What About ideal cities, and counter revolutionary master plans?

Avant-Garde
The avant-garde is a paradoxical state. In order to exist, it relies on its incongruous condition of being both fundamentally contemporary and ahead of its time. A conceptual palimpsest, the avant-garde requires writing its history over its own past keeping a vulnerable balance between present problems, and possible future solutions. All about contextualizing the perfect timing, what happens when the avant-garde goes out of sync; when its solutions are overlooked for being too premature, or ridiculed for being delayed?

In the past century alone, the avant-garde was victim of two untimely appearances. In the first one, its proposals arrived too early; the world was taken aback by the boldness of its ambitions, by the audacity of its delirium. In the second coming, the avant-garde was too late. Here its stratagems were on a futile mission of inventing a program that already existed.

These consecutive setbacks have concealed the potential of  a parallel form of urban intelligence that not only is able to complete even the most ambitious truncated plans of the avant-garde in Europe, but that can also propose and achieve a set of alternative and original forms of urbanism. Can a genealogy of key events in the 20th century reveal the potential of this parallel non-European universe, and its relationship to the avant-garde as we know it?

Le Corbusier 1922
In 1922 Le Corbusier presented the first of his “ideal” cities.  La ville contemporaine pour trois millions d’habitants was an urban layout of cruciform skyscrapers, housing slabs and a carpet of parks intersected by juxtaposed grids of car infrastructure. In this urban plan Le Corbusier was not only aspiring for a greener, denser, centralized, bureaucratic, car oriented city, but the plan suggested the ideal conditions for Modern Architecture to flourish.

The Ville Contemporaine was like an abstract diagram. When the modernist plans started to take shape on real cities, first in Paris with the Plan Voisin (1925), then in the rest of the world with the Ville Radieuse (1935), the image of Le Corbusier oscillated between a visionary and a madman. His preoccupations were clearly fundamental problems of his time, but the formalization of his ideas were not always welcomed. Even if the cities of his time had needed more hygienic and organized schemes, buildings that were more suitable to live in, collective housing that distanced itself from the Haussmanian family flat and an overall vision that….

Read entire article at: http://archinect.com/news/article/42861638/megastructures-are-the-shopping-malls-of-the-avant-garde

atelier V : architecture (www.atelierv.com) has completed the design of a new 5,850  sf residence in the Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles.  The proposed residence sits atop a small relatively flat  lot area of 6,500 sf.  The new residence will replace an existing 1956 home on the site.  “The proposed plan’s Party is an interpreted Eastern Courtyard concept which incorporates the yard into the belly of the residence,  thereby maximizing privacy and interactivity for a family of four” Says Mark Vaghei, AIA , atelier V’s Design Principal.  The new residence is comprised of three distinct volumes  .  A two story main east-west volume is flanked in the front by the high-ceiling living room and on the back by the guest house, together forming the three sides of the enclosed courtyard housing the outdoor entertainment space and a lap pool.

The spaces are organized as such to increase views  into and out of one another with as much use of transparent planes on the courtyard side.  The entire Courtyard as well as the two story volume housing the kitchen, family room and bedrooms on the second floor take maximum advantage of passive solar gain through southern exposure.   The  ground floor entertainment and guest wings are accessible to the courtyard through operable sliding glass doors.  The basement level will house a media room as well as a wine cellar and other utility functions such as the garage and additional guest areas.  The basement is also directly accessible from the entry driveway and can be doubled as an in-law quarter.   ” Working with a very small piece of land , we wanted to avoid having a traditional house and a backyard disjointed from each other, we tried to integrate as much of the yard as possible within the confines of the structure, in a sense co-mingling the indoors and the outdoors” says Mark Vaghei, AIA.

The basic approach to use of materials in the house was driven by sustainability and use of natural and recycled materials as much as possible.  The project will use a combination of FCP (Fiber Cement Panels) and Trespa panels in the facade.  Strategic privacy is

achieved through use of obscured channel glass in the master bath and master bedroom areas.  The entire house will use recycled water through collectors that collect rain water and store them in a special tank.  Additionally, the project will maximize the use of recycled materials and will include active solar panels for heating and air-conditioning as well as pool heating.

It’s worth noting that this entire house has been designed on a 4 foot planning grid with steel beams and TJI wood joists.  The entire skin of the building is separated from the main structure on the south side allowing the skin to be as transparent as possible where maximum solar  gain and views are desired .  This efficient structural system has contributed to cost efficiencies otherwise not possible while allowing for a maximum open and flexible modern plan.    The cost of this residence is projected to be in the neighborhood of $200-230 /sf.

atelier V is proud to have participated in design of this unique residence and we look forward to its construction and final occupancy.

For more information and additional photos of this  and other atelier V projects, please go to : www.atelierv.com /projects/residential/Hartzel residence.

Credits:

Elise McCurley , Junior Designer, 3D Artist

Kayt Brumder, Breathing Room, thesis project at The Cooper Union, New York, 2009. [© Kayt Brumder; all images courtesy of the Canadian Centre for Architecture]

We live in a state of pervasive anxiety. Every day we are confronted with environmental problems: the energy crisis, pollution, decreasing biodiversity, climate change, new epidemics, the externalities of industrial production and consumerist lifestyles. We perceive our bodies as constantly at risk (from sources difficult to pinpoint) of contamination and disease. This increasing concern and obsession with health and well-being, mainly among urban populations in the West, is triggering an inevitable process of medicalization; ordinary problems are increasingly defined in medical terms and understood through a medical framework. [1]

We are so carried away by the idea of health that we have created a new moralistic philosophy: healthism. [2] Health is no longer identified primarily with the absence of illness, but with a state of general well-being concerning all types of functioning, from physical and biological to social and cultural. Nevertheless, our ambition for total well-being is fragmented and parcelled out through disconnected policies and actions. The production of a healthier body to withstand (inevitable) deterioration is today achieved through voluntary biomedical interventions and individual efforts (“staying in shape”), supported by new environmental urban planning policies.
Contemporary architecture and urban planning seem to address uncritically the conditions and context in which this discourse on health is developing. In most cases, the design disciplines rely on an abstract, scientific notion of health, and very literally adopt concepts such as “population,” “community,” “citizen,” “nature,” “green,” “development,” “city” and “body” into a professionalized, disciplinary discourse that simply echoes the ambiguities characteristic of current debate. Practitioners also ignore the fact that economic processes are closely intertwined with environmental processes, and especially that concepts of the body, health and sickness are products of history, politics, economics and culture. To properly “diagnose” urban problems, we must not speak of health in abstract terms, but rather of various ideas and states of health. As Jonathan M. Metzl has noted, “‘health’ is a term replete with value judgments, hierarchies and blind assumptions that speak as much about power and privilege as they do about well-being. Health is a desired state, but it is also a prescribed state and an ideological position.” [3]

The book and exhibition Imperfect Health do not represent a comprehensive survey of the relationships between health, architecture, cities and the environment. On the contrary, we mean to highlight some of the uncertainties and contradictions present in ideas of health and health care that are emerging in Western countries today, particularly in Europe and North America.

Read entire article at : http://places.designobserver.com/feature/imperfect-health-demedicalize-architecture/32928/

URBAN RENEWAL THROUGH AFFORDABILITY IN OLD TOWN KERN

On Wednesday November 2, 2011 atelier V celebrated the grand opening of Baker Street Village Phase I in Bakersfield, California. Attending the ceremonies were dignitaries from the City government including but not limited to Honorable Harvey Hall, the Mayor of Bakersfield, Messieurs Stephen Pelz, Executive Director, and Randy Coats Deputy Director of Planning for Kern County Housing Authority as well as Ms. Donna Kunz, the Redevelopment Agency Director for the City of Bakersfield.

Baker Street Village is a true mixed use master plan community that originally started as a Public-Private partnership between a private developer and the City of Bakersfield’s Redevelopment Agency back in 2007.  The 2008 financial crises took its toll on the project and rendered it economically unfeasible as a private development.  Fortunately,  in early 2010 the Housing Authority of the County of Kern came to the rescue and purchased the project with the new mission of transforming it into Affordable Housing.  Atelier V and the Housing Authority went through a series of cost-cutting value engineering iterations to achieve the new budget objective.  The re-designed began construction in the fall of 2010 and was completed  October of this year.

Baker Street Village is a multi-phase mixed use project. Phase I  is comprised of two distinct housing prototypes.  First (Building A) are a series of twenty four 3-story 3-bedroom townhome units in 4 separate buildings totaling approximately 62,000 sf.  The second part (Building B) of the complex is a 3-story 27,000 sf mixed use building with 13 one-bedroom loft-type units and 10,000 sf of retail on the ground floor along Baker Street. The complex’s various components are connected via pedestrian walkways enhancing the urban character of the project.  The townhome units are designed as walk-ups with the main level approximately 4 feet higher than the pedestrian sidewalk, while the garages are half sunken below grade and accessed from the back side.  Again, the idea was to enhance the pedestrian experience on Lake and King avenues with the structures hugging the property line. The townhome facades are a combination of wood siding and cement plaster with painted wood trims.  The mixed use building (Bldg. B) along Baker street takes on a completely different look while staying true to the urban nature of the project.  Large expanses of glass and corrugated metal panels in combination with cement plaster  add to create the setting for a more sophisticated urban lifestyle.  “We worked closely with the County of Kern Housing Authority officials to try and preserve as much of the original features of the project as possible while meeting new and completely re-defined objectives” Said Mark Vaghei, AIA Principal in Charge of atelier V: architecture (www.atelierv.com)

atelier V looks forward to the implementation of Phase II of Baker Street Village which promises to fill in the missing pieces in the overall strategy of Urban Renewal of Old Downtown Kern.

atelier V: architecture would like to thank Messieurs Stephen Pelz, Randy Coats and Mike Ruiz of the County of Kern Housing Authority for their invaluable efforts to resurrect the project.  We also like to thank Wallace and Smith, the General Contractor and their personnel, Tom McCormick, Ed Felicidario and Ulysses Edralin for all their hard work to build the project.

For more information and photos on this and other atelier V projects, please visit : www.atelierv.com projects/residential/Baker Street Village Phase I (Copyrighted 2011, atelier V, Inc.)

Credits:

atelier V team:  Vanessa Ablegas, Project Manager, Alistair Turner, 3D artist

Structural Engineer :  APSG Engineers , Mr. Avtar Pall, Principal

Civil Engineer :  Porter-Robertson Engineering and Surveying, Inc,  Mr. Matt Carson, Project Manager

Putting Down Roots in a Refugee Camp

By Jonathan Liu 7/12 

 “We understand more than anyone else on the job site,” Gregg Pasquarelli told a second-floor conference room one recent Thursday evening inside the New School’s Arnhold Hall. His audience peered at him through a remarkable selection of eyewear—surely the most impressive array of cantilevers, arches and trusswork west of the East River. “We truly do,” he reiterated. “We know more than the developer, we know more the contractor, we know more than the inspector, we know more than the guy installing something. We know a lot about all the stuff. It’s the integrator and the communicator role that’s the most important thing: We don’t build buildings, we make instruction sets for buildings.” At a time when even flat-box furniture is morphed by amateurs into “Ikeahacks,” has our civilization forgotten how to properly follow instructions—and defer to instruction-makers? A principal of SHoP Architects, the burgeoning firm at work on Barclays Center and the South Street Seaport redevelopment, Mr. Pasquarelli was the keynote speaker at the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture’s Teachers Seminar 2011. The theme of this year’s three-day conference was “Performative Practices,” which begs a bit of clarification. Borrowed from linguistics, by way of sociology, ethnography and much else besides, “performance” is perhaps better known as one of those terms of academic art whose very amorphousness—to the uncharitable, meaninglessness—is the intellectual and political point. And in a way, the advent of architecture-as-performance did free thinking from the entrenched, and perhaps as meaningless, rivalry between the formalist and functionalist. Is the “performer” in question the architect, the inhabitant, or the building itself? Yes. Like many coinages of the 1960s, performativity is an ideal that seems just as free-associational nowadays—but that’s been astutely monetized, or should be. In Mr. Pasquarelli’s telling, architects must assert their parochial interests as “the last great generalist profession.” “It’s about grabbing those territories back that have systematically been given away by our profession over the past 30 years,” he said at the conference. “For us, that is the core of performance-based design. Think about what the buildings do, how they work, how they’re put together. What are the politics behind it? What’s the finance behind it? What’s the technology behind it? How’s it going to engage a city?” Mr. Pasquarelli’s favorite slide was a quasi-Venn diagram, without the productive overlaps: architects deal with clients and general contractors as would-be advisories, while outsourcing details—facades, fabrication, zoning, finance—to an orbit of specialist consultants. SHoP’s solution has been rear-guard vertical integration, morphing over 15 years from a five-person design firm to a boutique conglomerate with hands in planning, construction, software, and even real estate itself. (Developers are apparently apt to listen to architects that take equity stakes in their condo projects.) Above all, SHoP is concerned with materials. “I’m not talking about sitting down with your mechanical engineer, early in a project,” Mr. Pasquarelli said. “I mean actually, like, actually talking to the tinknocker who’s bending metal when you’re building a building and finding out how big are the sheets are that can fit on a truck, and what the turning radiuses are, what are the eight ways they can be clipped together.” SHoP Construction is managing the fabrication of the Barclays Center’s rust-steel skin, cut from digital files, weathered in an Indianapolis warehouse, and tagged by barcode; SHoP Applications has unleashed an iPhone app so that “everyone from Bruce Ratner to the guy turning the screwdriver” can track the status of each of thousands of unique panels. A drumbeat of opportunity—or countdown of crisis—animated much of the ACSA seminar. “We are out ahead of the construction industry by about three or four years,” Mr. Pasquiarelli told the room. “But if we don’t grab those territories really fast, they’re going to grab them first and we’re going to get even more relegated to the sidelines.” SHoP, he insisted, was to remain “firmly rooted in the academic,” despite the branded subsidiaries, commitment to large-scale building, and general interest in making money. This wasn’t just playing to the bookish crowd. Performance theory in the 20th century exploded architecture into the realm of the phenomenological, the discursive, the dramaturgical. Performative practices in the 21st seems to be about architects realigning themselves with the ancient and decidedly un-theatrical realities of engineering—while maintaining the self-dramatizing ideas (and language) of “capital-A Architecture.” This language, of an exceptional tradition losing its “territory,” betrayed real professional pride tempered by severe vocational anxiety. Might architects really be at risk of irrelevance? In a mildly controversial article this April, Slate critic Witold Rybczynski took to task the sort of dense, insular architecture speak—“assemblage,” “tectonic,” “spatiality”—favored by, say, participants at ACSA conferences. (Sample presentations at the New School event: “The Architectural Detail in Inter/Trans-disciplinary Practice,” “Historical Problematics of the Collaborative Divide.”) Nineteenth-century architects, claimed Mr. Rybczynski, invented all……

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atelier V completes the design of Duxbury Residence in Beverly Wood, California. Sustainable Total Architecture in the heart of Los Angeles.

atelier V: architecture (www.atelierv.com) has  completed the design of Duxbury Residence. A 9,000 sf , 2-story + basement single family home nestled in a quiet tree-lined street in the wonderful community of Beverly Wood in the heart of Los Angeles.  The new house will replace an existing single story 1950′s structure.  The Owners are a couple from New York who moved to the community many years ago and subsequently moved to a bigger home in Beverly Hills.  As proud grandparents, recently they made a decision to move back to the Beverly Wood community to be closer to their daughters and their grandchildren.  “The client wanted a modern home while satisfying their need for big family gatherings during the  holidays and room for grandchildren to play and feel at home”  says Mark Vaghei, AIA, atelier V’s Principal.  Given the Los Angeles Mansionization Ordinance in effect, the area of the home could not exceed a maximum 45% of the lot area.  One way to increase the available usable area to the client was to introduce a full basement floor. Additionally, the mansionization Ordinance allowed a maximum height of 33 feet with a 25% sloped roof which further narrowed down the alternative envelope of the house.  “We approached the program very logically by introducing a tripartite plan parti, effectively separating the home into 3 different zones, with the entry/gallery space in the middle housing all vertical circulation, the public zone,  and the private zones on each side” says , Mark Vaghei.  The second floor of the house is similarly divided into a master suite and other bedrooms connected via a bridge through the middle double height gallery space.  An elevator serves both the first and second floors as well as the basement, providing easy access from the garage at the basement level to the kitchen and the bedrooms.  The middle zone in the plan extends outside both on the entry/street side as well as the back yard and manifests itself in the ground plan in the form of water.  Pool on the one side,  and a cascading water feature on the other pulling your eye in both directions through the light-filled glass- enclosed galley space.  Additionally, the gallery opens down to the basement partially to let natural light penetrate deep into the basement floor making that floor an integral part of the house.

The roof is what really distinguishes this home from any other home in the neighborhood and for that matter the entire LA area.  The metal clad roofs are gently undulating waves in opposite direction on the two outer volumes of the structure flanking the skylit gallery in the middle.  The roofs will be covered with solar tiles essentially freeing the structure from the need for conventional energy sources.  Operable skylights in the middle gallery space will vent warm air from throughout the house and glass exposure to the south and south-west provide for maximum passive solar energy. 

The hardscape/landscape is divided into zones of activity.  Flat grass areas around the pool for the grandchildren to play, outdoor living room with a fireplace off the kitchen for informal gatherings, a hardscaped area flanking the pool for lounging , barbequing and larger gatherings.  On the front yard side, the elevation difference between the entry and the sidewalk is mitigated through a series of “landscaped Shelves” transitioning down to the sidewalk and flanking the cascaded water feature.  The side yards are reserved for the Client’s favorite trees effectively providing barrier for privacy.  “The result is really what we call Total Architecture, a type of structure which is in total harmony with its ground plane/site and grows out of it and not merely planted on it” Says Mark Vaghei, AIA

Duxbury Residence will go through the Beverly Wood Association for final approvals and is planned for construction sometimes in 2012.  For more information on this project including plans and models and other work by atelier V please go to : www.atelierv.com to Projects to Residential to Duxbury Residence.

Credits: Elise McCurley (3D artist), atelier V

Pedestrians and trams are given priority treatment in Zurich. Tram operators can turn traffic lights in their favor as they approach, forcing cars to halt.

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

Published: June 26, 2011 

 While American cities are synchronizing green lights to improve traffic flow and offering apps to help drivers find parking, many European cities are doing the opposite: creating environments openly hostile to cars. The methods vary, but the mission is clear — to make car use expensive and just plain miserable enough to tilt drivers toward more environmentally friendly modes of transportation. Multimedia Slide Show Europe’s Fight Against Traffic.  Cities including Vienna to Munich and Copenhagen have closed vast swaths of streets to car traffic. Barcelona and Paris have had car lanes eroded by popular bike-sharing programs. Drivers in London and Stockholm pay hefty congestion charges just for entering the heart of the city. And over the past two years, dozens of German cities have joined a national network of “environmental zones” where only cars with low carbon dioxide emissions may enter. Likeminded cities welcome new shopping malls and apartment buildings but severely restrict the allowable number of parking spaces.

On-street parking is vanishing. In recent years, even former car capitals like Munich have evolved into “walkers’ paradises,” said Lee Schipper, a senior research engineer at Stanford University who specializes in sustainable transportation. “In the United States, there has been much more of a tendency to adapt cities to accommodate driving,” said Peder Jensen, head of the Energy and Transport Group at the European Environment Agency. “Here there has been more movement to make cities more livable for people, to get cities relatively free of cars.” To that end, the municipal Traffic Planning Department here in Zurich has been working overtime in recent years to torment drivers. Closely spaced red lights have been added on roads into town, causing delays and angst for commuters. Pedestrian underpasses that once allowed traffic to flow freely across major intersections have been removed. Operators in the city’s ever expanding tram system can turn traffic lights in their favor as they approach, forcing cars to halt. Around Löwenplatz, one of Zurich’s busiest squares, cars are now banned on many blocks. Where permitted, their speed is limited to a snail’s pace so that crosswalks and crossing signs can be removed entirely, giving people on foot the right to cross anywhere they like at any time. As he stood watching a few cars inch through a mass of bicycles and pedestrians, the city’s chief traffic planner, Andy Fellmann, smiled. “Driving is a stop-and-go experience,” he said. “That’s what we like! Our goal is to reconquer public space for pedestrians, not to make it easy for drivers.” While some American cities — notably San Francisco, which has “pedestrianized” parts of Market Street — have made similar efforts, they are still the exception in the United States, where it has been difficult to get people to imagine a life where cars are not entrenched, Dr. Schipper said. Europe’s cities generally have stronger incentives to act. Built for the most part before the advent of cars, their narrow roads are poor at handling heavy traffic. Public transportation is generally better in Europe than in the United States, and gas often costs over $8 a gallon, contributing to driving costs that are two to three times greater per mile than in the United States, Dr. Schipper said. What is more, European Union countries probably cannot meet a commitment under the Kyoto Protocol to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions unless they curb driving. The United States never ratified that pact. Globally, emissions from transportation continue a relentless rise, with half of them coming from personal cars. Yet an important impulse behind Europe’s traffic reforms will be familiar to mayors in Los Angeles and Vienna alike: to make cities more inviting, with cleaner air and less traffic. Michael Kodransky, global research manager at the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy in New York, which works with cities to reduce transport emissions, said that Europe was previously “on the same trajectory as the United States, with more people wanting to own more cars.” But in the past decade, there had been “a conscious shift in thinking, and firm policy,” he said. And it is having an effect. After two decades of car ownership, Hans Von Matt, 52, who works in the insurance industry, sold his vehicle and now gets around Zurich by tram or bicycle, using a car-sharing service for trips out of the city. Carless households have increased from 40 to 45 percent in the last decade, and car owners use their vehicles less, city statistics show.

“There were big fights over whether to close this road or not — but now it is closed, and people got used to it,” he said, alighting from his bicycle on Limmatquai, a riverside pedestrian zone lined with cafes that used to be two lanes of gridlock. Each major road closing has to be approved in a referendum.

Can Designer Power Masts Win Over the Public?

By Christina Schmidt

Europe is undergoing a revolution in energy production that requires massive new infrastructure to support the shift to renewables. But do new power lines always have to result in blight? Some utility companies are hoping that designer power masts can help overcome local opposition. Erik Bystrup gets enthusiastic when the talk turns to power transmission masts. Standing in front of one of his masts, the Danish architect uses words like “elegance” and “beauty” and talks about how pleased he is that transmission masts are finally no longer dotting the landscape like “giant sad men.”

There is a simple reason behind Bystrup’s passionate words: His masts are not ordinary steel structures but art. To improve the Danes’ acceptance of the poles, which are visible at great distances, the architect designed modern masts that look like abstract crowns or eagles’ wings.

Bystrup is proud that he can count himself among the pioneers of a new aesthetic of the power transmission mast. Some 500 of his winged masts will soon mark a 166-kilometer (103-mile) section of power lines in Denmark’s Jutland region. The architect rhapsodizes over the steel poles, saying the way they reflect sunlight will make them “almost invisible.”

Invisibility is a characteristic many citizens would like see applied to power lines. Because of the massive shift to renewable energies currently being planned, thousands of kilometers of new, high-voltage power lines will have to be installed throughout Europe in the coming years, a prospect that generates very little enthusiasm across the continent. The masts will be used to transport electricity from offshore windparks off the North and Baltic seas as well as saved energy from batteries in Norway in Northern Europe as well as power from giant solar energy facilities in North Africa to consumers across the continent. But the networks of steel cable, which are about 60 meters (197 feet) high, are a blight on the landscape and are surrounded by electromagnetic fields, triggering public campaigns against them in many European countries. In Germany, the public debate is beginning in earnest following plans by Chanceller Angela Merkel to back away from her government’s initial move to extend the lifelines of nuclear plants and to now likely retreat from atomic energy entirely.

Design against NIMBY Lawsuits

With a whole slew of not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) lawsuits planned against the construction of so-called new energy autobahns in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, grid operators in many places are now deploying a new weapon in the fight against this concentrated resistance: the power of beauty. In the Finnish city of Jyväskylä, transmission masts are no longer just unadorned metal poles. Instead, yellow, looped Y-shaped masts stretch into the sky. When they are illuminated at night, they convey the message of green electricity. In Iceland, dramatic designs could lead to masts in the future that take the shape of human statues. Because of the way they are designed, they can even be adjusted to suit their environment, so that, for example, they look like people climbing up a hill.

The electric utilities can already report their first successes. Bystrup’s crown-shaped masts in northern Denmark are the result of a contest the Danish grid operator Energinet.dk announced about 10 years ago. To gain approval for a new transmission route, the company enticed local residents and their political representatives with the idea of using less conspicuous designer masts. “Politicians took up the idea and then told us it was a requirement,” says Energinet.dk manager Christian Jensen. It was a horse trade that apparently brought reconciliation into the political debate. Today, local residents fondly refer to the transmission masts as “magic wands,” an allusion to their shape.

But it isn’t everywhere that citizens meekly succumb to the charm of the spruced up masts, which, at the end of the day, are still masts, as the Dutch grid operator Tennet experienced. Its proposal to replace the standard steel poles with double masts consisting of two asparagus-shaped poles encountered little approval. “We want underground lines instead of dangerous masts. A new exterior doesn’t change that,” says Harry van der Weij, one of the protesting citizens.

‘Our Projects Are Still in Their Infancy’

In other European countries, the conflict over power transmission masts as art is in full swing. In Germany, on the other hand, which likes to see itself as a pioneer of future-oriented energy technology, there are no masts shaped like asparagus, crowns or wings to be seen. “Our projects are still in their infancy,” says Wilfried Fischer, manager of major projects with the eastern German grid operator 50Hertz. The traditional grid-shaped mast is so superior in terms of solidity and economic efficiency, says Fischer, that the only word he can think of to describe them is “optimal.”

German bureaucracy, with its thousands of safety and construction rules, has also made it difficult to change the design of traditional masts. “Overhead power lines are in the public space. They are our responsibility, and we cannot experiment with untested materials,” says Fischer.

The planned surge of investment would provide an opportunity to design power lines to be as unobtrusive as possible. Designer masts are a compromise but by no means an answer to the question of how much harm the human need for electricity is actually worth. The grid operators still have other ways of satisfying local residents’ demands, such as by using the power grid of Deutsche Bahn, Germany’s national railway, installing underground power lines and even integrating wind turbines into power masts to generate additional electricity.

The Danish architect Bystrup knows from firsthand experience how great the need for discussion is. During the course of the public debate, he was forced to redesign his eagle-wing mast several times. First it was safety concerns and residents’ demands that the masts be placed farther away from homes, and then visual preferences, that made the masts slimmer, but also taller and more noticeable. The architect was left with little of his original vision to create an invisible mast.