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Icelandic Company Designs Human Pylons
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."
... archeologists 3000 years from now will puzzle over their purpose. Obviously such a primitive society couldn't have had electricity.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
... Terran-shaped pylons! That way you can disguise one in their base until you're ready and then bam! warp in dudes.
Or just carrying a lot of voltage on the third phase?
Must construct additional pylons.
If we have to have things like high-power lines, we might as well make them as beautiful and mesmerizing as possible. I can't understand why we make so much without giving a nod to the beauty we have the capacity to create. I also like these a LOT more than the winner (http://www.dezeen.com/2009/03/30/high-voltage-transmisison-line-towers-by-arphenotype/), but that's just my opinion.
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.
wot no sig
What a retarded use of human resources.
Send your spendthrift head of state this
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"
Wow, and I thought clown dolls were freaky when I was a kid. Can't wait for kids to wake up screaming that the giant electrical skeletons are coming to get them!
They should just get Disney to subsidize them & build a bunch of these:
http://atlasobscura.com/place/mickey-pylon
All they would need now is one holding a sword aloft, and the words will flow from the mouths of geeks everywhere: "I have the Power!!!".... :-)
So giant robots will not be scary at all compared with metal towers? What a marvellous idea. The Eiffel tower is due for an anthropomorphic makeover any day now. The colossus of Paris perhaps.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
Note to self, don't invite Don Quixote to Iceland.
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.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
Would you like to buy some Icelandic Honey Pylons? Oh please! We're bally cold and there's nothing but bloody fish to eat!
This is the NSA, we're gonna geet U h@x0r5! Also, what is a h@x0r5?
I for one welcome our new terrain-conquering giant pylon overlords.
Didn't you people ever play starcraft??
Apparently, Iceland does indeed require additional pylons. No word on if they need moar vespene gas, however.
Deathrace 2000!
now that would have been worth RTFA.
Must... construct... additional...
ARRGGHH
The towers of the George Washington Bridge 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")
confused hippies will assume the burning man festival has been moved to iceland and multiplied by 1,000. they will proceed to inadvertently bring down the entire country's electrical infrastructure during the namesake ritual of the closing of their festivities. iceland will discover they can successfully drive the hippies back into the sea with the playing of bjork music over loudspeakers. but the smoke from the burning human pylons will result in europe closing down their entire airpace for a week
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Humanoid statues can hold cables with their elbows, shoulders, top of their head, middle of their chest etc.
Not just with their hands - like real humans.
And if you think that humanoid pylons are impractical - get a load of these ugly things. No pun intended.
And then try imagining servicing one of those nightmares.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
They designed human Cylons? Have televised science fiction dramas taught us nothing?? ... oh.
Wow, the Boston Society of Architects Unbuilt Architecture. What an honor. What's next? An Academy Award for "Best Unmade Motion Picture".
Um, has anybody checked if the Easter Island Statues had signs of carrying power cables? That answer might clear up a lot of riddles.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
you must construct additional pylons!
did you forget to take your meds?
My fear with those human looking pylons is that the electricity will be connected wrong, and in some freak incident, the damn things will come alive and start stepping on people.
But it's sure would be cool as shit to see that Irrational Fear come to pass also.
Nevermind me.... I'm silly.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
If you make every pylon different, you lose the ability to mass-produce the component parts. When the time comes to erect them, the assembly crews are dealing with different parts and different drawings each time, so there is no "learning from experience". And each separate design will need to be tested individually for wind resistance, structural integrity, ice loading, etc.
Yeah, they look cool, but the downsides are numerous, and most likely a project-killer.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
We should make them like hentai porn.
1 - What all those heads were used for on Easter Island.
2 - How they moved the heads.
Det. Thorn: You tell everybody. Listen to me, Hatcher. You've gotta tell them! Soylent Pylon is people! We've gotta stop them somehow!
you know it is. quite elaborate.
Read radical news here
Those look like plastic vomit oozing over the remains of an umbrella accident.
"Shape of each one varying according to its longitude and latitude" is pretentiouspeak for "bigger ones would look different than the small ones or otherwise it would fall down and break into million pieces".
Meaning that they've even managed to fail their own "adaptability of nature" blurb - each tower would HAVE TO BE uniquely designed and prefabricated.
So much for adaptability. Or nature.
And good luck replacing or fixing one in a jiffy next time a volcano decides to erupt and causes earthquakes, floods and your run-of-the-mill volcanic eruptions.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
And just think of all the Japanese tourists coming to see them.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
This seems like something best left to the world of Sim City.
They'll scare off the Daleks.
Have gnu, will travel.
Why not shape them like the famous and popular Eiffel Tower?.....oh wait
Table-ized A.I.
. It's also quite an upgrade for their power system. Iceland produces *enormous* amounts of electricity from their hydroelectric plants, so there's always a need for more power lines from the interior, where the reservoirs are located, to the coast, where the aluminum smelters are being built. I was reading a discussion of electrical systems in a small museum in Vik (I believe) where they mentioned that until the 1960's much of Iceland had single-wire power distribution -- not single phase, mind you, but just a single wire, that carried high voltage, and used the earth itself as the current return path. Any building with power outside of the few cities had its own monster variable transformer so the people living there could adjust the in-house voltage to the value they needed, to account for voltage drop along the supply line.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
They simply couldn't figure a way out of wire-frame preview mode and cooked up a good story. My boss does this all the time.
Table-ized A.I.
Obviously, Iceland is hoping to host the next one.
After reading the headline, I was thinking "what an odd use for their excess population".
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Couldn't each pylon be designed to look like a pole dancer?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I'd love it if they used this design for the Beauly to Denny power line, if only to see how many of them get set on fire. There are two groups of Scots that might do so... those opposed to the visual intrusion of pylons in otherwise unspoilt scenery, and those who got lost on the way to the Wicker Man festival.
Personally I quite like them. They look like a cross between Rez and Thunderbirds.
After getting past the thought of "been there, done that with Battlestar Galactica", my next thought was of the orange cones that are put on roads to guide traffic and are constantly getting run over. They're also getting constantly run over in driver's ed classes. I couldn't imagine why some sick bastard wanted make those cones look like humans unless he really hated highway maintenance workers.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
Those plyons won't bring back your damned apples!
Choi + Shine is not an Icelandic company! I wonder where the heck the submitter got that. Their website puts their address at
I should have filed a patent or something.
# (/.);;
- : float -> float -> float =
See: "Joke".
Reference ancient Egypt and the finds regarding electricity.
The ancient Egyptians performed some impressive feats of engineering (exactly how they went about building the pyramids is still up for debate). They also had good insights in many sciences, but electricity is not part of it.
Some battery-ish bottles have been found near Baghdad, these were extremely weak and just might have been used for gilding or metal-plating. As for the nutcases who claim that all the "schoolbook experts" are wrong and the Egyptians had what we know as electricity and electric light, well... the nutcases are wrong. See this article for a thorough refutation based on numerous impossibilities with the hypothesis.
I agree that their stone reliefs will last longer than any computer, though :)
Are you a grammar Nazi? I'm trying to improve my English; please correct my errors!
There is a reason pylons are boring: It is extremely hard to come up with a design that actually works, i.e. is resilient under adverse conditions. The current designs are the results of more than a century of experimentation. Deviating from them in such an extreme fashion would require a few decades of testing for each individual design and with several hundred, geographically diverse, instances. Anything less would be inviting frequent catastrophic failure in a piece of very critical infrastructure.
This was done by designers with not even the slightest clue of how safe engineering works.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
"NOT ENOUGH POWER - BUILD MORE PYLONS!". ?? Those sneaky Protoss - Terran shaped pylons won't fool us!!
You must construct creepier pylons!
Our gateway has no power... You must build a pylon nearby so that our forces can come to this world.
Entropius, you're my new hero.