Tsvetan Toshkov, the visionary with his City in the Sky

Contemporary sensibility and social models of community, economics and life have not yet lived the thrust of Heroic Materialism. The thrust given to us by the visions of engineer Winkel back in 1840, applied in an illustrious way by the engineer Eiffel, combined with the modern capitalism triumph in cities like New York, those visions still generate ideas and creative fervor.  What’s more - CarlosSlim Helu – one of the most influential people in the world, supports the view that our civilization future is in the even stronger urban concentration and economic and social infrastructure creation. 

I do not agree because I think that it does not reflect current opportunities of the information society and the increased passion of technology coupled middle class to own quality personal and biologically conditioned life. I believe that 19th and 20th century technologies having given rise to the social doctrines and collective obsessions, presuppose physical contact in the limited by mechanical technology production. The model of aggregation, born from this need, represents an extremely limited, antibiotic community of identical specializing in narrow professional, economic and social frameworks socialized individuals. Simply put - performance in a mechanized workshop from the 19th century is determined by the physical size of transmissions between different technological operations. On the other hand transport possibilities are a prerequisite for remoteness from the workplace and home. Тhe rest of the public functions are accommodated in this functional framework.

Transport links limitations and the need and possibility to communicate form a specific production and economic efficiency, requiring physical accumulation of large groups of specialized individuals in a restricted functional space. High scrapers and concrete-block complexes represent this thinking and level of technology.  This city life model combined with the desire for clean nature environment is the basis for visions of the future of the urban environment. 

That is exactly the project of an extremely beautiful living structure of Tsvetan Toshkov and his concept City in the Sky. I share with you my admiration.

Me personally, I would prefer lying on the lawn and working on the computer. My activity results are somewhere on the globe. The network is my office, my collaborators don’t need to scrab adjacent desks in the same office. I believe we can and we should  return to our natural environment thanks to the information technologies and thus recover damages from Heroic Materialism and social engineering born by it.