STOP wrecking landscapes with buildings! Jay Springett tells why

Watch the full conversation here: • How solarpunk envision...
Solarpunk is a movement in fiction, art, fashion, and activism that imagines what a sustainable civilisation looks like, and how we get there.
In this new episode of Ecogradia, we speak with British writer, podcaster, and strategist Jay Springett. He has been part of the solarpunk community and driving conversations around the subject for a decade.
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[@prototropo]

This is music to my ears. Why oh why do architects and city planners assume that every building (THEIR building) stands alone, monumental and eternally independent of any consideration for other people, other functions or future generations? I've lived in San Francisco for 50 years, and I'm astonished how many beautiful structures characterized the 1920s, 30s and 40s, and then, suddenly, how little regard for any higher purpose imbues the postwar buildings. For example, entering the city by the much-traveled Bay Bridge initially affords commuters a glorious panorama of the SF waterfront. But as you get closer, parallel to that row of piers and docks, but high above it, you are confronted by a mess of building tops littered with elevator siloes, air circulation mechanisms, and phone/radio transmission dishes and antennae of all sorts. It's the ugliest possible scene to sandwich in between the approach and the descent to street level. And it basically says "Now that our engineering commission is done and we're fully paid, we don't really care at all about your visual experience every workday for the next 100 years."
The same is true, at least approximately I think, for Denver, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Phoenix, St. Louis and the former Soviet Bloc cities, but is not nearly as bad in Portland, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Boston, London or Toronto (very generally speaking).
In any case, every building that will govern a landscape for more than 30 years should absolutely take into account the experience of those poor souls who will be stuck with every aspect of such a building. We count! We matter!
Don't coerce your monstrosities on thousands of innocent bystanders. What we see every day we step outside our homes should be something heartening and humanizing, not cold, coercive, corporatizing, careless or cavalier.

[@Ecogradia]

Thank you for sharing!