![]() ![]() One drawing of the projected city even features a nuclear power station right in the middle of town. Spilhaus loved the mechanics of systems but he was no architect. Image: Unicorn Stencil Doc Filmsĭedicated town-planning, let alone architecture, is very thin on the ground – the idea presumably being that planners and architects would come in later and be free to do their thing. But there is precious little consideration given to, say, the provision of an actual civic space where people would want to live.Īt one point, the MXC was to be covered in a giant glass geodesic dome. We see broad-brush schematics of the city’s organisation, even including “personal flying zones” to accommodate jet-belt commuters. Judging by Freidrichs’s documentary, which makes use of personal interviews and audio of the MXC board’s meetings (you can almost smell the whiskey-breath and cigarette smoke), there was little meat on the bones. The total cost of the project was estimated at $10bn, completion date: 1984. Corporations including Boeing, Ford and Honeywell pledged to invest. With the support of vice-president Hubert Humphrey, a former Minnesota senator, MXC received some $250,000 of federal funds in 1967. Their joint PR campaign brought on other well-connected advocates: a four-star general president Johnson’s physician civil rights leader Muriel Snowden even Fuller himself (at one point MXC was to be covered in a giant glass geodesic dome, like the one Fuller had proposed putting over Manhattan in 1960). Minnesota Experimental City, or MXC, began in earnest in 1966, when Spilhaus found a powerful ally in the form of Otto Silha, publisher of the Minnesota Star and Tribune. Photographs: Ron Galella/WireImage/Unicorn Stencil Doc Films Spilhaus loved the mechanics of systems – but he was no architect. Spilhaus even anticipated that people would have personal computers in their homes one day, which they would use for shopping and education. All of this infrastructure – transport, utilities, parking, air-pollution removal technology – could be built underground, leaving clear civic space at ground level. He questioned the amount of urban space given over to roads, and proposed that the city of the future be free of the internal combustion engine, or at least that cars be integrated into a “dual-mode” guideway – whereby automobiles come off the road and on to a guided rail-like system that moves them around the city independent of the drivers. In his city, everything would be recycled. He focused on the problem of waste, noting that prosperity in 1950s and 60s America was being measured in terms of consumption, and suggesting that “waste is a resource that we don’t yet know how to use”. He cottoned on early to concepts such as air pollution, even speculating that it was changing the Earth’s atmosphere. In proposing his prototype 21st-century city, Spilhaus correctly diagnosed many of the shortcomings of the 20th-century one. He called it a “total systems experiment”. So in true postwar visionary style, Spilhaus rethought the entire concept of the city from first principles. This was in an era when existing cities were dying – blighted by crime, urban decay and “white flight” to the suburbs. Looking at projections in the early 60s, Spilhaus saw that the US population was set to grow to 400 million by the 21st century, which translated into the equivalent of building 12 new cities of 250,000 people annually. South African-American geophysicist and oceanographer Athelstan Spilhaus in 1962. Getting such visions off the paper turned out to be a different story, but an instructive one, as told in new documentary The Experimental City, directed by Chad Freidrichs. Spilhaus proposed such solutions weekly in his future-science comic-strip series Our New Age, which was widely syndicated in US newspapers from 1957 to 1973. If we could send a human into space, we could do anything. And, like Fuller, he believed that science and technology could solve most of humankind’s problems. He seems to have been an expert in everything from engineering to urban planning to atmospheric science to oceanography. Originally from South Africa, by way of MIT, Spilhaus was a postwar polymath in the vein of Buckminster Fuller. The sci-fi name sounds too on-the-nose to be true, but Spilhaus was real and so, for a time, was his utopian brainchild – at least on paper. You’d also have heard of its chief designer: Athelstan Spilhaus. I f Minnesota Experimental City had been a roaring success, you’d probably have heard of it. ![]()
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