWII. They were from all over China and I had great difficulty understanding a lot of them. Even my wife, who grew up in Taiwan had trouble - I distinctly remember one neighbor, "Uncle Bo", who had suffered a stroke and was basically abandoned there by his family, who pronounced the number 9 like, "kyu" (like Japanese), among many other pronunciation quirks. I found out later that this is common in some dialect in mainland China, but I forgot where/which dialect. The living conditions were pretty ... not great, with eroding concrete, scorching hot in the summer, and constant issues with moisture leaking in, but I think our rent started out at NT$2500 ($80 USD?), which was even cheap at that time. Our landlord later raised the rent to $3k and we "abandoned our post." I still have a weird fondness for that time and place, though. It's conceivable that I am one of the last people some of those veterans told their stories too. People in Taiwan at that time were not terribly interested in stories old people told, so maybe I was even the _only_ person some of them ever told their stories too, but I went back there in 2019 and was happy to see all the work that had been done to record the stories and memories of my former neighbors in the artist village that is there now. I think there was even a little plaque for Uncle Bo, IIRC.
- qingcharles 3y ago
  Thank you. These are the sort of amazing responses that make HN so good.

120 points by georgeoliver 3y ago

> Unfortunately, there was still a problem–the city couldn’t overlook the building codes. But Casagrande found a loophole: He declared that since the houses had been handmade, they were a form of art. “The city commissioned me to make a public artwork, and Treasure Hill is the artwork. That’s where [people] live now,” he said. “That’s how they rationalized it.” That ignores the purpose of the building codes even artists can die in fires (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Ship_warehouse_fire https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Ship_warehouse_fire). This is especially worse when you have families and children living there. This city of the future sounds like nothing I want a part of.

tdeck 3y ago
Not only fires, but also earthquakes which are common in Taiwan.
aaron695 3y ago
Good to see a Hacker is now being a bureaucrat reading books of city codes over Neuromancer. These are peoples homes, the danger is probably less than many US ghettos or homeless encampments, how about we start bulldozing those which are unsafe and ugly if people homes have no meaning. There's no reason you cant make communities not up to spec with current building codes safe. This is normal for historic buildings which have exceptions. The Ghost Ship fire was a concert, I don't believe any killed were residents. > This city of the future sounds like nothing I want a part of. Nothing like never leaving the safety of the suburban home I guess, the new hacker ethos.
- whythre 3y ago
  Surely there is middle ground here- I agree with the general sentiment though; the perfect need not be the enemy of the good.
- hutzlibu 3y ago
  In general I agree with your sentiment, but I think one can do alternative living without building codes, that is safe and clean unlike the ghost ship apparently was, and also: "The Ghost Ship fire was a concert, I don't believe any killed were residents." "One victim of the fire was a building resident." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Ship_warehouse_fire https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Ship_warehouse_fire They knew they had faulty electricity and they had a small fire before.
- vidarh 3y ago
  I don't really think your comment contradicts the comment you reply to - as you point out one way of addressing the failure to meet building codes is to make those communities safe. But just defining their around the lack of safety is a poor option. It's hard to tell from the article whether they just worked around the bureaucracy without fixing the issues or if they made it safe in non-standard ways too. And so everyone would probably be better served if there was a process for handling exceptions that actually assessed and documented that a non-standard method was used and that someone signed it off as safe enough, so that ambiguity wasn't there. (And the world of Neuromancer isn't one I'd like to live in, as much as I loved reading about it)
alwa 3y ago
Sounds like it’s all masonry construction, isn’t that fireproof? Not to be flip: I too wouldn’t want to live in a society where improvisation were the construction norm. But it’s not clear to me that all code requirements are life- or safety-critical. It sounds like Treasure Hill was in fact emptied and “renovated” in the course of this “artist village” process [0]. One imagines that such a process may have addressed the life-critical deficiencies even if it couldn’t meet the more nitpicky code requirements that might apply to normal development. [0] https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/treasure-hill-taipei https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/treasure-hill-taipei
- bruce511 3y ago
  >> But it’s not clear to me that all code requirements are life- or safety-critical. It depends somewhat on your definition of "critical. The 50s didn't have seat belts, and clearly most people survived. So "few" died in cars that there was opposition to year introduction. I was recently in a country where smoke alarms are not "a thing". As is no-one had one, they simply don't exist. Sure there's the odd residential fire , but they're rare - single digits per year. Ladders kill more people than fire, but we sell a ladder to anyone, and you don't need a degree to climb one. Building regulations are an important way of keeping people safe. They're a stamp of quality to buyers. Unfortunately they also seem to want to cover 100% of all cases all the time. And that final 0.01% is expensive, and time consuming. Which delays, or denies projects. Which results in fewer places to live. Which, dare I suggest, leads to homeless deaths. Safety standards -are- important. Buildings falling down, or going up in flames, is obviously really bad. But equally not-building-at-all is dangerous. And regulators seem to give very little weight to that when adding another regulation.
  - lostlogin 3y ago
    Your view is a common one, but the flip side of that is cost. Ask someone to make a flood, earthquake and fireproof building and they can price it up and decide if they want to proceed. One maimed human from an accident/incident/event that could have been prevented, and the cost can dwarf the expense of building better. The Pacific rim is somewhere that is fairly prone to natural disasters. Here in NZ, an earthquake in Christchurch [1] killed 185 people, 115 of them in a single building that didn’t meet the building code. If that building’s defects were known, and it had been classed a work of art, that makes the situation worse in my view. As others have noted, you can make old buildings safer. Can’t they do that? [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Christchurch_earthquake https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Christchurch_earthquake
the__alchemist 3y ago
This is a controversial take. As an example, compare apartment buildings in the US, (2 stairwells required for exit in case of fire) vice in Europe. The tradeoff: The US apartments are theoretically easier to evacuate in case of fire. They are also consequently poorly laid out of use, with ugly central hallways, and only one side of windows on most apartments.

thsksbd 3y ago

The future city is ugly and built with and upon the scraps left by our military largesse. Sounds about right.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

airstrike 3y ago

> This is Treasure Hill–a prototype for what one architect believes is the future of sustainable urban living. Title should be "One architect's idea of the \"city of the future\" looks like a bunker"

akomtu 3y ago
I'd go even further and say the heresy that "urban living" is not the future, so making it sustainable is like scaling horse-riding to 10 billion riders.
- abenga 3y ago
  What do you think is the alternative? More sprawl? All global billions living in idyllic farms? On what land?
  - akomtu 3y ago
    I think it will be small multi-generational houses. Outside of a few overpopulated cities, most of the land, even in NY, is farmlands or just undeveloped. Living in hives isn't really in human nature.
    - abenga 3y ago
      More than half of the global human population (and growing) lives in urban areas, so _by definition_ it is human nature. The artificial restrictions artificially limiting the number of new apartment blocks, causing lack of affordable housing is what's forcing younger people to move back in with their parents increasing the number of multi-generational houses. It's pretty hard for me to see this as an unalloyed good that should be the future of living.
      - mantas 3y ago
        If humans use electricity, is it by nature? Is doom scrolling by nature? Or just abusing our instincts? Same applies to urban living.

yellow_lead 3y ago

(2016)

Apocryphon 3y ago

Solarpunk brutalism

atleastoptimal 3y ago
Abandoned town: :| Abandoned town (overgrown): :O
- wardedVibe 3y ago
  it's... clearly not abandoned. Pretty sure you mean dilapidated.

makeitshine 3y ago

Taipei has an ugly beauty to it. Individually, the typical concrete, tiled covered buildings, are ugly, but cram them together, throw up some neon lights, a tiny park with a Daoist temple crammed in the mix, add a few street vendors and the bustle of people and its downright charming. Cities in Japan are much better put together, but I prefer the chaotic, gritty feeling of Taipei, and Treasure Hill is an interesting segment of that.

maxglute 3y ago
Taipei a little too grimy more often than not for my taste, takes time for the charm to shine through compared to JP. But it's certainly there. Wouldn't hurt to have their conscripts do a few days of pressure washing if water wasn't so scarce.
- jeffparsons 3y ago
  Would pressure-washing using sea water be viable? If it's all going into storm water drains and out to sea anyway, what's the difference? Or does it go via, e.g., sewage treatment, first? (I suppose this is a bit of a lazy question, but I couldn't easily find anything conclusive when I searched, and I bet there are interesting angles on the idea that I haven't even considered.)
  - maxglute 3y ago
    I'm guessing salt water bad for rebar in cracking reinforced concrete.

annabyrd 3y ago

Dilapidated urban landscapes == internet catnip.

konschubert 3y ago

The city of the future has abundant energy from solar. Especially during sunny days, when no storage is needed, it will be extremely cheap to air condition and desalinate seawater.

raziel2p 3y ago

The article doesn't say anything about what makes it actually the city of the future, apart from them recycling and filtering water. Looks cool though, and has a nice backstory.

throwuwu 3y ago

An inaccessible favela? Really? What is up with this apocalyptic view of the future?

dappermanneke 3y ago
greens and environmentalists write shit like this and then wonder why none of us elect them to flush our prosperity down the drain
- Abekkus 3y ago
  Meanwhile, what you call our prosperity is quickly becoming one dude’s prosperity.
  - harvey9 3y ago
    Sure we're gonna get the inaccessible favela anyway, but that doesn't mean we have to vote for it.
  - kcplate 3y ago
    One dude’s prosperity, and a whole lot of other people’s still comfortably living. And for what it’s worth, other options don’t change the “one dude’s prosperity” part.

darkhorse13 3y ago

Call me crazy but I really find cities like the one in Taipei really charming. I grew up in one, and there's something very human about this aesthetic.

cbilson 3y ago

Thanks a lot for posting this! I actually used to live in a rented "house" in the place the article is about, probably around 1994-1995. Most of my neighbors were very old veterans, with a handful of NTU students who were rarely seen. Talking with my veteran neighbors was fascinating for me. Most of them had stories of the Civil War and some had fought in WWII. They were from all over China and I had great difficulty understanding a lot of them. Even my wife, who grew up in Taiwan had trouble - I distinctly remember one neighbor, "Uncle Bo", who had suffered a stroke and was basically abandoned there by his family, who pronounced the number 9 like, "kyu" (like Japanese), among many other pronunciation quirks. I found out later that this is common in some dialect in mainland China, but I forgot where/which dialect. The living conditions were pretty ... not great, with eroding concrete, scorching hot in the summer, and constant issues with moisture leaking in, but I think our rent started out at NT$2500 ($80 USD?), which was even cheap at that time. Our landlord later raised the rent to $3k and we "abandoned our post." I still have a weird fondness for that time and place, though. It's conceivable that I am one of the last people some of those veterans told their stories too. People in Taiwan at that time were not terribly interested in stories old people told, so maybe I was even the _only_ person some of them ever told their stories too, but I went back there in 2019 and was happy to see all the work that had been done to record the stories and memories of my former neighbors in the artist village that is there now. I think there was even a little plaque for Uncle Bo, IIRC.

qingcharles 3y ago
Thank you. These are the sort of amazing responses that make HN so good.