Fly-By-Light
"Giselle watches the tiltrotor commuter shuttles carrying the air-networkers, while in the distance airships circle Airlander with London sightseers." (picture caption to "A Fly-By-Light Architecture", from Audacity.org's "Sustaining Architecture in the Anti-Machine Age", again)This is like shooting fish in a barrel, but here goes... the Fly-By-Light group propose a ginormous 400 metre high Futurist transport hub ("Airlander") looming irridescently over Charing Cross, complete with a swarm of V-22 Osprey tiltrotors flying low along the river to and from commuter hubs. But has our Giselle actually heard an Osprey, not perhaps the quietest of aircraft on earth? Or wondered about their per-passenger-mile energy budgets?
I'd accuse the authors of taking the piss if I didn't feel I was being pissed on in turn….
Labels: books, britain, culture, politics, technology
2 Comments:
www.audacity.org: Good grief, that's one of the worst put together sites I've ever seen in my life. It's barely navigable!
I'd like to know what they are about (I think) but anyone who writes about development and architecture of all things and then hides its in this bizarre heap of circa 1995 animated gifs and other such rubbish doesn't really expect to be taken seriously, do they?
I think they're deadly serious, and I think they have their hearts in the right place, but I could be wrong. The book's almost as bad as the web site — a real dog's breakfast of 1990's visual stylage (a word that means so much more than "styling") and enthusiastically-dreadful writing. Urgh. The effect's both impenetrable and quite transparent.
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