Scritch, scritch, scritch. The faint sound of William Katavolos etching his imaginings onto paper is audible over the whoosh and thump of pumps moving thousands of gallons of water through his lair at Brooklyn's Pratt Institute--a concrete-block subbasement where steam pipes hiss overhead and the air has the faint chlorine whiff of swimming pools. Katavolos's felt-tip marker is scratching a handy piece of notebook paper, shaping pipes and arches, pools and columns, in broad pen strokes.
Katavolos can't explain anything important without a pen and a piece of paper. Any kind of paper will do: yellow, white, or lined, notebook or scrap. As he draws, he talks: of social movements, vast planned communities, surprises and revolutions. His ambitions are big, like his circle of acquaintances, which has extended from physicists J. Robert Oppenheimer and Richard Feynman to abstract expressionist painters Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell. His conversation shifts easily from Einstein's theories to Einstein himself ("a big man; people seem to think he was small, for some reason").
Architecture, he says, is on the verge of an epochal change in materials, engineering techniques, and fundamental concepts that will make the buildings of the next century as different from our own as skyscrapers are from Greek temples. The new buildings, he says, will be "organic"--made of soft gels and fibers genetically engineered to be as yielding and flexible as flesh. He imagines floating cities that collapse in a hurricane and then spring back up when the wind dies down; he envisions floors that sprout chairs perfectly shaped to the bodies of the people who need them. "There have been only two eras in architecture," he declares. "The Greco- Roman was one; Gothic was the other; organicism is the next." It will be an era, he says, of buildings that swell and shrink like lungs, where wastewater is forced through filters like blood through kidneys, where the mass of a house is a warm fluid pushed by a heartlike pump.
Katavolos is one of architecture's visionaries, men and women who are sketching a more ecologically sound and aesthetically appealing future- -sometimes on the backs of phone bills and napkins, sometimes in wood and cement and plastic. They are individuals like the late Buckminster Fuller, creator and apostle of the geodesic dome; they are groups like the New Alchemy Institute, which brought together environmentally compatible buildings, machinery, and agriculture on a 12-acre experimental site on Cape Cod. Their efforts have even spawned a new field--biomimetics--whose premise is that humanity can create better materials and structures by understanding and imitating the way spiders make their silk, or oysters their shells.
Katavolos's approach goes one step further. He says the best way to learn from nature is to use its favorite building material: water. That's why his 15-by-40-foot basement research lab is filled with domes and arches and columns made of a little plastic, a little wood, and a lot of H2O. The structures are pieces of the kind of full-size home he hopes to construct soon according to his "hydronic" principles. "What I'm trying to do is develop a system that is, first of all, an organic machine, with parts that are like a heart, a lung, a liver, a kidney. Then I'm trying to make it work using only a really good pump to do everything--pump water through the walls, get it heated, transfer the hot water where it's needed, force used water through filters, and so on." Katavolos says we already know enough to make large, useful buildings out of little more than fresh water, and to design entire communities around reservoirs that, in addition to supplying the building material, will grow fish and water vegetable gardens.
