2010-10-29
The Beauty Of Power Lines
The broadcast of BBC Four’s Secret History of the National Grid has, as you may have noticed, regenerated my interest in electricity pylons (partly aided by Joe Moran).
In Alain de Botton’s The Pleasures and Sorrows Of Work, there’s an entire chapter on transmission infrastructure. In it, he mentions two notable books. One is apparently a Korean guide to pylons around the world, which, annoyingly, I have yet to track down.
However, the other, “De schoonheid van hoogspanningslijnen (in het Nederlandse landschap)”, or “The Beauty of Electricity Pylons in the Dutch Landscape”, definitely exists. Here’s an excerpt of a translation of the description:
An often heard opinion is that power lines the horizon visual pollution. The compilers of this publication believe that a conscious way of looking at other aspects of the power line to be apparent, and often there is a certain beauty. The beauty can both relate to the mast itself as the perspective effect of a beautifully designed range and how to measure the line indicates the underlying landscape. Preceded by a brief explanation about the function and typology of high-voltage lines, looks at the problems of designing a line entails.
I’d love to see a translation of the work; I suspect it’s not worth learning Dutch for by itself. It’s also great to see a re-appreciation of human creations as beauty - in the National Gallery there’s a Turner painting of Maidenhead Bridge being crossed by a steam locomotive, as well as a French picture of a railway station. More like this, please.
2009-11-08
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From synecdoche on Flickr, an art project in Houston:
Using 13 billboards along the city´s downtown freeways, Olivier will replace the usual advertisements with images of the urban landscape that would be visible if the billboard did not exist - the sky, trees, and buildings obstructed by the ads will now be “revealed.”
Having been to the southern US, I can certainly recognise the pattern synecdoche describes in the description of another photo of a billboard from the project:
Houston is a city of billboards and big signs, sprouting everywhere above the highways in gleaming, glaring, blinking, clashing profusion. A billboardless vista is rare; in traffic-dense commuter areas there are so many that they cancel each other out, becoming visual background noise. Even on a relatively deserted stretch of highway there will be at least one or two every half-mile or so.
That makes this project, time-limited though it is, even more wonderful.
