SPECIAL FEATURES
Sunday, December 26, 2004
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By Jim Pollock
The first thing downtown Des Moines planners and developers need to write on their 2005 calendars is “take a trip to Curitiba, Brazil.”
There they would find the last missing piece of our downtown housing puzzle. The one thing that will lure the hesitant resident and at the same time put us on every top 10 list in America for architecture, housing and general coolness.
In Curitiba, the people who decide our city’s future would find a cylindrical apartment building 11 stories tall, with each floor consisting of a single apartment.
And each apartment rotates.
Yes. By voice command, you can start your residence spinning slowly at the leisurely rate of one revolution per hour – the old Marxist ideal applied to architecture.
Craving sunlight? Curious about the storm rolling in? Someone you’d like to spy on, perhaps? Just go for a spin.
The key to happiness, of course, is that each tenant gets his or her very own floor to command. You definitely don’t want to argue with your neighbors about who gets to watch the sunset. The bickering would never cease, and neither would the turning.
Of course, we’ve had the same technology in Des Moines since 1972, right up on top of the Holiday Inn Downtown. But nobody gets to live in that futuristic saucer, and just about the only time it gets used is for wedding receptions. According to a hotel official, about 90 percent of the people who book the disk ask for it to be set in motion. Which makes you wonder, are there really 10 percent of us who would turn down a chance to rotate? Is it motion sickness they fear, or do they imagine the wedding cake flying off the table?
If we had such a marvel on a nice, high spot in Des Moines (like the Holiday Inn location), you could select a view of the state Capitol, the downtown skyline, a night game at Principal Park or maybe your hometown grain elevator without leaving your recliner. This would be true on the upper stories, that is. If you lived on the first floor, your choices might be more like: tree, parking lot, shrubs, some guy grilling hamburgers. Rental rates definitely would vary by altitude.
Curitiba is a city of nearly 2 million (isn’t it amazing how many huge cities we provincials have never heard of?) that apparently is not a surprising location for such a creative, progressive structure.
At a global summit of mayors and urban planners, it was praised as the most innovative city in the world.
For example, in Curitiba you can exchange recyclable garbage for bus tokens. Once at the bus stop, you wait inside a clear tube, and when the bus pulls up, a section of the bus opens, the tube opens, and everybody steps off and on – no narrow stairs to negotiate and no waiting for the person ahead of you to fumble for money.
Even if nobody goes for this rotating residence idea, maybe our planners and developers really should pay Curitiba a visit.
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