Descriptive Illustrated Catalogue of the Sixty-Eight Competitive Designs for the Great Tower for London – Fred. C. Lynde [1890]
Thursday, 13 February 2014
While many of the entries to a completion to design a new tower for London, in 1890, appear as poor copies of the Eiffel Tower, other proposals transcend the architectural traditions and clichés of the time. Futurist monoliths and space-conquering rockets wait alongside Babelesque towers and medieval obelisks preparing for lift-off. The catalogue documents a structure with ‘a captive parachute to hold four persons’, a tower with a spiral railway climbing its exterior, a 1/12-scale model of the ‘Great Pyramid of Giza envisioned as a colony of aerial vegetarians, who would grow their own food in hanging gardens’. The fusion of styles generate anachronistic hybrids which look both forwards and backwards in time, many will be recognisable to those who have pondered the cities described by Calvino or Lovecraft.
Related:
Yuri Avvakumov – Agitarch Structures: Reconfiguring Utopia
The Spatio-Lumino-Chronodynamic Towers & Sculptures of Nicolas Schöffer
