The Big Green House

Thursday, January 08, 2004

 

Bright lights, big city

The rains came, the temperatures warmed, the snow became slush. The streets flooded and cleared. All we have now are random piles of dirty snow on our sidewalks and yards, and the memory of what it looked like when it was fresh and clean. *sigh*

But that’s not what I’m here to talk about.

No, I’m here to talk about Sky City. (Well, technically I’m here to work, but there’s not much going on right now & my employers are cool with my writing on the job as long as I’m all caught up, so…) Science Girl and I watched a show devoted to the engineering behind the (potential) construction of Sky City last night on the Discovery channel.

I’m of two minds about this thing, as I am about so very many other, uh, things. The sci-fi geek in me thinks the whole idea is pretty damn cool; the rest of me sees a very real potential for one of those 1970’s disaster movies come to life. The possibility of catastrophic fire or earthquake was addressed in the show we saw. I’m no architect, so I have no idea whether the claims made have any sort of validity; my guess is that they were looking at best-case scenarios, but maybe I’m just being cynical. However, not one word was said about the threat of massive swarms of angry killer bees, which strikes me as a huge, potentially deadly oversight on the part of the Takenaka company. Someone needs to look into this.

(I’m leaving Godzilla out of the discussion because A) it’s too obvious, and B) I can’t remember if he’s on the side of humanity now or not – the big guy has flip-flopped on that question a few times over the course of his career, as I recall.)

I guess my biggest question about the project is: who the hell is gonna pay for it? They threw a bunch of numbers around last night, but I seem to recall that something like 3 billion tons of steel would go into the construction of just the mega-columns alone. That’s some serious coin right there, and if I recall correctly the Japanese economy ain’t exactly at its healthiest these days. The producers may have addressed this concern at the beginning of the program, which we missed. It could be the same entity that’s footing the bill for the prototype building in Taipei, for all I know. Whoever it ends up being had better be ready to pay some overtime.

The other problem is one of aesthetics. Do I really need to point out the symbolism inherent in a half-mile-high cylindrical tower?

bmarkey 1/08/2004 10:09:00 PM