JF Ptak Science Books Post 1434
A continuing thread on this blog (this post is a good example) has surfaced unusual thing that have been found floating in the sky in prints, photographs and ideas: there have been "extra Earths", holes leading to heaven, massive stone tetrahedra, swimming pools, hangars, airports, downloaded aliens from extra moons, flying Woolworth buildings, and much else (not limited to 19th century balloon-hoisted horses, here). Today's unusual thing to be found in the sky is the suburbs.
The Romanian architect Harlan Georgesco came up with an idea to prevent suburban sprawl from making one city out of the land from San Diego to San Francsico--put the suburbs in the sky. The story is in the wonderful Unbuilt America by Sky and Stone under the subheading "Relocation of Los Angeles", where they quote Mr. Georgesco saying that the sprawl of a plan to develop 300x300 foot "horizontal plots" in a larger scheme of an endless horizon of such housing could be made into "vertical tracts".
The vertical tracts of 300x300 feet (90,000 square feet or about two acres) oe chunks thereof would be suspended via "steel in tension" (giving the Golden Gate Bridge as an example of this system) in a structure 640 feet tall, which is labeled as a "medium high rise"). (I should point out that the WTC was 208' square.)
Mr. Georgesco's proposal called for a total reorganization of dwelling life in California--he was thinking of housing 5 million people in this way. The little squares on his map (below) shows the emplacement of colonies like this vertical city.
It seems to me that as a futurist the architect's plans contained an abundantly fatal flaw in assuming the construction of suburban houses on a platform 600' tall. To be concerned with waste by stacking cul de sacs one on top of one another seems to miss the point, some.
Notes:
I would be curious to know about Mr. Georgesco's life in Romania during the 1939-1945 period. He certainly became successful and accomplished, though the period in Romania was--lightly put--complicated. Starting out the war as a neutral, Romania moved quickly to be an ally of the Nazis, participating in Barbarosa, and over the next 3 years lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers, and civilians. And of course there was a participation in the Holocaust. By 1944 the King of Romania was able to lead a revolt and Romania joined the war on the Allied side, declaring war on Germany. They were almost immediately overtaken by the Soviets, who would stay for quite a long time. When the Soviets arrived, they basically "took" the Romanian army (of 130,000 men or so) back to the Soviet Union--the vast majority never to return. Mr. Georgesco left in '47.
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