THE STRINGS OF LIGHT

For some time, many men have been wondering whether or not humanity has reached the point of the final frontier.

Limit within which the already faint surviving light is obscured by heavy shadows projected up to the opening in which the darkness swallows our unknown future.

Pessimistic view?

Maybe not.

Scientists around the world almost unanimously agree that around 2030, therefore in a few years, the existing climate changes will be irreversible.

Could it be true?

Who can tell.

What is possible to know is what is observed and what is observed very often one would not want to know.

Common sense struggles to metabolize things that are outside its DNA.

And since we are becoming "experts" in DNA modification, we have managed, by means of the unconscious presumed awareness, to complicate our "anthropic structure" to the point where, in extricating ourselves in its angular meanders, we are lost.

The main road, or perhaps the one we should consider most obvious, is lost.

For millennia we have traveled roads on the surface, nourishing the soul and body of all that the earth offered us along the way.

Our minds were better "oxygenated" like the lungs.

Even with the inevitable weaknesses of being human, and even in the hypothesis of new territorial conquests of one people over the other, with the few means available we were able to live and, in some cases to survive, respecting the host territory.

We took the essential while leaving the superfluous.

We lived in harmony with each other and with the outside world, despite the difficulties that living yesterday and today entailed.

Today the opposite is true.

The concept of the human group is outdated.

The legitimate but also too prevailing mass technology imposes its pre-established answers on us regardless of our specific questions.

SkyLevel is not against technological progress, far from it.

What we do not share is the lack of knowledge on the naive use of the same.

A sort of philosophical preparation relating to human-technology interaction.

Of course, the amount of superfluous it produces overwhelms the essentials of our harmonious living.

It is the throwaway and hit and run theory.

The superfluous generates unknowns projected on our future and, as happens in mathematics, a system characterized by equations with a number of unknowns different from the known terms, cannot admit solutions.

This is all very dangerous.

And until when will this state of affairs be possible?

Certainly the "surface" road was interrupted a few decades ago and, to continue our journey, we were forced to dig a tunnel inside a hill formed by our own landfills.

Inside, the air is unhealthy and the light is almost absent.

To get out of this tunnel we continue to dig and dig but, I fear, in the wrong directions and the darkness of our ratio is always present like a boulder on our heads.

Goya asserted that "the sleep of reason generates monsters".

It is sad to have to admit it but the greedy desire for power, interests and wealth, obscuring the light of reason makes us perform irresponsible acts.

Without ever generalizing, of course.

In this way we mostly generate confusion and confusion devours harmony.

But can human beings live in an environment that is made more and more disharmonious and alien to their way of being part of a natural environment?

Knowledge should be the first power used by man but, alas, it is only in third place after economics and politics.

The latter is obviously dissimilar from the enlightened example of the Hellenic Polis.

All this chaos has given rise to most of the urban agglomerations, from small towns to small cities, from large cities to megalopolises.

Originally we had the village / town, to be understood as a human aggregate identifying a "place" considered almost sacred by its inhabitants.

In addition to the civil, public and religious buildings, there were also culture, traditions, politics, economics, legal rules ... in short, the development of human activities that attributed the guiding structure of living itself to the DNA of the village. on a human scale.

From the historic center, with its square and the most representative buildings, the outskirts were harmonized with respect to the center thanks to proportional relationships between the heights of the buildings, and between the latter and the streets.

The predominant architectural typology identifying the creative, formal and functional abilities of a people was respected.

The village was designed to defend itself from extreme environmental conditions and, at the same time, sought the most harmonious integration with the territory.

The host environment was feared and respected.

Today?

How to identify those entities within which our life takes place?

Certainly, without ever generalizing, most of these urban nuclei could be considered as passive "containers" of human beings and other forms of life placed in anonymous "spaces" deprived of the human identity to which reference was previously made, and devourers of natural territories surrounding them as the subject of very often reckless urbanization processes.

Their original DNA is compromised by the logic of power and no longer by pure knowledge.

Politics and economics represent the lifeblood of a people but to prevent this lifeblood from becoming poison, both must be supported by culture.

This is not the case today.

We are immersed in millions, millions and millions of tons of building materials potentially aggressive to human health.

Radioactive cements, lacquers, paints, bitumen, impregnating agents, glues, plastics and anything else that may be the result of oil, pollute our territories and, therefore, the water and food we eat.

Due to the intensive cultivation due to the increasing scarcity of agricultural territories, we use pesticides of various kinds, thus sterilizing mother earth and poisoning our own lives. Under the many "hills" that circumscribe most of our suburbs live the landfills of our time.

Think about the end of the millions of buildings built in the last hundred years, subject to inevitable demolition at the end of their life cycle.

We will probably have mountains instead of hills!

We have to start from a new stage of design avoiding making the mistakes of the past again as it still happens too often today because the alternatives are not very effective except for one.

It is still possible to think of a new dimension of living that can help people be ferried towards sustainable and more evolved models of anthropic development.

This is the reason for the advent of strings that bring a new human dimension.

Reversing this direction will not be easy.

It will be necessary to open the right gates of the ratio even at the cost of great sacrifices.

The possibilities of error are drastically reduced since, in this state of things, each single error would lead to the amplification of the next.

It is necessary to structure a new "vision" of the world, more advanced and less invasive than the current one.

The current DNA of urban agglomerations, not eternal like everything else in existence, must be extensively modified since it represents the reference-guide of the vital activities of the living beings present.

We must begin to change a large part of the world without the latter noticing.

The historic centers and the great architecture of the past and present must be increasingly respected and maintained as they identify the "places" of the memory of a people.

On the contrary, the buildings that identify amorphous spaces, with no history other than the chronological one, such as most of our anonymous suburbs, should be rebuilt at the end of their life cycle a little at a time, with totally different criteria.

The boundaries of urban agglomerations should no longer expand but, rather, contract, even increasing the land to be used for nature and agriculture.

What impossible?

No, we did it.

The limit is only mental.

The key concept of our thinking is the following: we no longer have to invade the surrounding natural territories since we are not the legitimate owners of this mother earth but rather it is nature that we must bring to our cities.

From this harmonious union, an understanding can arise that can, perhaps, illuminate a large part of our darker future.

We are in the presence of a revolution in the field of urban planning, architecture, engineering and, above all, in the relationship between living beings and between them and their vital structure.

But why identify the new urban centers with the word "string".

The motivation is inherent in the formal and functional analogy of the "New Housing Dimension" project with the semantic meaning of the word itself from which the various meanings derive, which I report below in points such as from the Dictionary:

1)… etymological term which means to tighten, to be concise in a discourse…;

2)… tie or elastic band capable of “binding” various elements…;

3)… mathematical term which indicates a set of elements connected in a specific way such as, for example, a succession of elements that can be treated as a single element…;

4) ... technological term with which, for example, a photovoltaic system by means of the union of panels electrically connected in series, obtains the desired voltage ...;

5)… linguistic term that indicates the sequence of linked elements…;

6) ... term used in Quantum Physics within String theory, to indicate an infinitely thin one-dimensional object, of length in the order of 10-34m, whose different modes of vibration would give rise to the particles predicted by the Standard model (photons , electrons, neutrinos…)…;

THE STRINGS OF LIGHT

Let us now analyze the analogies.

1) Let's start from the meaning of “tighten”.

The current urban nuclei, taking cities as an example, no longer have to expand but, rather, huddle around themselves making the most of their potential.

They have to rebuild themselves building after building and neighborhood after neighborhood in such a way as to create self-sufficient but interacting nuclei-villages.

The aim is to have greater control in terms of the physical management of the city area and, therefore, of the infrastructures and transport, also streamlining the checks and administrative practices.

In essence, in order to survive, large cities should be divided into many autonomous urban nuclei in terms of food, energy and infrastructural supply, communicating with the nature present in them and equipped with a set of centripetal forces capable of counteracting the action. centrifugal and therefore expansive of our cities;

2) The structural network of the new urban nuclei relating to the New Housing Dimension is interconnected like the threads of a spider's web and therefore “linked” in all its constituent parts.

This bond occurs by means of "elastic bands" arranged horizontally, defined precisely as "Strings" and vertical structures connecting three superimposed levels.

The first level, located below the ground level, is intended for underground car parks equipped with appropriate ventilation systems and surface skylights.

They are located in the outermost parts of the urban nuclei and enter only some underground areas of the nuclei near the central areas.

By means of vertical connections such as stairs and hydraulic piston elevators powered by photovoltaic panels, it is possible to reach the various upper levels.

In specific points of the nuclei, the storage tanks of rainwater suitably filtered and purified are buried to be used for all water purposes including the water supply for domestic use.

On the upper part of the containment excavation of the tanks, the construction of particular floors configures the condensation plates capable of withdrawing the water from the air and then pouring it into special underground tanks adjacent to the storage tanks.

In this way it is possible to take advantage of an additional water reserve in periods of drought.

The second level refers to the ground floor.

The other infrastructures are located on it, i.e. the phytodepuration tanks in place of the sewage systems, the underground and inspectable casings used for the passage of water pipes, electricity, gas ..., parks and areas for recreational and sporting activities , pedestrian connections and some road routes for the passage of ecological vehicles.

The foundations are partly underground, relative to the parking areas and others on the ground level.

From these rise the pillars and the vertical structures containing the connections and the technical service compartments to the strings.

All the remaining surface, with the exception of sporadic buildings connected to the ground, is dedicated to nature and a large part of it to agriculture.

In addition, areas are planned to be allocated to rotary woods, consisting of trees whose cutting for building purposes or for biomass fuel can take place every five to six years.

In this way the city has the possibility to build itself starting from its own foundations.

It is possible to cultivate the fruits of the earth at km 0.

And the buildings?

Civil, commercial and artisanal buildings…?

In reality there are but not on the ground level but on the extrados of the Strings.

On the third level, as indicated above, there are civil and public buildings, offices and shops.

All these buildings are designed in compliance with the rules of green building as well as harmonious relationships, and have different types of terraced, in line, balcony and courtyard type.

The strings, comparable to rectangular planes of considerable length, have a width of some tens of meters.

They are supported by vertical anti-seismic structures, conceived with a patented anti-seismic construction system integrated with oscillators positioned at the base of each pillar.

In the event of an earthquake, all the buildings above the Strings, already predisposed to receive seismic actions of a certain entity, would be completely protected unlike today, where the few who are predisposed to respond to such events are fully protected.

The buildings are located on the right and left ends of the bands while on the central part of the same there are the access balconies to the buildings, along which skylights are inserted that can illuminate a part of the ground level below the strings.

The strings are intercommunicating and "linked" to each other in order to allow the connection between the areas of the urban core and, therefore, between the different buildings as in a real city.

Indeed much better than a conventional city since the connections are no longer referable to a single level but even two levels starting from the ground level.

We are in the presence of an epochal revolution.

Excluding the underground level to be used for parking, the city is on two levels.

The first is dedicated to nature, the second to man who can tiptoe to observe the unfolding of life below.

But that is not all.

The urban layout of the nucleus reflects that of the historic centers of the past that made history.

An example is Bernardo Rossellino's City of Pienza.

An urban nucleus on a human scale, therefore, where the internal streets look like the corridors of a house.

The square is located in the central area and is circumscribed by administrative, scholastic, commercial, religious buildings… all, however, located at an aerial altitude with a distance of about seven meters from the ground level.

The square itself is the roof of a large multipurpose building.

It is placed on the ground like some surrounding buildings that could have been placed on the Strings, but I believe that every change must be made gradually so as not to generate a state of alienation, however positive, in people.

The market is located around and below the central square, similar to what existed in the Polis Greca with the Agora.

On the roofs of the buildings the garden roofs and the solar and photovoltaic panel systems are located in sequence, without excluding, however, geothermal ones.

A question that would often arise is ... what to do about the shadow areas generated by the Strings on the ground level?

How can there be nature where shadow reigns?

Well, we can answer these legitimate questions.

Under the soffits of the Strings there are “solar false ceilings”, so defined because they are designed to convey the sunlight above the Strings below them.

In this way, it is possible to have sufficient energy for cultivation or for any other purpose.

LED systems, powered by photovoltaic panels inserted in the false ceiling, have the function of modifying the frequency of natural light according to the specific type of cultivation and nozzle systems positioned on the intrados of the strings, nebulizing the air with water particles ionize giving it the right level of humidity.

Starting from "tomorrow", we will no longer be going towards the countryside but the countryside will come towards us.

We will leave the trees connected with their roots in mother earth without having to force them to cohabit with men on the balconies with the associated and connected risks.

As the intensity of sunlight decreases, a system of integrated sensors activates the LED panels powered by the photovoltaic systems.

On the ground level, the pillars also act as street lamps since on their external surface there are transparent casings containing LED neon.

In this way, the new generation urban nucleus can be illuminated at any time of day.

This is the reason for the advent of the "Strings of light".

On the String-tops, the street furniture elements have been conceived with a dual function.

The benches not only serve as rest stations for the inhabitants but are also energy supplies as they are equipped with photovoltaic roofs integrated with the supporting structure of the benches.

The photovoltaic street lamps have solar light collectors at the top that are part of solar tunnels whose light transport collectors pass through the stems of the street lamps reaching the intrados of the strings.

We are in the presence of a New World.

3) Mathematics also helps us because the Strings being interconnected with each other and with the lower floors, they allow the potential inhabitant to travel following different vectorial paths both horizontally by air or on the ground level, and vertically since it is possible to pass from the floors buried on the Strings up to the garden roofs.

The single building can be reached on various levels and the entrance to the same can also be done from the roof.

By increasing the fruition surfaces, the scalar and vector mathematical combinations of the displacements in place consequently increase.

In this way the transport and interaction systems between the various places of the urban core are harmonized and greatly facilitated.

4) Like the buildings that in this case can be aligned in line, in rows, in a gallery, in a sequence of courtyards or even in single lots for one-two-three or four-family buildings, the roofs also allow the accommodation of technological systems connected in orderly succession.

The solar and photovoltaic panels and also the hanging gardens follow the conceptual DNA of the Strings.

Not only the technological elements, but all the rest of the urban layout is designed in such a way as to order everything in sequence according to criteria that are never absolutist but modifiable in relation to the contexts in which they are located.

In essence, the new housing dimension is made up of sequences of fragments ordered into elements making up a single organism.

In this regard, we take the opportunity to point out something relevant.

Regardless of the design of an entire urban nucleus by means of Strings, even the potential single house to be built within a city of now, I suppose, an old concept, can follow the same constructive criterion "rising" from the ground, after reclamation of the land underlying to bring back to its ancient function.

Also in this case the "light" will be able to filter in order to bring new life "to light".

The fragment is only a seed, but this, together with many other fragments, can constitute the great unity that we all need.

5) The word String, linguistically indicates a succession of concatenated elements.

For this reason, even the new urban nuclei represented by the structural strings should, logically and in merit, enter the semiological code of urban planning, since they represent the beginning of a new era.

6) Regarding the last point, the analogy is conceptual.

Quantum Physics has long represented the new horizon of classical physics.

What for the second is thesis because it is obvious as it is inserted in a macroscopic context, for the first it is only theorized within an infinitesimally small world.

Yet, the theories of Quantum Physics find applications in the real world, the macroscopic one.

The Strings intended by us will undoubtedly be the new world that faces our present.

The concepts of building change.

The patented anti-seismic metal frame that characterizes the buildings has been conceived in a totally different way from any other anti-seismic structure.

The pillars of the Strings take into account a corroborating system between the classic oscillators and the hybrid anti-seismic system indicated above.

Strings are anti-seismic elastic bands capable of supporting entire buildings so that in the event of inertial action it would not be one or a few buildings that would be saved as happens today but rather all the buildings present on them.

This morphological-functional structure goes beyond the concept of contemporary urban aggregate.

Under the Strings we carry the Sun and, therefore, life in its various forms.

We can get a good part of the food at 0 km by enormously reducing the amount of pollutants.

We generate the "green lungs" we all need by greatly breaking down the disastrous fine dust.

The impact on the ground is savored and has only the essentials.

There would be room for animals, better protecting those in danger of extinction.

In addition to being non-invasive and polluting the environment, the infrastructural systems are designed to produce self-sufficiency for the entire urban system.

The vehicular traffic is outside the nucleus and follows a few underground vector routes.

If this is not a revolution, we ask ourselves what the real one is.

The conceptual analogy with the Strings considered in Quantum Physics is obvious.

Those considered in Physics, with their different ways of vibrating would give rise to the particles of which we ourselves are composed.

Strings of light, by means of their always different spatial combinations, points of view and reference, would be able to organize the life present in them by increasing their combinatorial possibilities and, I believe, of human relationships.

We must never forget that the physical and conceptual loss of the social group would inevitably end up making us lose ourselves, as already happens in a large part of our life.

We are sure that the new living dimension will make the new architecture vibrate harmoniously and forcefully, generating new elements of life.

The architecture of the next few years will be destined to live with an increasingly adverse climate to our way of life.

It must be of defense but also of integration with what the Earth will be able to offer to us today and to future generations tomorrow.

One cannot seek harmony within oneself within a disharmonious world.

SkyLevel's wish is to lay the foundations for the chronological construction of parts of the world capable of harmonizing with the host environment by following the rules of ingenuity and common sense.

In this way, perhaps, there will be more possibilities to better understand our small role within a larger world that how it can give ... it can also take away.