My Twitter feed is full of promoted tweets for some mad person's* idea to build a mirrored city in the Saudi desert that will look like this:
Here are some screenshots for which some graphic artist no doubt made lots of money:
You know what it reminds me of? The over-the-top illustrations for O'Neill space colonies in the late 70's and 80's:
And I would say the chance of it being actually built is about the same...
* (likely an architect who has gone on a bender after being told by a Saudi Crown Prince to dream up something different in which money is no object)
3 comments:
This is akin to the utopian spirit that gets behind pure communism, pure capitalism, anarcho-capitalism, veganism, and net zero carbon. Only patient utopianism should be considered. Once you get this impatient utopianism, you just have to take the cold shower, check yourself, and go about explaining schemes where we live a little better every year but don't try and save the planet all at once.
The project is 1000 times too big. Ten times too high, ten times too wide, ten times too long. If we allow for the length, then okay its 100 times too big, and its made out of the wrong materials. The materials its made out of would strip the world economy of resources.
Communist undertakings that are not pure infrastructure and defence should be catalytic. They should be a catalyst that go for decades, that you kind of hope the private sole trader community will eventually leap-frog.
Supposing we took the train line that the Ghan drives along. Supposing we then wanted to revive stone building. Use computer information systems and software to be able to put together largely stone based infrastructure. With a very slow twenty year start we might then have a mature supply chain and a skilled labour force and then you can take this process, excruciating in its slowness, and speed things up, only gaining in cost-effectiveness.
The rocks are POTENTIALLY the most durable and cheapest building material up to 5 storeys. Cross-laminated timber maybe twice that. You need the train line first since rocks are heavy and you don't want to be fighting gravity. The rocks can be generated by way of Krater-Gartens (Crater gardens) built either side of the track. The first building will take years to build cheaply. The second less long, then faster and cheaper each time if and only if this is a patient undertaking and if and only if its all done out of surplus budgets, state, federal and local. Got to be surplus budgets. Marx was a good economist but an extremist. Keynes was completely full of shit.
While the buildings would be stone, the air-conditioning might well come from shade-cloth pyramids where a single sprinkler can cool down the buildings and the air underneath.
Anyway thats a potential outline. This monstrosity that would ruin the Saudis if they stick with it, should be there for purely didactic purposes. It has a bunch of concepts that purport to solve all the problems of urban living. But its too big, it can't be done, so it shouldn't be attempted in reality. Once they get that train-line in, and its the train-line which is the key resource, they should then come out with a new design that is scaled down at least two orders of magnitude.
Just get that train line in and provide for passive water desalination. Then its time to rethink the whole thing. Because you can't be daydreaming about changing the world with construction gigantism. Change the world with flat rail and canals? Sure but thats a many hundreds of years project. But this thing really is madness. Even if we get with, and agree with, the excellent concepts involved.
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