Torgglerat: Dream City
~ metro, better ~
TL;DR — Your way of building cities sucks. In lots of different, horrible ways. Here are the improvements you need, from construction and design to transit and utilities. I can’t build this for you, though. I’ll wait.
Torggler Door
Klemens Torggler is one of my Secret Heroes. Watch his YouTube videos of door designs. His mind is an Alien Artifact!
That door of his opened a vista in my skull. Let each WALL of a structure sit within a Cabinet on Wheels. The Floorplan of the building is ONLY bare, flat slab and exterior walls, bare pillars. You roll these Cabinets into place, with a lever-arm dropping the frame around those Castor Wheels and squishing the top of the Cabinet into the ceiling, locking it into place. That Pre-Fab Cabinet then unfurls Torggler-door Walls. Latch them on both sides. You can roll-and-reconfigure your entire home in half an hour.
Other Cabinets are your Murphy Bed, Shower & Tub, etc. Flooring is easy, too!
Floors: Metal beams act as a lattice of joists bolted to the walls and pillars at the base, with struts periodically to transfer loads to base-plates. These hold-up your flooring. Lay plastic drip-troughs under the gaps in the joists, and then install all water, sewage, electrical, telecom under those joists. Nobody needs to feed a cable behind drywall!
Once all the utilities are down, you lay tiles across those gaps in the joists. No Grout! No Tile Guy! Cheap and fast, ‘Floating Tile’ saddling that gap: Each tile will NOT break — it is glued to a thick plywood backing, which itself is glued to a steel mesh, a 16" square sandwich. That steel mesh is what keeps the plywood from fraying and bending, even if the tile does crack! Should a tile crack, you still don’t fall through the floor — no catastrophic failure. Just lift that tile out of its slot and use a suction-pad to drop a fresh tile into that slot. Done!
The key differentiator in this design is that it now costs next to nothing to re-model. This is distinct from those ‘transformer’ apartments, which must be muscled-about to convert your bedroom into your kitchen, every day— NOT those! Instead, each new occupant can choose their own durable floorplan, and modify it seasonally, without much time or trouble. This eliminates the wasted time and money to repeatedly install expensive crap, just to waste more time and money to rip it all out and throw it away years later!
Without expensive plumbers, electricians, tile guys, cabinet installations… just slab and pillar, pre-fab cabinets, bulk tile and plywood? Yup. Construction, at generous salaries, would still make homes for less than $400/m2. A 2,000sq.ft. home for $80K. I’ve tried explaining this to folks for over two decades. Your way of doing things looks like a clown car, to me.
The Ziggurat Hills
When I saw photos of Habitat 67, I immediately thought: “Oh, he kinda messed it up.” Safdie, decades earlier, had been stumbling through the same issues with skyscrapers that I had been solving in my bedroom. Don’t live in Habitat 67; it feels like a stack of shipping containers, and all those insane ledges drip your eyes over the edge in a fever-dream. Ziggurats are better, if you give them skylights to a hollow interior.
Ziggurats were step-ledged pyramids. Each ‘step’ is actually a wide balcony for that floor. Combine with the Torggler concept from above — Torgglerats. The outside of the Torgglerat is the balconies to stacked homes. Each home is multiple floors, its own chunk of the exterior, multiple layers of balcony looking out onto the vista and sky. And this pyramid is HOLLOW.
Inside that hollowness is a Plaza leading to a smaller, interior Pyramid — again, step-layered balconies forming a second ‘interior perimeter’. That inner Ziggurat holds all the shops, services, offices, roughly a quarter the floorspace of the homes which blanket the sunny exterior. The exterior homes outside have additional mezzanines pointed inwards, overlooking those shops and the interior Plaza, lit by shafts of skylight and dangling trellises of LEDs. The ceiling is all mirrored, to double the apparent volume of the inner Plaza.
Going Deeper: The inner Pyramid is ALSO Hollow!
A diamond-shaped cross-section of void is ensconced beneath all the shops and offices. The lower third of that diamond is cut-off by a wide slab floor. Inside that lower-third compartment is the Train Station, covered-over by layers of structure, inaudible to anyone in their homes. There are no Roads in the wide sunlight outside; only walking and bike paths among gardens and quiet nooks. From your kitchen window, you hear only the birds.
The upper region of the deep-interior Hidden Diamond is scheduled for various Events — from Art Displays to Concerts, Conferences and Booths of Craft Bazaar Swap-Meets. Its enclosure gives you the ability to easily patrol and charge tickets, if you must. And that Rave can bump all night long, without waking the neighbors!
From the outside, the entire City is only an undulating ridgeline; the Torgglerats are not separate monolithic blobs like your skyscrapers! Their edges and corners merge into a variegated and meandering, rolling hillside. And in the centers of the highest points of those hills, yes — a few narrowing Spires! Here, high-density low-budget housing is squeezed directly above the densest zones of shops, services, offices, directly above the Train Station. Younger people who want to save money live there — like me. :)
Why Bother?
With Torgglerats, we can supply each resident with more than 500sq.ft. each… while stuffing 500,000 people on every square mile. They won’t feel cramped, either — they have wide vistas in every angle, balconies covering MORE area than the entire footprint of the City itself! Gardens and Plazas, Grottos and Nooks all replaced your four-lanes-of-traffic and parking. Everything is green or terra cotta or wrought iron, dangling LEDs or reflecting wide beams of sun.
And, compared to the cost of housing here in California, you pay a DOZEN TIMES LESS.
Most importantly, however, that DENSITY and low BASE-cost causes two very important things to happen: 1) it is WORTH it to invest more into higher-quality services and utilities, infrastructure and amenities, because a greater density of people are using them more often, 2) you have the SPARE cash to invest into those things, because rent is so low — you have disposable income! Torgglerats will naturally accumulate public goods and valuable infrastructure at a faster rate than other cities, and they will only saturate that demand for quality at a much higher ‘capital-saturation rate’. Thus, the Torgglerat will always be at the forefront of quality per dollar!
High-Quality Infrastructure
Between each inner Plaza, there are moving walkways, like at the Airport. The first lane of walkway travels a measly 2mph, just 1 meter per second. Yet, the rails on your left open-up to allow you to step onto the SECOND lane of walkway, if you please. That second lane adds another 1m/sec to your speed. By the time you are walking in the THIRD lane, the Fast-Lane, you are traveling at an accumulated pace of 5m/sec — TEN miles per hour! That is FASTER than a City BUS! And, you didn’t have to wait for the bus to arrive, first; your total travel-time is multiple times less, while being dirt cheap.
When you need to travel further, there are the Train Stations beneath the inner Plaza, with local lines stopping at each station, while Express lines stop at every fifth station. These are worth spending a lot, to make them enjoyable and comfortable, fast and reliable, safe and clean — look at how much MORE I am willing to spend on my rail lines, and why:
The Torgglerat metropolitan zone has people living at much higher density than even New York City — NYC only squeezes 10,000 people per square kilometer, and even Manhattan is only 30,000 folks per kilometer. Torggler, by layering spaces and making fuller use of the vertical space above your roads and parking, fits 200,000 per km2. That’s 20x the density. As a result, your usual destinations are only 1/4th as far-away as they would be in New York City. (Four is close to the square root of the 20x density.) So, each passenger only needs the transit-system for 1/4th as much TIME. That means: the same number of people can get the same amount of travel done, using 1/4th the rail-line Capacity! So, it’s worth spending 4x on your rail-lines, per passenger. But that has a feedback effect…
Once you spend 4x per passenger on your rails, while having no roads or parking, you also bring-in a larger portion of trips and riders. And so, the value to each rider is increased even more when you improve the rail-line’s speed and quality. And, with all of your errands taking 1/4th as much time, you go on more trips! All of these factors add value to you, which is why these rails must be FREE.
By making all public transit free, you eliminate the hassle. That is worth more dollars than the ticket-price! And that value is re-couped in the form of higher real estate valuations, higher rents at equilibrium. You saved $2,000 a year on ticket-prices — while the time saved and convenience, elimination of pain-points, all combine for a value-to-you of $5,000 per year, for a net increase to your condo-value of $40K. The increased value in assets is many times greater than the cost of operating free rails and moving-walkways. And it creates a huge ‘pull-factor’ that attracts talent and the wealthy who don’t want hassles because their time is precious to them.
Similarly, the Torgglerat City needs a separate rail-line for freight and deliveries as well as emergency services. No public riders; only ambulances and pallets of stuff. And those freight deliveries go to under-pyramid distribution networks: Three Sizes of Pneumatic Tube Rails. The Tiny Tube carries your usual mail into your home, in a dropbox. The Mid-Tube delivers larger packages to your section of Torgglerat apartments — you just go down the hall and enter your delivery’s ID Passkey, to grab the new speaker system. And finally, the Wide-Tube hands bigger stuff (IKEA) to a depot downstairs where you grab a dolly and wheel it into the elevator to take it home. Additional under-ground Pneumatic Rails haul trash on Gnomish mining-carts; no bins or dumpsters. (No, don’t dig tunnels underground AFTER building a city on top; you build the whole city with its rails as the ground-floor, layering Plazas above it.)
The Nature of Utilities and Amenities
Look at how Nature grows real organisms: they start small, and slowly grow, all of their organs intact along the way, until they reach their maximum Natural size. They have a stopping-point, where they do NOT grow bigger!
The cells that keep growing and growing until they suffocate their own system? Those are called cancer. You grow your cities like cancer.
A City must be built as a singular structure, with a planned scale. Once it reaches that size, it stops. And there are no expensive renovations. Instead, when demand for housing continues to grow? You build another city, somewhere else. They need to be far-enough apart that they don’t sap each other. Do NOT expand around existing cities with endless sprawl of suburbs. Do NOT tear-down and re-build small sections of an existing city. Make better ones, for each new generation. Nature does it that way; the old Cities will age-out and be replaced wholesale, like elder members of a herd.
Torgglerats begin construction with the ‘downtown’ hubs where Spires of dense apartments are more common, along with a greater proportion of offices than shops. The early wave of workers at key functions move into those spots. Further around that, as construction continues, are the nooks and grottos of distinct flavors, places to eat and shop and relax with friends. Further still are the quiet neighborhoods, predominantly stacks of balcony-ringed homes in Torggler ziggurat-form. And you stop there. If you do not stop, you will overwhelm your transport and utility systems, and everyone is stuck in traffic while the city decays. Stop growing like cancer!
Sunken Ovens
My Torgglerats use a different method to cook food. Scattered across the City are numerous pits into the deep ground, 200ft, filled with water. Bell-jars descend along a conveyor-belt down into that pit of water and rise again, carrying a floatie inside the Bell-jar which was covered in food. Because that Bell-jar descended so deep, then the air-pressure squeezed and heated inside — your food cooks exactly how you want, dialed-in by the depth and timing of the jars. And, at that depth, food browns perfectly, all the way through itself. NO other method is capable of cooking like that! Your drumsticks have glistening crispies of rendered fats on the inside of each bite! In the thick of the meat! Cookies are always exactly golden. Eggplant actually cooks soft and flavorful! Fruit smoothies automatically become organic TAFFY, with no added sugars!
Those confections and plates of food are shuttled on the above-mentioned Pneumatic Tubes to each restaurant and cafe, conference and wedding reception. No need to have an entire kitchen sitting un-used while the Brunch Spot is closed all evening and night. By avoiding that waste of space and resources, then it is cheaper for restaurants to operate — so they can afford to sell delicious at a discount! That is another enormous ‘pull-factor’ to grab talent and wealth density, raising property values. It pays for itself many times over.
Similarly, the density of folks and ease of travel and delivery and food all lower the costs and barriers and labor for events. As a result, it is worth the real estate value to subsidize public events at a higher rate, serving more niche interests and hosting events regularly. You save money and time at each spot, while getting better quality, which means you spend more time and money on good stuff, supporting those activities — so that there is more good stuff to spend it on!
Wider Vistas
There are dozens of smaller conveniences and factors to consider in a Torgglerat. My deepest longing is for that city where every home and apartment has wide vista, seeing large slices of sky above, instead of those narrow towers trapping me, feeling like a zombie rising from a grave. I cannot emphasize enough: Torgglerats provide the residences with more home-balcony area than the entire footprint of the City, combined. And, there are both the exterior Plazas, ensconced between those Torgglerat pyramids, as well as the interior Plazas, AND the deeper Caves of Event Centers and All Night Dance Parties. You wanted ‘third spaces’? I give you an entire City covered in them.
