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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?
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
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!
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)
What a retarded use of human resources.
So you've never ever bought something because it looked good? Thank goodness people like you don't have their way all the time. The world would look like Soviet Russia if they did.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
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
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!
. 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.
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.