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Walden 3-D, Inc. was formed in 1990 to formalize a conversation started in 1970 between H. Roice Nelson, Jr. and Raymond S. Gardner regarding building cities around people instead of around cars.
Over the years, Walden 3-D (W3D) has acted as a new company incubator, a geophysical consultancy, and think tank. W3D is interested in pursuing a project at "0 Deerwood" to return to company roots. Quoting from 1990 documentation, W3D was formed to:
- "Lead a revolution in urban planning through information technologies. The planned end result is the development of cost effective and ecologically sound three-dimensional cities."
- "These communities will provide the highest and best land use, juxtapositioning a large building mass with nature to benefit both, while maximizing utilization of finite resources."
- "The projects will accommodate a greatly increased population compared to the population on an equivalent footprint in one of today's housing developments."
- "The complexes will use state-of-the-art concepts in energy conservation, waste treatment and recycling. Living units will "plug" into an intelligent network providing residents with complete environmental control and access to information worldwide, encouraging information-based decision-making and scrupulous democracy."
The 1990 W3D funded design of "The Intelligent Habitat Project" (W3D89A) illustrates these goals.
Society has accepted many of the "revolutionary" ideas discussed 3½ decades ago by the founders of W3D. Consider the "X-treme green dream home" described in the Houston Business Journal (Week of August 3-9, 2007).
Also consider the following quotes:
- "A lovely city is not an accident, as a lovely person is not an accident."
- "Architecture is the physical framework for the life of man, exterior to his own and all other biological frameworks."
- We are crustaceans. Like coral we make cities and inhabit them, leave and get in a movable shell to go to another shell. This is like thinking of the body as the house for the soul. Our spaces can close ourselves off from the outside world. Therefore we make windows for a view, or for sunlight at breakfast.
- "The city is the true concern of architecture."
- That which lives wants to become three-dimensional for the sake of complexity and intensity. But it has to keep itself two-dimensional in the whole so as to deploy itself and feed on the sun."
- "The city is the cradle and the expression of civilization. The materialistic society has all but destroyed the city."
- "The city must be predicated on compactness. Lack of compactness is lack of efficiency."
- "The city is the container of man's social organism. It is where man makes history."
W3D is interested in prototyping a new type of city within a city, on a small scale. A key goal is to demonstrate the economic benefits of designing responsive environments to the developers, so the ideas will be replicated.
Click Here for a W3D company profile.
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