By Eric Simons
Near the end of his comprehensive 1906 redesign of the city of San Francisco, internationally renowned architect D.H. Burnham considered the question of water. The obstacles to be overcome weren’t what your drought-stricken twenty-first century San Franciscan might imagine. “The water supply of San Francisco will eventually be obtained from the Sierras,” Burnham wrote. “As it will be limitless, the reservoirs should be vast and designed to be in themselves a feature of the city.”
It wasn’t supply that bothered Burnham. It was aesthetics. The main thing, Burnham decided, was that the reservoirs not interfere with his gigantic proposed neoclassical “Aethenium” at the base of Twin Peaks. In 1904, the people of San Francisco were living through a great economic boom period and expansion, and thus wanted nothing more (apparently) than to establish their city as an international center for Greco-Roman sculpture and intellectual pretention. “In these latter years,” wrote the former mayor James Phelan in the afterword to the Burnham report, “the city has wisely become conscious of its former self-neglect, and a strong sentiment pervades the community that improvement and adornment should be bravely begun.”
You’ll be probably less than surprised to find that little that Burnham suggested came to pass. He’s a great reminder, though, that asking architects to imagine a city a century in the future is basically asking for pulse-of-the-city style psychoanalysis. What are people freaked out about? What are their hopes, dreams, desires for their city? How can we project those onto a map set one hundred years in the future?
Which brings us to 2008, and the History Channel-sponsored City of the Future project asking architects to imagine their cities in 2108. Cal professor Lisa Iwamoto and her firm, IwamotoScott Architecture, entered, and their vision of San Francisco in 2108 was named one of the competition’s three finalists. (It lost, in the national online vote, to the regional winner from Atlanta.)
If there is a psychological lesson to be learned from Iwamoto’s design, or from the city’s eager embrace of green design, it is that the brave citizens of San Francisco are currently scared senseless about the environmental state of the world. Almost every feature of the IwamotoScott design is aimed at sustainability. The project proposes an “occupiable infrastructure” that combines housing with a network for power, water, and transportation distribution. Giant “fog flowers” catch fog for water, bayfront algae farms produce biofuels for hydrogen-powered cars, “geothermal mushrooms” generate energy, permeable pavement recharges the city’s huge underground water aquifer. There is no suggestion of a need for more classical architecture; the new housing structures imagined by IwamotoScott look like giant waving tentacles poking out of the bayfront Embarcadero.
It’s a project intended not only to offer green solutions for a green-hungry world, it’s intended to offer an inspiring creative vision to combat the malaise of environmental despair.
“I think it’s great when architecture can capture the imagination,” Iwamoto said. “One of the things we were trying to do was think about, algae farms, geothermal mushrooms, all those things are kinds of things that people I think understand and appreciate and kind of think, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t think originally about that but it’s kind of cool.’ And then look at the design part of it and see how, ‘Oh, it can be more than a square box on a hill.’”
Peering into the future often makes architects look silly, but “you have to take a leap of faith,” Iwamoto said. And unlike Burnham’s attempt to address cultural insecurities, modern designers face a much more obvious -- and universal -- challenge, especially in a waterfront city where sea level is expected to rise by five meters. “There is one thing we all know, that we’re facing a global climate crisis,” Iwamoto said. “That was just too big to not address.”
The world can change quite a bit in a century, and as catastrophic as it now seems, climate change probably won’t be the overriding concern of architects 100 years in the future. But whether or not the San Francisco of 2108 features giant live-in waterfront tendrils, the HydroNet project will stand as a record that in 2008, architects were trying to figure out a way to make sure that those future architects have the luxury of worrying about something else.
As Burnham noted in his report, “While prudence holds up a warning figure, we must not forget what San Francisco has become in fifty years and what it is still further destined to become. We must remember that a meager plan will fall short of perfect achievement, while a great one will yield large results, even if it is never fully realized.”