Infrastructure and the Future
Will Lark Take vehicle designers, for instance. They are just working on the vehicles themselves, and because of that we make SUVs. They do everything—they get you everywhere you need to go, they go three hundred miles, they go over one hundred miles an hour, they have all these performance specs that are just unnecessary for a city. If we think about piggy backing off a city’s infrastructure, we can design vehicles that are very efficient for their services there. But that requires the bigger vision of working with city planners or utility companies to provide energy on demand. Until someone takes a look at the larger vision—whether it’s an architect or someone else that can say, okay, these three systems of buildings, subways, and cars have to work together—we’re not going to get there. We’re going to have all these incremental things, and we’re going to have this situation like you’re describing. We’re going to get to the point where there is no more oil and we’re not going to have any choice in the matter. Kazys Varnelis A lot of people are commuting long distances in order to be able to find an affordable place to live. If you were to look at immigration in this country in the last decade, much of it has been into the outlying regions. Little of it has been to the traditional urban core. This is reshaping American cities. We need to think of the big picture. Where is the affordable housing going? Are we building any of it at all? Or are we just building these developer-driven projects way out in the boonies so that people then have nightmarish commutes, clog up the roads, and pollute the air. Unfortunately, instead of thinking about these questions, apparently the administration just decided to bail out home builders, which was just unconscionable. That was just in the news this week. We need to reframe politics and the big picture in terms of how we think about infrastructure. Beto Lopez One of the things that struck me was this question around commerce and what drives it. Of the products that we’ve been asked to design in the
Cell Phone Tower
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