Woebot
Well-known member
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pointful 🔫
These cityscapes resemble computer renderings cos that's what they are, i suppose, just in the medium of bricks and mortar (or flatpack or whatever).
I've long thought that all design is merging into a single shape: phones, cars, trainers, even buildings all looking more and more the sameinteresting point sufi.
in a similar vein i'm always intrigued to notice shapes in car design which are a function of software tools. and as a historical flourish i should add that the "bezier" tool for defining curves was designed by monsieur bezier to help him specify the curves of the renault cars he was designing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bézier_curve
Controversially, I find The Shard (from a distance, at least) a beautiful building.
Although the great modernist works appeared after the First World War, all the key ideas behind those works had been developed before it. The war removed the cold dead hands of inertia and tradition, and suddenly all these new ideas and values were free to run wild. I wonder if we will see a similar thing now? Will those previously existing but resisted ideas become mainstream after the pandemic?
Is this likely? After the Great Fire of London in 1666, there were grand schemes to rebuild the city in a smarter, saner, more elegant fashion...
These fine-minded plans came to nothing. Londoners couldn't wait for the planners to design this improved city and immediately rebuilt roads and buildings in the chaotic way they were before, more or less.
isn't it quite difficult to fill these buildings anyway? centre point and docklands were empty for years, shard was so empty there was a suggestion to move parliament there at one time.
anyway wren wanted to put a classical european street plan in place
View attachment 3387
more silly ideas here
but ultimately ownership of land won out
London is kind of a mess isn't it? No rigid geometrical plans and axes framing the city. You could argue that its layout reflects neoliberalism, decentralised and pluralist but ultimately run by business.