Chapter 14
The Architect as World Planner
2I have had the good fortune to be invited to more than one hundred universities and colleges around the earth. I have, therefore, a certain experience which may be of value in respect to subjects which are apparently of inspiration to architectural students. I am convinced that they have a greater interest in comprehensive world patterns than had my generation, for instance.
3 I am sure it is my study of world-patterning which has gained for me student interest and support. The essence of world problems, as I see it, is as follows:
4 At the first moment in history when economic data was coming in from all around the earth, Thomas Malthus, integrating that data, discovered that the world’s people were multiplying their numbers more rapidly than they were producing goods to supply themselves. Malthus’ discovery coincided with the moment when Darwin was discovering his theory of evolution and adopting his hypothesis that the evolution was predicated upon survival of the fittest. As a consequence, Malthus’ pattern seemed to indicate survival of the fittest to be a scientific fact.
5 Up to this moment in history, whether world societies fared well or ill had seemed to be a matter of fate or a whimsical decision of the Gods. Suddenly the Malthusian law of survival became an apparent scientific fact which confronted the statesmen and political leaders of nations. From that moment on it seemed clearly a matter of ‘‘you or me,’’ and the leaders of great nations felt it was their obvious mandated responsibility to be sure that it was not their nation that went down. At this moment in history the ‘‘you or me’’ motivation founded on Malthus constitutes the mainspring of world political policy and action.
6 The solutions under the Malthusian ‘‘you or me’’ lead into two main political categories:
- 1.)
- Ruthless but often polite decimation of the unsupportable fractions, or leaving the unsupportable fractions to their unhappy fate.
- 2.)
- Socialism, the theory of austerity for all and sharing of the inadequacy with slow approach to certain untimely mutual demise.
7 In view of the seeming scientific inexorability of the Malthusian concept, it comes as a great surprise that in this century a new pattern has emerged which not only questions the fundamental validity of the Malthusian and Darwinian theory, but even seems to promise their invalidation in economic and social domains.
8 At the turn of the century the technology of the industrial revolution was beginning to integrate, developing patterns of higher leverage in the doing of man’s work than had been anticipated. As of 1900, less than one per cent of humanity was participating in the high advantages of the industrial equation.
9 (I developed a physical measure of what I mean by participating in the industrial equation when I was technical consultant to Fortune magazine in 1938. When the equivalent of the work that could be done by two hundred human slaves was available and being used in electrical and other energy units in the industrial network by a human family of five members, I rated this family an industrial ‘‘have’’ family.)
10 Intertechnology gelling was occurring at such an important rate at the turn of the century that by 1914 and the beginning of World War I, the percentage of human family participating in the industrial network advantage had grown from less than one per cent to six per cent. It was unquestionably this swift integration of new levels of technology that emboldened the political world ‘‘outs’’ to challenge the political ‘‘ins’’ in World War I. As World War II began, twenty per cent of humanity was participating in the advantage of the industrial network. At the present moment approximately forty-four per cent of humanity is participating in the higher advantages.
11 This emergence of the new pattern of man’s advantage amplification rate may be news. (It is not surprising, because it is a discovery of my own and has not been widely published. The New York Times made mention of it in 1952.) The curve of acceleration of those participating in industrialization indicates that the whole of the human family will be participating in the highest technical advantages before the end of the twentieth century, at a level of human satisfaction as yet not even dreamed of by any man.
12 To understand the surprising significance of this curve it must be understood that what I speak of as the industrial network embraces all the resources of the earth that enter into the establishment and maintenance of the industrial processes. As the percentage increased from one to forty-four, it meant that total organized world tonnage of metallic and metabolic resource utilization was supplying only one per cent, then six per cent, then forty-four per cent. During this half-century of industrialization, world’s population has been increasing at a faster rate than additional resources have been discovered. That is, the ratio of world copper, mined or unmined, or of iron, mined or unmined, per capita, has been continually decreasing. Therefore this increase in numbers served has not been the result of the addition of more resources, but the consequence of the scientifically-designed multiplication of the performance per unit of invested resource. Transferring communication from wire to wireless is a typical means of doing more with less.
13 I am confident that architects will not claim that they were consciously engaged in coordinated improvement of this over-all world performance pattern of resources use. This was not the declared policy of any nation. How then has it come about?
14 The answer is that it has been a by-product of the development of weaponry and the tools-to-make-tools investment to support that massive weaponry, with the fabulous capital investments for the weaponry predicated upon the Malthusian ‘‘you or me’’ concept. As each level of weaponry advance becomes obsoleted by a new level of attainment, the technology which arose to produce and support it at the obsoleting level then becomes available to world society for every day technical-economic satisfactions.
15 The change in the world’s standard of living, its utter change of man’s ecological patterning from the 1900, local, on-foot sweep-out to the world-around sweep-out of 1961 has been, then, a second-hand by-product of the world’s preoccupation with weaponry.
16 Two and a half trillion dollars were invested by the nations of the earth in the subsidy of the airplane as a weapon in the first half century of the airplane. This amounts to sixty times the value of all the gold in the world. The two and a half trillion was a regenerative investing pattern employing the tooled wealth to create higher tooled capability and to inhibit more energy from world energy patterning by shunting that energy into man’s industrial networks to apply it to the end of his larger levers. The accumulation is vast and has made gold utterly obsolete, as the wealth represented by industrial energy and tool capability and ever-improving know-how constitute the real wealth of the world.
17 How did it happen that the native preoccupations of men in weaponry continually improved performance per unit of invested resource? It was because at that time the ability to carry the hitting power of the weaponry the greatest distance in the shortest time involved ships, and ships had limited displacement, due to Nature’s pattern of float-ability. Therefore, the design challenge was to produce the most powerful ship with the least weight invested in the ship, thus enabling it to carry the greatest load of weaponry and fuel to get it there fastest.
18 As we went from the ships of the sea to the ships of the air, the performance per pound of the equipment became of even higher importance than on the sea. Finally, with the breakthrough to rocketry, we see a transition of startling magnitude in speed, distance and energy load carried per weight of vehicle.
19 Architects know that neither they nor their patrons have ever been concerned with the weights of their buildings or with any ratings of performance per unit of weight investment. Neither the architects nor society know what buildings weigh. Society knows well, on the other hand, what the Queen Mary and the Douglas DC-8 weigh; the public knows what their performance capabilities are. The world of housing, the world of architecture, has always been a world of dealing with the leftovers after the high-priority technologies had been applied to the weaponry.
20 The upping of the performance per pound of the world’s resources for improving standards of living has never been a direct objective of the politicians or the military servants of the politicians. Gradually we have come to realize the startling quality of this emerging pattern of the improvement of the performance of the resources as applied secondarily to livingry of man.
21 This pattern indicates the inexorable realization of one hundred per cent industrialization, and if left unattended, to be realized as a by-product of man’s negative preoccupation, it means that it will be realized only through increasing successions of world emergencies of the kind which mankind now finds himself apparently helplessly enmeshed in.
22 Because the forward transformation of the resources from their going functions into other functions of higher performance represents a continual revolution in design, it is a pattern that could be anticipatorily mastered by man as designer, particularly mastered by a comprehension of the architect as the integrating designer in the era of great specialization.
23 If, however, architects and engineers, as has been their custom, wait for a patron to command their services before they engage in their designing practice, it is easy to see that neither the politician nor the industrialist nor any private patron will engage the architectural profession in this anticipatory design command of the resources investment and technical evolution, because the politico and the industrialist and the private patron are all as yet convinced of the inexorableness of the Malthusian ‘‘you or me’’ survival of the fittest.
24 I know the architectural profession is not only altruistic enough but is also prone to take the responsibility of comprehensive design anticipation and effectiveness. But research departments in their offices would be beyond the capacity of the architectural profession.
25 I have gradually realized through the years that there is a solution—to wit:
26 The architectural and engineering professions, governing the curricular policies of the university architectural schools, should tell the architectural faculties and students that they will foster and support comprehensive research and development within the architectural schools themselves where society has arranged for five-year sojourns of selected, high-capability, comprehensive-prone youth. The architectural professionals will from time to time rejoin the universities to participate in its research.
27 The architectural schools around the world should be asked by the International Union of Architects to initiate world design. (In April, 1962, the executive committee of the I.U.A. officially adopted my proposal.)
28 The regenerative consequences will probably be of surprising magnitude.