Why do I say this?
Because reading today's chapter from Ecocities really got me thinking...
"The City Today" chapter references a building in Oakland, California called the Montgomery Ward Building as an example of "appropriate technology." To give some formal definition of this, I'll quote from the book: "Appropriate technology was, in Schumacher's words, technology with a 'human face,' and it came to include solar, wind, geothermal, and biological fuels such as waste wood chips and alcohol; energy conservation measures such as weather stripping and insulation of water heaters, pipes, and buildings; recycling of all sorts; soil building through composting and human waste recovery; agricultural practices such as integrated pest management and companion planting; more efficient transportation systems such as bicycles and public transit vehicles, transcontinental railways and electric cars."
Wow, talk about one giant ron-on sentence...haha. Basically appropriate technology was justified in the design of our cities as, "If the tecniology seemed appropriate to a healthier world, it qualified."
Getting back from my tangent...
The Montgomery Ward Building is (or was) an example that Richard Register found to clarify the continuity of bridge between appropriate technology and ecocities. From the reading I learned that this department store had some amazing ecological practices. It was eight stories tall and covered almost a two-block area. Here's how amazing, and efficient, and completely logical their practices were:
On the first floor the goods arrived from a short spur off the regional rail line that came right into the building. Those goods were transported or "transferred" to the upper floors by a freight elevator. Customers would arrive to the building in the second floor called, the show room, where there were displays that could be looked over and where they could place an order at the sales counter. Their orders were written down, rolled up, and slipped into a canister placed in a pneumatic tube and sucked up to one of the six stories of warehousing above. This makes me think of those drive-thru banking canisters where you put your deposit or withdrawal slip and it gets sucked up and delivered to the bank teller. Anyways... once the order was placed and in one of the warehousing floors, a clerk picked it up and, on roller skates (how fun!), zipped off to the correct shelves to find the item and bring it back to a spiral delivery chute, which was then delivered to the show room by gravity. All of this happened in typically less than two minutes. Wait, what? Talk about an efficient system! Really, it is quite the amazing and efficient way to get items to a customer (not to mention fun riding roller blades at work!). Awesome. - Further the customer paid for the item, carried it out the door only a few feet away, and usually went home by transit - or if the package was large, it could be delivered by a truck already making the rounds.
So not only is this building efficient by its practices with having a local (just up the next floor or so) warehouse with all its inventory, but it was also efficient because transit came right into the building and there was enough efficient transit-oriented-designed infrastructure that allowed people to take transit to and from it, also. This blew my mind away... I've never heard of this building but it sounds amazing! I'd love to go see it but only I can't because sadly it was demolished...
Really??? Such an efficient building so many practical ways and it was demolished? The reason for the demolition is so aggravating, "Though it was exemplary for working well with conservation, it was demolished due to ego-infested local politics." Ego, that is the problem, and politics. It really is revolting to think of them demolishing such a building that should have been more of a landmark for illustrating how working intelligently in the third dimension solves numerous problems in one compact and elegant design." This building sounds amazing; ideal for ecological practices in most "big box" buildings...I can't believe it was demolished...This is why I think we have a nasty habit of throwing away the good things and replacing them with something worse.
Thinking of what we replaced this efficient system with might be even more revolting. Today, we have the goods warehoused in one-story big box "sheds" that are ten to forty iles (if not more) from Oakland that are transported by a fleet of trucks "clogging the freeways and burning millions of gallons of fuel a year." Instead of arriving by transit, the customer drives their car to the one-story big-box building that they have to walk to from a huge land wasting parking lot. Once inside they have to wander the giant shelves trying to find what they want and if they're lucky they might find an employee to help them spend lots of time finding their product and then carry it themselves back to the checkout line, pay for it, and finally take it back to the parking lot and drive far back to their home.
This really makes me more aware of how society is constrained to this and it makes me look a lot more negatively on big box buildings such as Costco and Sam's Club. Putting the Montgomery Ward Building and our current practices side-by-side really puts light on how messed up our system really is...
As I grow and learn each year in college in the Architecture & Planning program, I've grown to hate big-box buildings and their gargantuan parking lots... This just fuels that hate because of how much of a waste of materials and energy it is to transport the goods and for the consumer to pick it up.
Forgive me for quoting again from Richard Register, but this is good stuff!
"Permit me to say that this is an insane waste of fossil fuels, asphalt, concrete, and the manufacture of hundreds of trucks, accompanied by massive quantities of air pollution and the consumption of millions of hours of people's time and millions of dollars of people's money to move products in today's manner as compared to taking transit to the old Montgomery Ward Building and having goods delivered to your hands by a clerk on roller skates and gravity. Compounding the insanity, as Grube pointed out in defending the building, was the destruction of thousands of tons of building materials and of all the energy that went into creating the building. The structure could have been remodeled successfully, as, in fact, shortly before the demolition of the Oakland facility, was the case with the old Montgomery Ward buildings in Portland, Chicago, and Baltimore. It could have remained one of the best examples of urban ecological design and efficiency, of appropriate technologies united by appropriate architecture and urban layout." - pg 114-115, Ecocities
He puts it beautifully... I hate the demolition of buildings with a burning passion... If you are going to demolish a building if it is ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY for the Public's Health, Safety, and Welfare, then at least salvage the building materials and reuse them. Otherwise I think renovation and remodeling of buildings is much more efficient and "eco-friendly" than such destructive and consumptive measures as the demolition and reconstruction of buildings.
It is part of my job as a future Architect with a background in Urban Planning/Ecology and a Sustainability Certificat, that I will be the inducer of such positive change in the way we design our cities and the buildings within them.
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