Icelandic Company Designs Human Pylons 142
Lanxon writes "An architecture and design firm called Choi+Shine has submitted a design for the Icelandic High-Voltage Electrical Pylon International Design Competition which proposes giant human-shaped pylons carrying electricity cables across the country's landscape, reports Wired. The enormous figures would only require slight alterations to existing pylon designs, says the firm, which was awarded an Honorable mention for its design by the competition's judging board. It also won an award from the Boston Society of Architects Unbuilt Architecture competition."
Yeah, they look cool but.... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the same as the gravity powered lamp (http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/20/1446256). It is a good idea that looks cool (cool enough to win awards) but has major drawbacks which make it completely impracticable to build.
Pylons typically have four large legs widely spaced apart for good reasons. Reducing them to two and making them very narrow isn't a good thing (TM). They also typically have 6 arms so as to keep the cost per cable down and each different design has to go through a lot of testing to ensure it can cope with the loads.
Nice blue sky thinking but an engineer hasn't been anywhere near the plans. If you want to give me an award, I to can come up with a nice pretty picture of a car that runs on one fried egg per 1000 miles. It's a nice sound bite but just as impossible to build.
missing something? (Score:4, Insightful)
Reading TFA (I know, I know...) I'm not sure if it's a design contest to _actually_ build the thing or simply to draw something nice to sell to a news agency and fill empty time in tv shows.
BTW, looking at the photos my first thought was "traditional pylons doesn't need chains to maintain verticallity"
Do it!! (Score:3, Insightful)
If they do the real job effectively, and don't cost too much more, they should do it. In fact, I'd like to see these worldwide. If human-shaped ones don't have enough legs, then animal-shaped ones might be good alternative (dinosaurs? dogs? dragons?).
Today's pylons do the job, but let's face it, they're ugly. If we have to dot our landscapes with pylons, we should at least make them interesting.
Re:In 3000 years.. (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of people like to make this claim that in a few thousand years society will have forgotten its ancestry and it will seem so ancient and primitive and confusing.
While obviously we won't seem as technologically advanced, I have a hard time as thinking of ancient societies as primitive. While their technology wasn't advanced their society isn't all that different from todays. There's an upper and a lower class - a work force and a ruling force - I mean we won't get into the complexities of politics or anything - but even people who think ancient greek religion is dead are actually half wrong: If you've ever read a horrorscope you have encountered a reminance of ancient greek society. All the zodiacs are based upon greek mythology, and a lot of greek mythology is based on the stars which still hold signifigant influence in that zodiac culture.
The main difference between now and then is that a lot more people have put emphasis on historians. Before the 1800's there really wasn't such a thing as "Archaeologists" - there were "grave robbers" who would break into tombs and sell the valuables but nothing in the interest of preserving history. (Just as a side note, thats why King Tut's Tomb was such a big deal, the first undisturbed tomb of a pharaoh, with valuables and everything still in tact). But now we have Libraries, Museums, historical conservation acts, basically a whole set of society in line with preserving our history. Yes - there WERE libraries in ancient times, but they were nothing like the libraries we have today. Specifically that libraries were not a public resource, only the aristocracy could use the library (both physically and by law, I mean illegal to enter the library if you don't have permission but if you didn't have permission you were probably illiterate anyways). Anyways, since this age of historical preservation has come about, we haven't really "puzzled" over much of society anymore. There are a few small quirks here and there; debates on how they erected the pyramids, how far back "writing" goes, etc etc. But much of it is just 2 widely accepted answers that keep going back and forth on who is right.
So I guess what I'm trying to say is, 3000 years from now, they won't be going "How did they have electricity back then?" - because we have MANY records of how Benjamin Franklin flew a kite in 1752, and that really sparked development on it. Whereas it was difficult to have the historical records from 1 library survive the test of time way back when, this new fangled internet thing has caused the spread of information so great that the redundancy on our data is so huge that even if every piece of paper is burned and Wikipedia goes down - there are still thousands of documents from every junior high school student that the information is preserved in some form or another. And quite honestly - the sources that AREN'T big are usually the ones with more accurate information. (Every king and pharaoh and emperor claims that they were great - however the accounts from a peasant or soldier are better indicators of how well a nation-state was doing).
Re:Yeah, they look cool but.... (Score:4, Insightful)
These almost certainly wouldn't be impossible to build, in fact they don't look like they'd even be that difficult to engineer. The more practical question is how much more would they cost compared to a more traditional tower, and does society see a value in spending that extra money. Just because something is utilitarian doesn't mean that it shouldn't look nice. While a straightforward steel bridge can certainly have an inherent beauty to it, I'm glad that I see many different designs in my travels. Helps keep the world a more interesting place.
Re:In 3000 years.. (Score:3, Insightful)
I know, I know.
I just hear a lot of people who DO make that argument as though it holds some water. "We didn't understand society 2000 years ago, so 2000 years from now they won't understand us either!"
It just annoys when I see it and I couldn't help myself. I mean I kind of knew that you were making the joke and my post wasn't really directed at you, it was just something that came to mind when I read it. I really should get back to work instead of writing long posts on /.
Less is more (Score:5, Insightful)
The towers of the George Washington Bridge [wikipedia.org] were originally to be given a faux masonry facing.
To our great good fortune that never happened:
"The George Washington Bridge over the Hudson is the most beautiful bridge in the world. Made of cables and steel beams, it gleams in the sky like a reversed arch. It is blessed. It is the only seat of grace in the disordered city. It is painted an aluminum color and, between water and sky, you see nothing but the bent cord supported by two steel towers. When your car moves up the ramp the two towers rise so high that it brings you happiness; their structure is so pure, so resolute, so regular that here, finally, steel architecture seems to laugh. The car reaches an unexpectedly wide apron; the second tower is very far away; innumerable vertical cables, gleaming against the sky, are suspended from the magisterial curve which swings down and then up. The rose-colored towers of New York appear, a vision whose harshness is mitigated by distance." (Le Corbusier, "When the Cathedrals were White")
Re:Yeah, they look cool but.... (Score:4, Insightful)
If you look at the pictures, they have lots of guy wires keeping them stable, a system which would work with even a single foot.
They also typically have 6 arms so as to keep the cost per cable down
The pictures show 4 attachment points at hands and elbows. Top of head would be an obvious fifth point, and there is no reason the wires can be just as widely spaced as on a traditional pylon.
The only real drawbacks are these require additional material ti build and additional setup costs, but the net result looks more like art than a boring series of towers.
Re:In 3000 years.. (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you defeated your own point.
You just listed 17 forms of storage, which is merely a fraction of what's available. Further, information replication technology being what it is, it's not like 2000 years ago when it took a month+ to scribe a book.
I'll grant you, it's a question of quantity over quality, but the results are the same; records from our society will last far longer than from previous societies.
Re:Yeah, they look cool but.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Actaully they have both and it just depends. Here in the States, I see more four-legged power-line structures than I do the single point types. But I have seen them. Anyway the point is, the GP clearly doesn't realize there is more than one way to make a structure that is sturdy.
Re:Yeah, they look cool but.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yeah, they look cool but.... (Score:3, Insightful)
I have it on fairly good authority that structures of this shape are capable of standing upright.
Re:In 3000 years.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Although I don't have any data to back it up for sure, I'm willing to bet that way more books were printed in the past 50 years than in the previous 5000. Millions of books are still printed every year, and that will continue for the foreseeable future. The "paperless office" only exists in a few isolated cases, paper is still ubiquitous in most of what people do. Even if all our digital data vanished tomorrow, contemporary civilization has left an enormous paper trail, and I would expect there to be plenty for future historians to sift through.
Let's take this one step further (Score:3, Insightful)