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Some time ago, I came across the artwork of the Italian artist Annibale Sicionolfi, and I am quite drawn to them, especially on how ecology and architecture are tied together. Art gallery in this link.
The artwork is supposedly set in the future, but what point--or points--of departure would I need to make all of this the architecture of 2022 instead?
1957
https://www.onverticality.com/blog/frank-lloyd-wright-mile-high-skyscraper
This is the year Frank Lloyd Wright proposes his Mile High skyscraper. In the new timeline that leads to the desired gargantuan buildings, people do not wuss out. They build the Mile High and then the party starts. Everyone needs their own Mile High. It is only a matter of time before other upstart cities, seeking to distinguish themselves, build comparably huge structures including the Super Fat Thing, the Building with Hole, and the Banyan Pit among others. Competition between buildings supplants war and sports as modes of competition and taxpayers gleefully line up to fund bizarrely impractical but groin-numbingly awesome Sicionolfiesque structures.
Then, like the tulip craze, it is over. People build practical smaller buildings. Time passes, and weeds grow on the great towers. Some of them are weed trees. The citizenry stare at the decaying hulks and wonder, groins unnumbed, at the crazy urges of their ancestors.
People still dig Lava Waterfountain building, though, and always will.
"How and where to start seeding the necessary conditions that will allow Annibale Siconolfi's cities to develop by 2022," is what you seem to me to be asking. And are you expecting to build these on Earth?
The ecologically-positive "look" of most of these city scapes portrayed seems deceiving. While they feature a lot greenery, so did the hanging gardens of Babylon, home to an early despot, Nebuchadnezzar
You would need an authoritarian dictatorship starting well before 1950. There were several then, that had conditions allowed them to continue, would've been well-placed to continue with their grand building programs. But you can go back as far as the Egyptians 4000+/- BC who had their nation-wide system to build the pyramids involving a lot of forced labor and untold riches in the hands of the ruler class.
The Siconolfi cities look like they need more materials to build than most countries can legally acquire. You'd need more wars and more colonial take-overs. Taxes sky-high and poorly-paid labor, as AI and robotics have only barely got started right now. Getting materials from off-planet, say the Moon, wouldn't be economically feasable.
Even if you begin the industrial revolution 500 years earlier, the pollution levels would've brought on climate change with its weather extremes earlier. As it is, in tropical climates where cyclones are common, with the technology of today, buildings are limited to ten floors above ground.
It is already architecture of 2022, there are several examples of building embedding trees in their structure.
To remain in Italy, the famous Bosco Verticale is one of the them
Bosco Verticale (Vertical Forest) is a pair of residential towers in the Porta Nuova district of Milan, Italy, between Via Gaetano de Castillia and Via Federico Confalonieri near Milano Porta Garibaldi railway station. They have a height of 111 metres (364 ft) and 76 metres (249 ft) and contain more than 900 trees (approximately 550 and 350 in the first and second towers, respectively) on 8,900 square metres (96,000 sq ft) of terraces. Within the complex is an 11-storey office building; its facade does not include plants.
The towers were designed by Boeri Studio (Stefano Boeri, Gianandrea Barreca and Giovanni La Varra). It also involved input from horticulturalists and botanists.
The building was inaugurated in October 2014
