yes Raoul, they seem even more alien-inspired than the traditional ones...
You know what? I'm not sure I like these. Firstly, I think that this is, to a certain extent, trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist. I think that electricity pylons are unusual, for industrial infrastructure put out in the middle of nowhere, in that they often don't look all that bad. There's often a certain, monumental 'giant striding across the landscape' feel to them, an attractive and sometimes starkly beautiful anthropomorphism.
These pylons seem to be trying to imitate, by contrast, the forms of trees and wind-carved rock and ice. This might actually work pretty well, except when you line them up, they're clearly all the same. One of these, by itself, might be quite attractive, but a rank of them looks... a little creepy actually. Clearly artificial and oddly off-kilter. From some angles they resemble a dancer standing, agonisingly, on point for hours and hours. From others they seem to stoop, as if weighed under by a heavy load, and call to mind a column of refugees trying to lug their remaining worldly goods through a landscape of desolation.
So, I'm not really a fan of this.
I don't like 'em either.
Silly and wholly impractical design wankery, much like the other nonsense to be found on Arphenotype's annoying and hilariously pretentious website.
*harrumph*
But a thought-provoking post nonetheless, Homie :)
Pylons as NZ culture:
The mind no more delights in simple heroics
The mind no more delights in simple heroics,
preferring evening and a slender glaze fastened
on macrocarpas, fast on the flying field
the hangars curled uncouth, the asphalt strip cooled
solemn and alone.
Remembering two people single in tastes whom frenzy
drew into her hands and shredded without
any patent reasoning,
my mind no longer pleased with eloquent manouvers [sic]
with decorations, flights or words for military actions
returns to browse on paddocks, on the stipple
of hawthorne and holly, on a melancholy company.
Hedges and macrocarpas are what we understand
and find familiar: even uprooted trees
have more compassion than the broken geometry
the frayed mainplanes, stripped fuselage
of aircraft in salvage sections.
Remembering two people young in the babbling city
both keen from a country town and by their time
betrayed, I see across the westering light
metrical the parade of pylons moving north,
see power stretched over the paddocks not
to destroy but produce;
from inland rivers to known harbours
the murmuring lines flowing.
Violence has been a necessary shadow
lain across beds where this pair could not couple
(and he went down near Norway and the girl
was killed by accident here.)
But these not ritual deaths may still assure
how, under the stretch of power, the soil remains
while here flanked road unreels those steady symbols
that, as permanent values, move through stress and action
where beyond, clean, hard and durable,
the pylons lean against clouds like harvest stooks.
Kendrick Smithyman: Poems Written in War Time, 1942-45
Love that poem, Ed.
Nice poem, sucky pylons
Can't we put the wires underground and mark them instead of crapping up the landscape?
"Can't we put the wires underground..."
Apparently it costs a lot more (maybe 10 times as much) and maintenance is 2 to 4 times as much. Which would all go on my 'lectric bill.
But that is likely still less than the cost of those sucky looking "aramid-fibre-matrix bounded with eco resin" (!) towers.
Quit the pile on.
Wire you being such a dim bulb?
Too pointy. Could they make the pylons look like deer all facing the same direction?
Could they make the pylons look like deerpink flamingoes all facing the same direction?
Hoooray for pink flamingos!!!!!
Definitely, giant flamingoes works better than giant deer.
But I'm thinking, Muffler Men. And they could be all facing the same direction.
deerpink flamingoes all facing the same direction?