Architecture and darkness – it’s a long story. A very long one. An essay about caves, earth craters and subways.
Architecture and darkness – it’s a long story. A very long one. An essay about caves, earth craters and subway railroads.
Just like people, architecture stays above ground until there is no other way. Only very few successful underground buildings have had the choice of whether they would have preferred to stand in the open air. The American architect Malcolm Wells was struck by the realization of the advantages of underground buildings when he visited Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West studio building in Arizona in 1959. “I realized that in the middle of the hot Arizona sun, this was suddenly a place that was cool and pleasant.” In 1964, Wells said goodbye to above-ground building altogether after, as he writes, “10 years of pouring asphalt on America in the name of architecture”. He became a visionary thinker for ecological building, whose writings would still be relevant today if only more people were aware of them: Houses should not consume more energy than they can generate themselves. Materials should be stable and sustainable. Rainwater should be used and, above all, buildings should no longer seal surfaces.
This is why underground construction was so important to him, or rather: buried and green construction. “It’s not the only way to live in harmony with nature. But it is one of the most promising and least considered.” He wanted to create buildings that would provide living space for many forms of life, not just for people. The aim of all architecture should be “not to leave the land worse than it was found.” He was so convinced of this mission that in 1974, on his own initiative, he proclaimed May 14 “Underground America Day”, perhaps the most unknown of all American holidays to this day. Wells took it – like everything – with a lot of humor. For Wells, his turn to underground construction also meant that he built virtually nothing – despite the new ecology movement in the USA, there were no commissions. So he drew settlements densely overgrown with plants, underground filling stations and residential buildings. Drawings that can be admired today in his wonderful sketchbook “The Earth-Sheltered House”, which was republished after his death in 2009.
Perhaps now is the time to rediscover Wells as an author and thinker, when everyone is talking about “sustainability”. Wells would certainly have drawn a different Masdar, and it would hardly have been worse. It is generally astonishing how little architecture voluntarily goes underground or even considers the possibility. “We live in an age of glittering buildings, of trophy houses,” writes Wells: “Big, ugly show-off monsters standing on land that has been leveled and cleared and then rolled out with poisonous green turf. If these houses could speak, they would be speechless with shame.” Does that feel like the text is 30 years old?
Whether underground architecture is per se more modest and sustainable than above-ground architecture is doubtful, however. For decades, architectural drawings have been haunted by the idea of the “earthscraper”, which sounds even more comical in German: der Erdkratzer. Most recently, in 2011, a Mexican office proposed sinking a 65-storey high-rise building into the ground in Mexico City. This would be cheaper, as the earthquake-plagued metropolis would otherwise not be able to build any high-rise buildings. In principle, the plan consists of a large hole in the ground around which a cone-shaped glass house is then built, open inwards, centrally lit and ventilated. I am not in a position to judge from here whether this idea, published with dramatic renderings, is suitable for realization in the swamp under Mexico City or whether it is more for the architects’ self-promotion.
Read more in Baumeister 12/2013
Photos: Nick Frank
