>The designers say the issue isn't necessarily one of cost, pointing out that their pylons are made out of the same material as a regular pylon, simply put together in a different way.
I feel compelled to point out that any "artistic" deviation from structural optimality will necessarily use more material to achieve the same sturdiness, and hence cost more. And when you have to put one every few hundred meters across a whole country, that's kind of a big deal.
>>any "artistic" deviation from structural optimality will necessarily use more material to achieve the same sturdiness, and hence cost more
A slavish adherence to this maxim condemns our age to a plague of depressing ugliness in our commercial and governmental structures
There are phrases for this, starting with "Penny Wise and Pound Foolish".
I have little doubt that the persistent lack of inspiration, or even whimsy, in architecture helps undermine our society's coherence. If no one builds anything of which we can collectively take pride and experience joy, where is the inspiration for cohesion?
There are myriad examples of wonderful government or commercial architecture from centuries ago. Centuries from now, will anybody GAF about any of today's structures?
We can do better, and it is more than worth it to do so.
Given a finite amount of dollars and materials, how much variation can there be in building something of structural soundness? Turns out a lot, at least in he video game :)
It's a combination of things, really. Underground is about twice as expensive as above-ground, harder to maintain and repair, and pretty much impossible to upgrade.
A lot of the medium-voltage stuff is already underground in some areas. All new 50kV-150kV stuff has been going underground for decades, and the stuff remaining above-ground just hasn't reached its replacement age yet. Despite its drawbacks, above-ground is unpopular enough that burying them is worth it.
However, the high-voltage stuff (220kV & 380kV) is still almost entirely above-ground. Those cables are extremely difficult to construct, and anything beyond a dozen miles or so simply isn't technically possible yet.
It's not going to cost 5-10x more to make the artistic design. And there are reasons beyond installation cost to avoid underground transmission -- maintenance is also way more expensive, and I believe it's also more fragile that way.
“Ian pointed out that whereas our culture openly invites us to be aware of birds and historic churches, it places no comparable emphasis on pylons, despite the fact that that they often rival, for ingenuity and beauty, many of the more established objects of our curiosity. He cited as an example Loch Awe in Scotland, a famously picturesque and romantic tourist destination dominated by the ruins of the fourteenth-century Kilchurn Castle, whose grounds are nevertheless crossed by a run of 400-kilowatt pylons linking the hydroelectric power station at Ben Cruachan with the Glasgow suburbs. On postcards of the loch and its castle, however, the electricity lines are almost invariably airbrushed out, so that the scenery pretends to a fictitious innocence, the bare hills and unsullied lake being symptomatic of what Ian (having grown increasingly garrulous under the influence of brandy) condemned as the garden-gnome mentality of sentimental Luddites.”
— The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work: t/c (Vintage International) by Alain De Botton
https://a.co/1CjMq1u
This is an unrelated tangent, but I'd like to point out the conventional and inaccurate use of Luddite to mean "generically against any kind of technology or 'progress'".
The Luddites were not anti-technology; they were labour activists. They smashed machines because it was their leverage over the owning class.
I was fully expecting cost or safety being an issue, but I did not expect this: (Specifically for the "Land of Giants" project.)
> A proposal in Norway faltered after a local mayor - spotting the visitor attraction potential of the structures - agreed they could be built in his town, as long as they weren't built anywhere else in the country.
Quite sad that alternative shaped (?) Pylons do exist, and some of them are really neat; yet are hampered by politics.
I think the harder you try, the more it becomes an eyesore. My favorite are Corten steel (a self protecting steel that rusts a nice natural red color) pylons personally... They just look "right" in a landscape, or at least as much as you can for humans planting wind turbines everywhere.
It's my understanding that weathering steels are avoided for structural applications, since while the corrosion behavior is usually pretty good, it can still be variable and unsatisfactory. There are a few high-profile cases of structures made from COR-TEN and similar that failed due to ineffective patination. It's a shame, since I agree that it does look nicer than most painted objects.
Work has continued in improving the alloy chemistry, so that it can be used for e.g. fencing without creating too many rust stains on nearby objects. One day we may be able to recreate the Delhi pillar alloy.
I agree. If you try to make a fancy design, you may draw more eyes to it, which defeats the purpose. If you really want to look at that hideous example from Hungary, you are weird. There are techniques, such as putting them halfway down, rather than on top of a ridge, to help them blend into the surroundings. But it's unlikely that you'll make them beautiful. Try, but not too hard maybe.
I can see how they have a kind of beauty in a laboratory or industrial plant or something.
But as part of nature? Set across an landscape otherwise made of plants and trees and hills?
For me, that's a million times no. I can't think of anything uglier or more jarring. The cold gray angular lattice skeleton feels like it couldn't be more opposite to all of the positive aesthetic qualities of nature.
I highly recommend a tour of your local electricity distribution substation, you will learn a lot about how the modern world operates. If you can visit one of the main power plants then that's even better.
I think they're ugly and unfortunate in the UK; in the parts of North America I've seen there's so much large visible infrastructure that they blend right in, it's a kind of 'where do you start' situation if you want to prettify them. I think there should just be some sensitivity to context, i.e. what we've already done to nature.
They really don't blend in. The ground around them is cleared of trees (of which there are many, everywhere in NA that I've lived) which makes them stick out like a sore thumb. For a time, I lived near the top of a hill, and the nearest pylon to my house has a honkin' bright flasher at the top. Usually, this wasn't an issue, but the park nearby would often get thick fog at night. Nothing like walking through a lovely foggy wooded park, pulsating with a bright omnipresent flash every 10 seconds.
Of course, it's better than a plane hitting the house in the fog.
The point of the colors is precisely to be highly visible. If you become incapacitated the last thing you want is to blend in with the surroundings. You might also notice that there's very few skiing outfits that are mostly white, or swimming suits that are mostly blue. To only reason someone would want to be more difficult to see is if they're trying to sneak up on someone.
People decry the loss of views in suburbs when a train might run next to the freeway. They hear train tracks and think ugly. But we can build sightly infrastructure that does not detract from the world’s most beautiful places.
Infrastructure can add to the landscape just as easily as it takes away from it. I've never understood the 'unspoilt beauty' types - 90% of the time the 'unspoilt' beauty they're talking about only exists because of human intervention. Rolling hills would look a lot different if they weren't used for agriculture or didn't have sheep occasionally cropping them.
It makes me wonder: all underground power lines are still laid by digging up the ground, laying them down, and then filling the dirt back in. Which is super-expensive. Right?
Are we trying to develop any technology for "microboring" in tunnels through dirt and clay, and maybe bedrock when occasionally necessary? E.g. just a two-inch diameter tube or something, that's even able to go underneath rivers and things? Solely for laying underground wires?
I don't follow trends for electrical lines, but directional drilling/boring is definitely a thing for fiber optic communications cabling, and trenchless pipe bursting is pretty common for sewer replacement projects.
Underground electrical lines are a lot harder to access for maintenance and monitoring though; that expense isn't going to go away if you install without a big trench. It's usually a good idea to ensure access above the underground run, and if you're going to clear the land to ensure access, it's not that big of an additional step to do traditional trenching for installation.
> I don't follow trends for electrical lines, but directional drilling/boring is definitely a thing for fiber optic communications cabling,
I run electrical work and sometimes use directional boring to run underground conduits, it really depends on the pathway your conduit is taking. It boils down to whichever costs less, digging and restoring two pits and directional boring, or ripping up and restoring a surface so you can trench and backfill. If it’s all green space, plowing/trenching wins every time. Once you start crossing sidewalks and driveways and so on, directional boring tends to be cheaper.
Directional boring exists but it’s even more expensive than trenching and backfilling. It’s typically only used when disturbing the concrete/asphalt/subsurface utilities and then restoring them is more expensive than directional boring.
I've wondered if there was some way to replace sidewalks with pre-cast sections that would allow for utility runs. Maybe something the size of septic tanks, with a removable lid that doubles as a sidewalk. I'm sure there are some significant practical limitations I am ignorant of.
> I'm sure there are some significant practical limitations I am ignorant of.
Yes, the steel framing or reinforced concrete panels that would be needed to hold up the precast concrete sidewalk would be very expensive. You don’t need the entire conductor accessible anyways, that’s what tuggers and mule tape are for, pulling wire.
Also, all of the pipes would need to be supported from the underground concrete/steel structure and you would also need a lot of (expensive) expansion joints. Laying pipes in the ground and burying them lets the earth support them instead of pipe hangers.
There are some colleges/institutions to do use tunnels to run steam pipes through a campus, and they tend to build purpose-built tunnels for those. I’m not a pipefitter, so I’m unsure why steam pipes get their own tunnels, perhaps a MechE or pipefitter can weigh in!
Underground electrical feeder conduits (on customer premises, I only deal in the electrical world beyond the utility transformer secondary) are typically run in concrete encased ‘duct bank’, with manholes every so often. Electrical vaults/manholes are available as precast pieces that you simply lower into place.
The big ones get cooled with oil and are typically in ducts in concrete. You need to insulate from the voltage and cool it. Air does both, albeit with lots of distance for higher voltages.
Horizontal directional drilling. It's already being widely used in urban areas, but digging a trench through some farmer's field is still vastly cheaper.
When used in moderation outside of cities, power lines look great on the landscape. I guess I'd prefer the pylons simply painted to complement the landscape in a tasteful manner, while still clearly standing out as artificial. The examples in the article aren't good at hiding their nature either. Maybe I'm too used to the sight of the pyramidal trusses but I'm finding most of these designs either kitsch or more ugly than the existing ones.
Surprised the comments here are mostly negative. I think the land of the giants ones are very cool. It'd be too much if they were like that everywhere, but I definitely appreciate the concept, and could see the argument for calling them "beautiful".
You obviously haven't been on Tumblr lately where there is a giant objectum culture and love all things electric. Pylons are the rulers of dreams over there, entire blogs devoted to their beauty. The inherent eroticism of the machine and the like.
The most important thing is to make them all the same as much as possible so that people who have to maintain them don't have to deal with annoying variations.
I have always thought of the standard distribution electric or ‘telephone’ pole as a religious cross. Electric companies can start an ‘Adopt a Cross’ program for additional revenue.
So: it seems like one of the more obvious faults of pylons is that they are the wrong color. Usually, they are white or grey (etc) which does not really gel with the existing natural landscape. It seems like the first step in fixing the problem would simply be to paint them brown, tan, green or blue, depending on the location -- possibly with a few brightly colored details so that they aren't too subtle. Bonus points for a paint that has inherent color variations, because flat colors are too visually distracting. (Why does pylon design even need a journal, anyway?)
Weathering steel seems like it could be a decent compromise between color and cost. Though admittedly I’m just assuming it would be less expensive than painting and maintaining said paint.
I feel compelled to point out that any "artistic" deviation from structural optimality will necessarily use more material to achieve the same sturdiness, and hence cost more. And when you have to put one every few hundred meters across a whole country, that's kind of a big deal.