Underground living
by Simon Jones

For an idea of the future direction of architecture look down at your feet. One day you may unsuspectingly be walking on top of housing, offices and even cities.

Country living offers the ideals of a relaxed, gentler way of life that many of us have bought into. Yet our desire to be cocooned by nature has involved bulldozing it into oblivion. So how can we regain a more harmonious relationship between the often opposing sides of large-scale development and rural ecology? By developing a green utopia - underground.

The Taisei Company's ambitious plan for subterranean living imaginatively titled Alice City from Alice in Wonderland offers a utopia that is almost as fantastical as the book.

A large clear dome, within an area of open parkland encases a multi-levelled structured metropolis of underground offices, housing, transportation and communal areas. The planners have thought of everything to make the city as self-sufficient as possible including shopping malls, theatres and sports complexes in addition to facilities (contained in a separate structure) for power generation, heating and waste recycling.

Apart from offering an almost limitless space for development, such subterranean development has many more attractive ecological advantages over traditional forms of housing. It is less obtrusive than high rise development and therefore favourable in environmentally sensitive areas. Land above the complex can be set aside for parkland and recreational use. In towns or cities where pollution levels are high, air can be filtered through air ducts in the roof of an underground housing or industrial complex.

Alice City is a radical concept; born from the response to the chronic lack of space along Japan's overcrowded coastlines and cities. Although the shortage of building space in many of the world's cities is not as severe as in Japan, it raises some important issues that may need to be addressed in the future. In recent years, Brown Field sites (areas that have previously been used for industrial use - essentially wasteland) have fulfilled the demand for land to develop out-of-town shopping units, cinemas, office parks and housing estates. The number of available sites will inevitably dwindle in the future and the ecological question of building on environmentally sensitive areas will be raised, as the population grows.

Championing the environmental cause of recycling, Earthship Biotecture have designed underground dwellings which utilise many of the by-products of our consumerist society such as tyres, cans, glass, plastic bottles, paper and cardboard. The huts, as they call them, are designed in modular units so that they can be added to according to your own requirements. Making the process of building a home look as straight forward as buying a piece of flat pack furniture, the units can be ordered direct from their website.

Concrete, with its reputation for blighting historical or environmentally sensitive areas can also be fashioned to blend in with its surroundings. In architect Lloyd Turner's home,(pictured left) it has been sprayed over large inflated shapes to allow the building to take on a curvaceous, organic form.The result is a building that fits in effortlessly with the contours of the site. So much so, it almost becomes invisible. Which means that the home has a unique difference between conventional forms of housing. Far from acting as a visual statement of the owner's wealth or status, it is more unassuming and fit for purpose. In an age of minimalist design, with its philosophy of paring down to the bare essentials, getting back to nature seems the obvious way forward.

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Doug Harris and John Reardon