Page 27 - Vertical City

RECONCILING HIGH-RISE LIVING AND THE SUN 27

acronym NBIC) will allow us to better understand the
heritage and culture of these civilizations 10.

With the help of environmental concerns, they are
now the object of deep interest, which may change
many paradigms.

Progresses in NBIC will not only revolutionize exact
science, medicine, and engineering in addition to the
humanities, but also, with that of metric scale techno-
logy, the very manner in which we view construction.

It is at the scale of the meter that four of the five
pillars of this “third industrial revolution” as proposed
by Jeremy Rifkin 11 can be understood.

To paraphrase Laurent Alexandre 12 speaking on
behalf of mankind, it (construction) will never be more
“than a beta version” just like the draft of a computer
program where the aim is to refine it,

and that in the cyberspace of our children where
the virtual world is becoming increasingly dominant. It
is thus urgent to reconnect with a type of generic and
dismountable building, where its use can be modified at

10 Archeological research at the sites of Carthage and in Peru in an
attempt to enlarge the hypothesis of the arrival in the new world of
Phoenicians and Celts, driven out by the Romans in the dawn of our
epoch, are an example.

11 Jeremy Rifkin, The Third industrial revolution, 2011, French transla-
tion: La troisième révolution industrielle, Paris, Éditions Les Liens qui
Libèrent, 2012; and its five “pillars,” four on a “metric“ scale: renew-
able energy, “zero energy” buildings, hydrogen, electric or battery-
powered vehicles, and the fifth: the Internet.

12 Laurent Alexandre, La mort de la mort, Paris, Éditions Jean-Claude
Lattès, 2011.