Energy: patterns, planning and architecture

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Professor Ramsey, author of the accompanying Plowboy Paper, is certainly no promoter of high-rise buildings. He says that such structures, as used in their current architectural and planning form, produce the following ten undesirable results:

[1] They are the helpmate and counterbalance of suburbia. High-rises and suburbia necessitate each other.

[2] High-rise buildings consume 2,000 to 8,000 times more mechanized energy for their operation and the movement of people and goods than do three- and four-story walk-ups. They also have a high thermal loss from the windrake of their high surfaces.

[3] Such structures preclude the use of solar energy on all buildings which fall within their shadow patterns.

[4] High-rises eliminate diversity of people and functions (such "hindrances to progress" are, of course, removed from the area before such a building is constructed.)

[5] In their final pattern (New York City), high-rise buildings eliminate all direct sun from the street . . . thus largely precluding plantlife, shade, light patterns, oxygen, visual perception and delight on that level.

[6] Vertical construction initiates and feeds the land-tax ripple effect which eventually drives both small business and the individual homeowner away from the area.

[7] High-rises enormously overload all city utilities and services, particularly the street, water and sewage systems. To cover 85% of the remaining area of a city with concrete (for parking, etc.) is an insult bordering on criminality to both land and people.

[8] Building vertically helps create high crime areas due to the evacuation of workers every weekday evening at 5 p.m. One invariably finds both high poverty and crime areas adjacent to new high-rise complexes.

[9] High-rises deplete the city tax base. Such structures do not pay enough taxes to cover the additional strain they put on city services. Case Documentation: San Francisco.

[10] High-rise buildings are a bore. If you've seen the 4th floor of one, you've seen the 24th floor. Case Study Documentation: The Ultimate High-rise by Bruce Brugmann, Greggar Sletteland and the Bay Guardian staff.

POLLUTION: Today's spreading oil, pesticide, insecticide, herbicide, detergent and other stains will continue to spread in the future. As will the land-, air- and water-contaminating wastes from our cities. Already dangerous levels of lead, chlorinated hydrocarbons and other pollutants in mother's (and other) milk will keep on rising. The nitrate poisoning of our water supplies (from massive agribiz crop injections of nitrogen fertilizer) will become an even greater problem tomorrow than it is today. We can look forward to more and bigger spills of nuclear waste. If we continue our present course, all the rivers will eventually foam and the lakes die. There will be no insects, no birds, no fish, no forests, no animals, no life. All will be quite "clean".

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