Some of the World's Most Bizarre Construction Projects (Sideprojects Youtube channel)

The ultimate building would be in a quarry stop a mountain. Steel sections going inside the quarry walls for additional support...but allowing drainage.
 
piginapoke said:
Neom's The Line in Saudi Arabia is a bizarre mega-project currently underway. 170 km long, 200m wide, 500m tall. Think of it as a horizontal skycraper taken to extremes and then some.
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Neom is of course monumentally stupid. However, it's a fantastic opportunity for western and, I imagine, Chinese engineering and construction firms to extract as much wealth and experience as possible from the Saudis. So long as the American, Aussie, Canuck, Brit and EU staff get the hell out of Arabia before the inevitable collapse, I foresee nothing but goodness from this. Lessons learned, SA returned to the dust.
 
Grandad. Influenced the modernists... and Albert Speer. The term 'paper architect' is often a sneer at impractical architects who never get anything built but in fact Boullée's intention was to illustrate radical new aesthetic principles, not build these vast edifices in real stone.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXVjZ8AhvTc


Now if Brian Dennehy's General Groves in Day One had been an architect... (and some architects really are like that - one that supervised my Masters thesis actually)

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfwopjmgEKQ
 
The radical architects of Russia before and after the revolution are loosely termed the Constructivists and influenced the Futurists and the Bauhaus (some ended up there). Like Boullée, their main purpose was to instruct and inspire as resources were practically nonexistent. You can google names like Konstantin Melnikov, Iakov Chernikov, Boris Iofan, El Lissitzky, and Vladimir Tatlin. Their influence can be seen in (mostly) living architects such as Daniel Libeskind, Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Bernard Tschumi, Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid (not living, unfortunately, but her firm is thriving). Lebbeus Woods was a recent paper architect in their mould too.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGQjbn9VV1g
 
Buckminster Fuller, Paolo Soleri and the arcology concept in general deserve a mention. Fuller mentored modern starchitect Norman Foster, who's carried on with his ideas in practice.

en.wikipedia.org

Arcology - Wikipedia

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Japanese construction companies often showed off grandiose proposals for megastructures, supposedly with the purpose of publicity and to attract recent engineering graduates who'd then be put to work designing car parks.

en.wikipedia.org

Shimizu Mega-City Pyramid - Wikipedia

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X-Seed 4000 - Wikipedia

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Japanese land prices would actually make these worth considering. The economic problem is the huge capital investment required, making it necessary for them to be generating revenue over the inevitably long construction period i.e., live in it while you build it.

I'm slightly surprised that no techbro billionaire has tried to build an arcology-type structure. Space seems to be their thing and there are only a few tepid proposals for planned towns. It's seems to be only Saudi Arabia that's seriously ambitious on the ground.
 
Rhinocrates said:
Japanese land prices would actually make these worth considering. The economic problem is the huge capital investment required, making it necessary for them to be generating revenue over the inevitably long construction period i.e., live in it while you build it.
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Japan would be a *ridiculous* place to build such things. You build whole new cities when your population is booming, but Japans population is going to crash.
 

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Rhinocrates said:
I'm slightly surprised that no techbro billionaire has tried to build an arcology-type structure. Space seems to be their thing and there are only a few tepid proposals for planned towns. It's seems to be only Saudi Arabia that's seriously ambitious on the ground.
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Extraterrestrial colonies are about looking outwards, expansion and freedom, especially once the tech is there that a colony can build other colonies. But a terrestrial arcology is about turning inwards, stagnation, conformity, a deletion of horizons. Basically giant prisons.
 
Orionblamblam said:
Extraterrestrial colonies are about looking outwards, expansion and freedom, especially once the tech is there that a colony can build other colonies. But a terrestrial arcology is about turning inwards, stagnation, conformity, a deletion of horizons. Basically giant prisons.
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Three I can think of off the top of my head:

-- Hugh Ferris "Metropolis of To-Morrow": New York transformed into a series of massive superblock towers surrounded by low-profile urbanization. Includes his famous bridges-as-skyscrapers drawings.

-- Kevin Roche's plan for a bicentennial World's Fair straddling the Delaware River in Philadelphia and built on a 50,000-car garage and highway complex (can't find a good picture of this one)

-- Paul Rudolph's plan for an island-wide megastructure encapsulating the Lower Manhattan Expressway.
 

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Orionblamblam said:
Extraterrestrial colonies are about looking outwards, expansion and freedom, especially once the tech is there that a colony can build other colonies. But a terrestrial arcology is about turning inwards, stagnation, conformity, a deletion of horizons. Basically giant prisons.
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Soleri coined the term as a portmanteau of architecture and ecology. They are not simply humungous Blade Runner-esque buildings, instead concept is about closing resource and energy loops and minimising footprint. This is a very likely prototype for an ET colony.

In fact, one of his conceptual designs was for one. 'Asteromo' dates from 1969, preceding O'Neill and following on from ideas of Tsiolkovsky and other thinkers.

pruned.blogspot.com

Asteromo

A blog on landscape architecture and related fields
pruned.blogspot.com pruned.blogspot.com

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Rhinocrates said:
Soleri coined the term as a portmanteau of architecture and ecology. They are not simply humungous Blade Runner-esque buildings, instead concept is about closing resource and energy loops and minimising footprint.
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Yes. "Sustainable prisons" on a large scale. It would not be long from "it has everything you need" to "you need never leave" to "you shouldn't ever leave" to "you're not allowed to leave" to "you are conditioned to not even think of leaving." Like one of those Chinese "15 minute cities, just - perhaps - a bit bigger. And with less actual view of the outside for the bulk of the denizens.

Rhinocrates said:
This is a very likely prototype for an ET colony.
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Difference being, an ET colony, whether in free space, inside an asteroid or on a planetary/lunar surface, is surrounded by an environment you can't live in. A terrestrial arcology is on *Earth.* So the psychologies would necessarily be different. A terrestrial arcology is built on the very idea of cutting you off from a safe and pleasant natural environment and replacing it with artificiality; an ET arcology would be based on the idea of turning an unlivable wasteland into livable space.
 
Orionblamblam said:
Like one of those Chinese "15 minute cities, just - perhaps - a bit bigger. And with less actual view of the outside for the bulk of the denizens.
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This is getting into tinfoil hat territory. Try some reading:

theconversation.com

15-minute cities: how to separate the reality from the conspiracy theory

It’s about designing cities that prioritise people not cars.
theconversation.com theconversation.com



livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk

20-minute neighbourhood or 15-minute city?

20-minute neighbourhood or 15-minute city?
livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk

Talk about prisons is hysterical nonsense.

As Mike Davis points out in his books City of Quartz and Ecology of Fear, the supposedly open plan of modern cities facilitates monitoring and control very well.

Orionblamblam said:
Difference being, an ET colony, whether in free space, inside an asteroid or on a planetary/lunar surface, is surrounded by an environment you can't live in. A terrestrial arcology is on *Earth.* So the psychologies would necessarily be different. A terrestrial arcology is built on the very idea of cutting you off from a safe and pleasant natural environment and replacing it with artificiality; an ET arcology would be based on the idea of turning an unlivable wasteland into livable space.
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Again, if you read, it's about minimising impact on nature so as the make sure it stays liveable. There's nothing about imprisonment in the concept - if anything, as you say yourself, it's actually getting out of one of these space colonies that is difficult. As people like Soleri, Fuller, and the people behind Biosphere 2, there is a logical continuum from self-sufficient architecture to space settlement, not an opposition.

Nor is it about "replacing" the natural with the artificial. Biomimetics plays a major role (again, the 'ecology' part of the word). This large building incorporates some of the principles (a former architecture school classmate was on the design team actually).


Here's an explainer that looks at various aspects of biomimetics in architecture.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KowHG5Wbgk


Interestingly, Soleri was a student of Frank Lloyd Wright and the arcology concept adressed the same issue of connection with and preservation of nature that Wright explored with his Broadacre City, but the latter is now seen in practice as a recipe for decidedly un-green urban sprawl and high energy consumption.

I'm not a huge fan of arcologies myself but they may be a necessary solution for supporting large, migrated populations to new territories or in increasingly inhospitable equatorial climates (as in the Zimbawean example) in the coming decades. Personally I'm more in favour of Ebenezer Howard's garden city concept and the real fifteen minute city that emphasises accessibility (rather than some paranoid projection of it). I happen to live in a city planned under the influence of Howard, almost all of my daily needs can be met within a 15 minute walking radius and The Economist ranks it as being one of the world's most liveable, but that may well end up being a luxury.
 
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Rhinocrates said:
Talk about prisons is hysterical nonsense.
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Cities are *already* awful. Walling them in will only make them worse. Imagine San Fran that you can't leave. Shudder.
Rhinocrates said:
Again, if you read, it's about minimising impact on nature so as the make sure it stays liveable.
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That's why space colonies are better. There, you *maximize* your impact on nature. Nuke the shit out of it!


Rhinocrates said:
There's nothing about imprisonment in the concept
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Sure,so everyone owns their own means of transportation and and rive/pilot it without relying on a central control? If you can only leave by means of public transport, your ability to leave is at the whim of the government. Especially once they institute social credit and biometrics.

"Biomimetics" is a poor substitute for "a million acres of nature, open skies, no light pollution and quiet." Actual forests, rivers, lakes, seasides, farm country will always be vastly better for people than simulations.


Rhinocrates said:
I'm not a huge fan of arcologies myself but they may be a necessary solution for supporting large, migrated populations to new territories
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That's what ships and shipping containers are for. And occasionally bigass trebuchets on the border.

Arcologies are *vastly* expensive construction projects. Regions currently getting flooded with "migrants" like, say, Britain, Ireland, Chicago, New York City, don't have the funds or the wherewithal to build conventional housing for what they currently have. Dumping *more* vast numbers of skill-poor uncultured resource consumers into the economy will only make it worse. You need arcologies to house millions of migrants, but you can't use *them* to build or pay for the damned things.

That's why I support space colonies. The denizens of those will *have* to be smart, educated, hard-working with dogged determination to maintain scientific excellence and engineering rigor. Those who don't will die, quickly. So in a few generations they can come back and repopulate a devastated and depopulated Earth.
 
Orionblamblam said:
Cities are *already* awful.
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More than half our species now lives in cities. Are you going to wish them away?

Also, if cities are awful, how is a space colony not like a city in its most important aspects? It will by necessity have a concentrated population.

Orionblamblam said:
Walling them in will only make them worse. Imagine San Fran that you can't leave. Shudder.
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Historically cities have usually been walled. In the case of the arcology, the boundary is permeable. Who's to say you can't leave? That's entirely your own projection and has nothing to do with what's in the literature.

Orionblamblam said:
That's why space colonies are better. There, you *maximize* your impact on nature. Nuke the shit out of it!
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That's rather nihilistic.... and pointless.

Orionblamblam said:
Sure,so everyone owns their own means of transportation and and rive/pilot it without relying on a central control? If you can only leave by means of public transport, your ability to leave is at the whim of the government. Especially once they institute social credit and biometrics.
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I'm reminded of Tucker Carlson's rants here with supposition compounding on supposition in a drunkard's walk further and further from any verifiable fact. It's a kind of rhetorical Jenga. Sure, the Chinese government would do that but why is this intrinsic to the concept itself?

Orionblamblam said:
"Biomimetics" is a poor substitute for "a million acres of nature, open skies, no light pollution and quiet." Actual forests, rivers, lakes, seasides, farm country will always be vastly better for people than simulations.
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There's a vast difference between replication of processes for practical means of maintaining stable internal environmental conditions and simulation of the landscape. Nor is it exclusive of the surrounding environment.

And regarding the wonders of nature, didn't you just say that you wanted to prove how big your willy is by nuking it?

Yet again, why is imprisonment intrinsic to the concept? Nobody's saying it but you and your continual return to this theme is... idiosyncratic. Ironically, it's the space colony that by its nature would be the prison that obsesses you: you can't go out without some sort of containment and supply - and who dispenses and controls that?

Anyway, on Earth, do you preserve wilderness by reducing a city's impact upon it or by sprawling occupancy? If the wilderness thrives with reduced pollution and building, then you can walk out without a space suit, albeit carrying bear spray, depending on which continent you inhabit.

Orionblamblam said:
That's what ships and shipping containers are for. And occasionally bigass trebuchets on the border.
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You're being glib. Politics, as is often said, is the art of the attainable with the hope of some kind of practical compassion while fantasies of impregnable enclaves have never been anything other than fantasies. Ever watch a zombie movie and taken it literally?

Orionblamblam said:
Arcologies are *vastly* expensive construction projects.
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Indeed, the first sensible thing you've said so far. The uncertainty of capital investment, dependable management and logistics will be a major obstacle to their construction.

Orionblamblam said:
Regions currently getting flooded with "migrants" like, say, Britain, Ireland, Chicago, New York City, don't have the funds or the wherewithal to build conventional housing for what they currently have. Dumping *more* vast numbers of skill-poor uncultured resource consumers into the economy will only make it worse. You need arcologies to house millions of migrants, but you can't use *them* to build or pay for the damned things.

That's why I support space colonies.
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In the real world, we're going to have to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. How do you transport all eight billion of us off planet?

Orionblamblam said:
The denizens of those will *have* to be smart, educated, hard-working with dogged determination to maintain scientific excellence and engineering rigor. Those who don't will die, quickly. So in a few generations they can come back and repopulate a devastated and depopulated Earth.
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Oh right, it's only those you consider the right kind that get to live in the space colonies. OK, you're turning this in the direction you've shown in every other thread that that hasn't been about purely technical matters. As has happened before, inevitably the threads became derailed and the admins shut it down.

Perhaps you can leave your thoughts about immigration to your own blog and remember the topic of this thread so that it can continue to be enjoyed by others. This thread is about weird construction projects, not the creation of a master race.
 
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Rhinocrates said:
More than half our species now lives in cities. Are you going to wish them away?
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Nah. Collapse will take care of that.

Rhinocrates said:
Also, if cities are awful, how is a space colony not like a city in its most important aspects? It will by necessity have a concentrated population.
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Indeed so. But it will also be in a world of unlimited expansion and infinite resources.



Rhinocrates said:
That's rather nihilistic.... and pointless.
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There's nothing nihilistic or pointless about converting an infinite universe of dead matter into living worlds.

Rhinocrates said:
I'm reminded of Tucker Carlson's rants here with supposition compounding on supposition in a drunkard's walk further and further from any verifiable fact. It's a kind of rhetorical Jenga. Sure, the Chinese government would do that but why is this intrinsic to the concept itself?
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Cities are concentrations of power. Authoritarianiam is something of an inevitable emergent property in such systems... and arcologies would be even more so. And they could hardly be otherwise.
Rhinocrates said:
And regarding the wonders of nature, didn't you just say that you wanted to prove how big your willy is by nuking it?
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No. And why are you thinking about anyones willy but your own?

I assume you're being stupid rather than perverted here. So I'll explain slower: in space, nature is dead. An asteroid is nature... and it's resources, and there is zero immorality in converting it into a loose rubble cloud via nukes. On Earth, nuking mountains into rubble to get at the goodies within is considered bad form. In space, there are no forests to clear-cut, no clean blue skies to pollute, no oceans to fish bare. We can disassemble moons.

Rhinocrates said:
In the real world, we're going to have to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. How do you transport all eight billion of us off planet?
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Who suggested such a thing?

Rhinocrates said:
Oh right, it's only those you consider the right kind that get to live in the space colonies.
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Only the right kind *can* live in a space colony. At least for the first few generations, death will be *real* close at hand. The same would apply to submarine colonies or balloon-borne colonies. You're stupid, you die... and you take others with you. So it will be incumbent upon the others that *you* don't be stupid... or don't be in the colony.
 
I want a connection from South America to Antarctica....that would take some doing however.

Mine the ice and remove the water before it winds up in the ports anyway.
 

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Utopian visions of arcologies will have to deal with the realities of packing vast numbers of humans into small spaces, programs that don't exactly have a spectacular history.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4a2zZCwU80


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nq_SpRBXRmE


And the fact that concentrating humans means concentrating power, leading to authoritarianism/totalitarianism, with results such as restricted mobility:

View: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/uDs5jQM3_J0


A major difference between terrestrial arcologies and space colonies (as distinct from planetary ones) is that there can be only a limited number of terrestrial arcologies, thus population densities are *meant* to be high. But space habitats can be built in the trillions... big enough and numerous enough that people could live in spacious, near-natural forested surroundings on estates big enough to embarrass the kings of old. And when the neighborhood starts getting cluttered with other space habitats... you can move your habitat away.
 
Your fantasies about space colonies are so much magical thinking and I believe I saw the same in Jehovah's Witness' pamphlets - and in any pastoralist utopia. It's easy to say 'in the future we will all have unicorns because the future isn't here now. It's an intellectual pyramid scheme.

In reality, the resources, the power and the monomaniacal authority needed to construct space colonies will be effectively oligarchic at best and totalitarian at worst. Beneath that, you've already said the quiet park out loud yourself - that in your mind it's going to be based on genocide-by-neglect (at best), racial purification, unified communal discipline, the creation of a master race, and fantasies of lebensraum. The people who subscribe to that won't be the architects of heaven. History has shown that such the people seeing others who have the effrontery to diverge from themselves tend to turn on each rather than run skipping across fields of clover into the wild yonder.

Wars have been fought over resources indeed, but the resource most wars have been fought over are human minds.

I personally don't have high hopes for arcologies - as utopias they're probably impossible and the concept may only be built - badly - in response to coastal cities being inundated. I mentioned them in this thread precisely because they're bizarre concepts, as it says on the tin. Magical thinking about utopias free of gravity, economics, and untermenschen are even more unlikely.

At least let's look at projects that are intriguing and amusing, as was the original intention of this thread.
 
Archigram. A British group of young architects active in the 60s. Their intent was to shake up expectations rather than prescribe blueprints and used the techniques of pop art rather than straight architectural rendering or modelling. Some of their more provocative ideas include the 'plug-in city' and the walking city.
 

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Archigram's exploration of the opposite scale - architecture you wear, called the suitaloon (suit balloon) and cushicle (cushion vehicle).
 

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After working for Richard Rogers and Norman Foster, Jan Kaplický and Amanda Levete were following in the footsteps of Archigram with their practice, Future Systems, originally founded with David Nixon in 1979. Initial ideas were, like Archigram's, intended to be provocative but they eventually built stuff too. A few boutique hotels that have now been built in wilderness locations are not far away from these proposals.
 

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Future Systems' Bob Marshall-Andrews House, Druidston, Pembrokeshire, Wales, and the Media Centre at Lords' Cricket Ground.
 

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They perpetrated this in Birmingham, for Selfridges. It looks like a monster from early Doctor Who, I think.
 

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Ant Farm, a US-based group, were more into installations (Cadillac Ranch, for example) but they did build this 'House of the Century' in Texas. You see a similar space-age aesthetic, complete with transparent tube walkway. Wholly impractical, it overheated incredibly in summer and is now abandoned.
 

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Ant Farm probably referred to Erich Mendelsohn's Einsteinturm, an observatory built in honour of Albert Einstein. It's recently been restored and works still as a solar observatory. Mr E, when shown it, said one word: 'Organic.'
 

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Rhinocrates said:
in your mind it's going to be based on genocide-by-neglect (at best), racial purification, unified communal discipline, the creation of a master race, and fantasies of lebensraum.
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If I say "only the smart and competent" and you think "that means only certain races," consider the possibility that YOU are the racist.
 
Oh my. The only limit is money. We could have colonies on the Moon or Mars right now but no one wants to pay for it. Unless they can get a BIG - REALLY BIG - return on their investment, then no. We have to creatively think about living on Earth. It's easy to think about space as this giant blank slate to make of it what we will, but can we? Since I was a boy, I heard about asteroids and a bit later, asteroid mining. Can it really be done? First, you need to get there, find a way to disassemble them, and have a way to extract the expensive stuff. IF - I mean IF, the payoff is BIG ENOUGH, then the wealthy patron gets wealthier, and gets the wonderful - and overused - title of "Making History" TM. Impress your peers at cocktail parties. Field ideas about making the process cheaper because the formula for big profits is big cheapness.

At present, the way people would live on Mars is in inflatable tubes in former lava vents that would be heated and pressurized. But you can't order carry-out. You'd starve before it arrived. Supposedly, about a mile down, is liquid water. Get the drilling equipment and you've got heat and water, and soil to grow things in. Sounds less comfortable than living on a ship in the ocean. Sure, they can send over episodes of SpongeBob and Doctor Who, but outside travel would be a bit hazardous. Poor Nigel fell off his rover, tore his suit and the auto-seal couldn't save him. A redesign has been ordered.

And what's all this chatter about who controls who? There had better be rules of behavior and clearly defined duties. Like a rifle platoon, everyone has to look after everyone else, but instead of bullets, the enemy is the hostile to humans environment.
 
Orionblamblam said:
If I say "only the smart and competent" and you think "that means only certain races," consider the possibility that YOU are the racist.
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I'm considering your many and insistent past comments about people with, shall we say, lower albedos. One simply has to look further up this thread. You're being transparently disingenuous.

Peter Sellers was much funnier, I must say.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZct-itCwPE
 
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