Showing posts from category: New Technology,

Glasgow’s Postwar Planning Wars Part 1 (Revised): Visions for a “New Glasgow”

Posted by funambulator@live.com on March 18, 2025

Tags: “New Glasgow”, Brutalist architecture, Glasgow Corporation, Modernism, Moss Hts, Post-WWII urban planning, Red Road Flats, Robert Bruce

⨳ ⨳ ⨳ As WWII drew to a close Glasgow Corporation (the City Council) had big plans for changing the face of Scotland’s biggest city and the (British) “Empire’s Second City” in the postwar period. Determined to rid Glasgow of its unhealthy “ghettos of decay and decline”, its plague of overcrowded slums and entrenched poverty and to fix the city’s critical housing shortage, the Corporation was gearing up for a mission to transform the city-scape. In 1947 a plan for total urban renewal put forward by the city engineer and master of works, Robert Bruce, found favour with the authorities〚𝔸〛 [‘Streets in the Sky: a social history of Glasgow’s brutalist tower blocks to be documented’, Judith Duffy, The Herald, 29-Mar-2015, www.heraldscotland.com].

⨳ ⨳ ⨳

“New Glasgow:” Bruce’s radical scheme was to wipe the slate clean in Glasgow…tear down a whole slab of the city including the run-down tenements in a wholesale slum clearance. Included in the plan for demolition were much of Glasgow’s iconic buildings, including architectural gems built by famous 19th century architects of the city, “Greek” Thomson and CR Mackintosh (Glasgow Central Railway Station, School of Arts, etc and many other historic Victorian, Georgian and Art Deco buildings). Bruce, an avid admirer of Le Corbusier modernism, wanted to fill the void at least partially with skyscrapers (“Streets in the sky”), the plan being for the city to “reinvent itself by building high and building modern”, alongside a program of urban and industrial decentralisation〚𝔹〛 [‘Canned designs: Two sides of Glasgow’, Christopher Beanland, TheLong+Short, 07-Apr-2016, www.thelongandshort.org]. Bruce also wanted to jettison the city’s familiar grid pattern in favour of straight streets and rectilinear blocks.

⏏️ Slums in the Gorbels (Photo: thesun.co.uk)

⨳ ⨳ ⨳

Fixing “the worse slums in Britain” Apparently unfazed by the horror expressed by many Glaswegians at Bruce’s brazen assault on the city’s grand architectural heritage, the Glasgow City Council had definite self-interest in mind when it endorsed the plan: Bruce’s scheme was essentially about slum clearance and re-housing people in the less densely populated parts of the city, not about re-location away from the city’s boundaries. Politically, this suited the Labour-dominated Corporation which was concerned that large scale depopulation of central Glasgow〚ℂ〛 would diminish the city’s standing in the UK. In the late 1940s Glasgow Corporation walked back its initial endorsement of the Bruce Report…shied away by the projected astronomical cost of the project while Britain was in the vice of postwar austerity. Ultimately some of its initiatives were implemented but many were never put into practice〚𝔻〛. One ‘modernisation’ initiative that did come to realisation was the M8 motorway, constructed right through the middle of Glasgow (“Glasgow Inner Ring Road” encircling the city centre). Around 230 tower blocks in the city did get built (some of the tower blocks were subsequently torn down much later), eliciting mixed opinions from the community. Most of these high-rise constructions were cheaply and quickly finished to meet the pressing exigences of public housing. While some residents were initially attracted to the features of modern convenience included—central heating, indoor toilets and hot running water—the downside for the longer term was poor quality housing stock (Duffy).

⏏️ Moss Heights (Source: UK Housing Wiki – Fandom)

⨳ ⨳ ⨳ Moss Heights: Moss Heights in Cardonald was the Corporation’s debut experiment with high-rise family housing (accommodating 263 families, built 1950-1954), and one of the best known. Intended to be “superior high-density housing for the working class”, the reality was that Moss Heights was more expensive to rent or buy than the usual Glasgow Corp units, thus many of those same working class families couldn’t afford to live there [‘Moss Heights’, University of Glasgow Case Study, www.gla.ac.uk]. The radical nature of the Bruce Plan polarised the community and dismayed many Glaswegians, eventually provoking a reaction to its extreme position and an ensuing tussle between two competing bodies of technocrats, one national and one local, to determine the future shape of Glasgow. The rival plan, the Clyde Valley Regional Plan 1946 (CVRP), was backed by the Scottish Office in Edinburgh. Part 2 of ‘Glasgow’s Postwar Planning Wars’ will look at the CVRP and its impact on Glasgow.

Footnote: Red Road Flats While Moss Heights was a “one-off”, Robert Bruce’s vision of clusters of high-rise buildings filling the Glasgow skyline didn’t really arrive until the 1960s, their belatedness made up for by being scattered all over the city. One of the most notoriously Brutalist of the high-rise Sixties complexes was the massive complex of eight tower blocks known as the Red Road Flats in the northeast of Glasgow〚𝔼〛 . The ageing and condemned buildings, vandalised and afflicted with asbestos and rising damp, were demolished between 2012 and 2015 [‘End of the Red Road’, Disappearing Glasgow, www.disappearing-glasgow.com]. Red Road, along with “the equally controversial and derided Hutchesontown C estate in the Gorbals”, became a symbol of “the errors of Glasgow’s ambitious post-war housing renewal policy” [‘Red River Flats’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

〚𝔼〛 furnished with the same set of “mod cons” as Moss Heights

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For Parts 2 and 3 of ‘Glasgow’s Planning Wars’ click on the following links:

https://www.7dayadventurer.com/2021/12/25/glasgows-postwar-planning-wars-utopian-visions-of-dystopia-slum-clearance-new-towns-and-social-engineering-part-2/

https://www.7dayadventurer.com/2021/12/31/glasgows-postwar-planning-wars-utopian-visions-of-dystopia-slum-clearance-new-towns-and-social-engineering-part-3/

Chandigarh, India: City Beautiful? Showcase for a Modern New Democracy? Or The Foisting of a Eurocentric Planning Model on the Third World?

Posted by Bonza Rottwheeler on February 25, 2025

Tags: Brasília, Brutalist architecture, Capitol Complex, Chandigarh, Garden City Movement, Greening Chandigarh, Le Corbusier, Leisure Valley, Modernist movement, Pandit Nehru, Pierre Jeanneret, V7s

The legacy of the renowned and influential Swiss–French architect Le Corbusier is inextricably tied up with the Chandigarh project – on his résumé it stands out as “the only urban plan of substance he (ever) implemented” [‘Chandigarh, once the future city’, Architectural Review, 6th March 2003, www.architectural–review.com.]. Inspired by the 19th century Garden City Movement, Le Corbusier’s design and planning of this new and unique town in northern India (1951–65), has been frequently lauded as one of the 20th century Modernism’s greatest experiments in architecture and urban planning [‘Le Corbusier Rediscovered: Chandigarh And Beyond’, Raynish Wattas & Deepik Gandhi (Eds.), (2018)].

Plan of grid sectors for “Chandigarh City Beautiful” (#13 was omitted because Le Corbusier was superstitious about the number)

The Chandigarh planned city captured the imagination of architects around the world. As a framework for the design Le Corbusier utilised the metaphor of the human body — head = Capitol Complex | heart = City Centre (commercial sector) | lungs = Leisure Valley (open spaces and green sectors) | intellect = Educational Zone | circulation system = network of different types of roads (the 7Vs). Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh also provided inspiration for later “utopian” city masterplans like Brasília, the new capital of Brazil𖤓 and it continues to draw praise from architects and planners both within and outside India.

Le Corbusier’s symbolic Open Hand monument, part of the Capitol Complex (photo: Fernanda Antonio/ArchDaily)

Nehru’s aspirations for a modern, forward-looking new city: The catalyst for what Le Corbusier created in Chandigarh came from India’s foundation prime minister ‘Pandit’ Nehru who envisioned the new city in an independent India as making a clear departure from the traditional model of India’s cities, overcrowded and dependent on agricultural life. In its place he wanted a modern, progressive and efficient city, one suited for a new democracy like India…and a green one, with open spaces, green landscapes and green belts①. Presented with this brief Le Corbusier produced a masterplan for Chandigarh which emphasised low-density, self-contained housing contained within an orderly grid pattern, abundant public spaces, buildings and structures which were intended to stand as symbols for freedom and aesthetic harmony as well as react well to the prevailing severe climatic conditions. His buildings in the Capitol Complex combined Brutalist elements—an opportunity to experiment with his favourite material beton brut (raw concrete)—with a sculptural form of architecture while striving for a purity of geometric form.

Capitol Complex (source: chandigarhtourism.gov.in)

But has Chandigarh, Le Corbusier’s magnum opus, stood the test of time? Today, 70 years on, the once fresh and vibrant modernist city is looking its age, described by one writer as being “derelict” and “glorious” at the same time, and both “visionary and anachronistic” [Jared Green, ‘Chandigarh: Where Modernism Met India’, The Dirt, 4th April 2017, www.dirt.asla.org]. Another has described Chandigarh as “a museum piece in need of protection” (Sunil Khilnani). Le Corbusier’s Capitol showpieces are now noticeably the worse for wear after exposure to Indian heatwaves and monsoons. Moreover, it is significant that Chandigarh, intended to be a universal model for a radically new type of Indian city, has not fostered any subsequent attempts to replicate Le Corbusier’s bold experiment in modernist planning anywhere else in India.

Le Corbusier (left) on his artificial Chandigarh lake with his cousin, the project’s chief architect Pierre Jeanneret (photo: Suresh Kumar)

A failure to deliver for all Chandigarh residents: Le Corbusier’s housing solution and plan to cap the size of the city’s population to give Chandigarhians some breathing space have been subverted. An influx of internal migrants has exploded the population from a planned maximum of 500,000 to more than double that. Overcrowding has led to the proliferation of shantytowns, slums and illegal food stalls on the city’s fringes, encroaching on the showcase green belt. The architect’s low-density living ideal has been compromised by the emergence of multiple occupancy, four or more families sharing the same house. For the lower/working class residents of the city have found themselves isolated in urban villages, cutoff from their destinations (shopping, educational, entertainment, etc).

Chamber of the Chief Justice (source: chinmaye.com)

Two classes of Chanigarhians: The poor are the big losers in Le Corbusier’s would-be Indian utopia…trapped on the periphery, their capacity to connect with the centre and its services, to access employment, etc is severely curtailed…representing a failure of Le Corbusier’s planning in not accommodating the social, cultural and economic problems of the lower strata of society [‘Le Corbusier’s Failed Modernism’, CRIT Magazine, the American Institute of Architects, (Tanner), March 1979, www.cknl.eu]. As put into practice, Chandigarh, though built by the poorest workers, was never intended for their use, but for the Punjabi elite (Green).

Worsening traffic is another factor to further dampen the attraction of Chandigarh as a place to live…the city has the largest number of vehicles per capita in the country and the streets and the rectangular grid pattern are unmistakably meant for automobiles rather than walkers. These are all areas of urban development where Le Corbusier fell short of his stated aim of improving the human condition.

Chandigarh city traffic (source: dailyguardian.com)

Implanting western aesthetics: Cultural insensitivity is one theme of detractors who rail against the absence of “Indianness” in the experimental city and the disregarding of the existing traditions of the Indian people. The Le Corbusier modernist experiment has been condemned as “an act of western cultural imperialism” for imposing Eurocentric ideals and a western planning ideology on a population rooted in a very different, pluralistic culture② (the grid pattern of sectors, European-style parks, hierarchical road system, etc.)[Pratyush Sarup, ‘Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh: Bold Vision or a Modernist Failure?’, AD, 13th May 2024, www.admiddleeast.com]③④.

Considering the aesthetics of Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh architecture—specifically the Capitol Complex—there’s a tendency among observers to see the functionalist buildings as cold, rigid and uninviting⑤ [Scott Harper, ‘Appetite for Construction: Le Corbusier’, The Rake, October 2024, www.therake.com]. Brutalist architecture and a preoccupation with concrete can be alienating for some people.

𖤓 for the story of Brazil’s experiment with modernist urban planning and architecture for the new capital of Brasília, go to https://www.7dayadventurer.com/2022/02/03/brasilia-brazils-modernist-capital-in-the-interior-an-unliveable-utopian-showcase/

① “a new town, symbolic of freedom of India unfettered by traditions of the past…(an) expression of faith in the future”

② Le Corbusier never stayed permanently in Chandigarh during the project’s lifespan and, most tellingly, never consulted with the local inhabitants about their needs and wants

③ this perspective also questions why outsiders and no native Indian architects were offered the project

④ Sarup: it was a planning failure because it “didn’t take into account the nation’s unique urban fabric”

⑤ and the large empty spaces between the key buildings conveys a sense of unconnectedness and a sterile atmosphere

The Sea Peoples Puzzle and the Collapse of Civilisations in the Late Bronze Age

Posted by Wolfgang Childerglas on February 17, 2025

Tags: Aegean Sea, Amarna Letters, Anatolia, Climate change in antiquity, Denyen and Ekwesh, Eastern Mediterranean, Egypt, Eric H Cline and ‘1177 BC’, Hittite kingdom, King Meryey of Libya, Late Bronze Age, Lukka, Medinet Habu, Mycenae (Greece), Nine Bows Confederation, Peleset, Pharaoh Ramesses III, Sea Peoples, Shekelesh, Sherden, Teresh, The Levant, Tjekker, Weshesh

By about 1200 BC the Late Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean and Aegean world was in turmoil. War and the movement of peoples around the region abounded as international trade ceased, cities crumbling and civilisations collapsed. With a scarcity of hard evidence for a period of history so very distant from our own, the default explanation of many historians until recent times was that the large-scale collapse and destruction was down to one factor, the emergence of vast hordes of nomadic warriors, enigmatic and mysterious pirates and marauders which have been subsumed under the name “Sea Peoples”𝕒. Very little is known of the Sea Peoples outside of what the ancient Egyptians have recorded about these shadowy invaders of the Eastern Mediterranean littoral…which is problematic for historical enquiry in itself – having “the (hefty) disadvantage of being known only by their enemies” [Duke, T. T. The Classical Journal, vol. 65, no. 3, 1969, pp. 134–37. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3296263. Accessed 15 Feb. 2025]

Late Bronze Age (credit: Finn Bjørklid / creativecommons.org)

The assumption that the Sea Peoples were pretty much wholly responsible for the collapse of civilisations in the Eastern Mediterranean in the 12th century BC has been challenged by historians of recent time. This revisionist view maintains that other factors could equally have caused the carnage of that world…drought, grave food shortages leading to a state of famine, the effects of climate change. Research into early agro-economies indicates their vulnerability to drought and long-term temperature change owing to general cooling which truncates their crop-growing season [McCormack et al (2012) cited in Wiener, M. H., FISCHER, P. M., & BÜRGE, T. (2017). Causes of Complex Systems Collapse at the End of the Bronze Age. In “Sea Peoples” Up-to-Date: New Research on Transformation in the Eastern Mediterranean in 13th-11th Centuries BCE (1st ed., pp. 43–74). Austrian Academy of Sciences Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1v2xvsn.7].

Historian and archaeologist Eric H Cline in particular argues that rather than being the perpetrators of the mega-devastation that befell the region by ca.1177 BC, the Sea Peoples were victims of the collapse as much as anyone else. Cline describes them as refugees fleeing from the drought and famine of cities and civilisations collapsing asunder [‘The Late Bronze Age Collapse and the Aftermath’, Eric H. Cline with Javier Mejia, YouTube interview 2024].

**Medinet Habu: Ramesses III’s memorial temple**

Primary sources illuminating the identity of the Sea Peoples: The first reference we have to the Sea Peoples is the Amarna Letters of Upper Egypt (ca.1345 BC), clay tablets mentioning, among other things, the existence of and contact with various foreign peoples named as the Sherden, Lukka and Danuna. The richest source of information on the activities of these mysterious seafaring tribes resides in Medinet Habu, Ramesses III’s memorial temple near Luxor. The inscriptions of the scribes tell the Egyptian version of the story of the Sea Peoples who having defeated all other city-states and settlements in their way, launched an armada and land force led by the kingdom of Ekwesh, attacking the Nile Delta with the objective of establishing settlements on its fertile farmlands𝕓. They launched three attempts at invasion of Egypt over a period of 30-odd years and three times they were defeated by the Egyptians. The temple walls reveal the death toll and punishments of the vanquished Sea Peoples and the enslavement of many of them (some of the captured Shardans were incorporated into the Egyptian army to defend the kingdom’s northern frontiers from the Hittites).

Pictorial depictions (above & below) of the Battle of the Nile Delta (ca.1178 BC) (Medinet Habu)

So, who were the Sea Peoples and where did they come from?: In regard to the identity of the Sea Peoples the extant records give us names but little understanding of who they were. There appears to have been at least nine culturally separate tribal groups–including the Sherdan, the Peleset, the Lukka, the Shekelesh, the Tjekker, the Denyen (or Danuna), the Ekwesh, the Teresh, the Meshwesh and the Weshesh—some much better known than others. They formed themselves into a warring confederation (Egyptian records give it the name the “Nine Bows Confederation” whilst under the leadership of King Meryey of Libya). The question of their origins is more problematic to scholars. The Lukka is associated with the region of Lycia (in Anatolia) although they were thought to be highly mobile. Historians have tended to identify the Peleset with the later Philistines (in the Bible also called Phlishtim (“invaders”) and located vaguely in the region of the Aegean. The Shekelesh have been associated with the island of Sicily although this wasn’t necessarily their original homeland as it’s also speculated that they may have moved there some time during the Bronze Age. The origins of the Sherden (or Shardan) is equally mysterious, with some archaeologists placing them within the Nuragic civilisation of Sardinia. The Tjekker have been variously linked to Canaan, Eastern Crete and the Sicals of Sicily, but without any conclusiveness. The Ekwesh are thought to have been from or based in the land of Libya, as was the Meshwesh. The origins of other groups are even more shadowy, such as the Denyen (or Danuna), the Karkiya and the Weshesh. Balancing these theories, Cline and other noted scholars hypothesise that the Sea Peoples’ migration began from the Western Mediterranean.

The Sea Peoples wearing distinctive feathered headdresses – as depicted on Ramesses II’s temple (source: Texas A&M University)

As Prof. Cline summed up the enigmatic Sea Peoples story: “the simple answer is that there is no simple answer. It remains an archaeological mystery that is the subject of much debate even today, more than 150 years after the discussions first began”.

𝕒 “Sea Peoples” was not a term used by contemporaries—Egyptians called them simply “Northerners”—but arose out of convenience to describe disparate groups of peoples thought to have come from islands and coastal areas of the Mediterranean (in reality, ironically, some came not from the sea at all!). What is established is that the Sea Peoples pursued a systematic pattern of invading and defeating the smaller empires and states of the region (Hittite kingdom, Mycenae (Greece), Syria, the Levant), culminating in a series of invasions of Egyptian Empire between ca.1213 BC and ca.1177 BC. They were repulsed and routed by the Egyptians (according to the Egyptian inscriptions) during the reigns of three succeeding pharaohs. The final Egyptian victory under Pharaoh Ramesses III was a Pyrrhic one. The war weakened the Egyptian economy to the point of bankruptcy, the empire was greatly diminished in size and by ca.1250 BC the Egyptian New Kingdom was finished.

𝕓 the Sea Peoples were atypical invaders, accompanying the fighting men was an entourage that included the families of the raiders and their livestock. The phenomena was a complete package, it’s objective included migration and the settlement of good farming lands…all of this added weight to the theory that the Sea Peoples were refugees in search of a permanent home

𓂉 𓂉 𓁈 ༗ ༗𓁈 ༗༗ 𓁈 𓂉 𓂉

Strangelove and his Cold Warrior Comrades, Art Imitating Life

Posted by Sloane Snodgrasse on July 8, 2023

Tags: Brigadier General Jack D Ripper, Cold War, Dr Strangelove, Fail Safe, General Buck Turgidson, General Curtis LeMay, Henry Kissinger, Herman Kahn, John Birch Society, Megadeath, Nuclear standoff, Peter George ‘Red Alert’, Peter Sellers, RAND Corporation, Robert Welch, Stanley Kubrick, Terry Southern, Wernher von Braun

Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 dark satire Dr Strangelove is a classic of the genre which comically probes the collective anxieties triggered in the West by the Cold War at its height in the early 1960s. Kubrick hammers home the utter absurdity of the prevailing nuclear standoff between the US and the Soviet Union and the consequential existential threat to the planet from the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) and “Doomsday bombs”. The movie’s plot involves the unilateral unleashing of a preemptive strike on Moscow by a deranged US Air Force general and the Pentagon’s shoddy attempts at “management” of the crisis.

Sellers as Dr Strangelove

˚ Kubrick and his film co-writers Terry Southern and Peter George give us three dangerously over-the-top, lunatic fringe characters – two gung-ho hawkish military types, generals Turgidson and Ripper, and the eponymous “Dr Strangelove”𝟙. The central figure in the nuclear nightmare scenario, Dr Strangelove (played by Peter Sellers), is a former German Nazi technocrat turned US strategic weapons expert and scientific advisor to the US president Merkin Muffley (also Sellers). Strangelove is creepily sanguine about the prospect for humanity post-nuclear Holocaust, expanding on his vision of a 100-year plan for survival (for some)…a male elite ensconced in an underground bunker where they can sire a selective breeding program with a plurality of desirable females [‘Dr Strangelove (character)’, Kubrick Wiki, www.kubrick.fandom.com].

˚ Strangelove a composite of various personages Though characterised by caricature and satire, the film’s three wildest characters are recognisable among the actual political, military and scientific figures of the day in America. The heavy Middle European accent of Dr Strangelove, his authoritarian-Nazi mannerisms and regular references to “Mein Führer”, has led some observers to conclude that the character was based on German aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun, instrumental in the Nazis’ V-2 rocket project and after 1945 in the US designing space rockets for NASA (a view given countenance by one of the screenwriters Terry Southern). Others have added émigré Hungarian scientists John von Neumann and Edward Teller as models for Strangelove. Both men worked on the Super-bomb projects (A-Bomb, H-Bomb, C-Bomb) for the US government in the 1940s and 50s, and both were rabidly anti-communist and anti-Russian [P.D. Smith, Doomsday Men (2007)]. Teller in particular shared a number of Strangelove’s traits, eg, volatile nature, Soviet-fixated and obsessed with bombs, possessed of a prosthetic limb. It’s probably a reasonable bet that the there was something of the personality of all three men in Dr Strangelove, but other individuals were also sources of inspiration for the character.

˚ A Megadeath influencer from RAND Another real-life figure widely associated with the Strangelove character is Herman Kahn, who was a physicist and military strategist with the RAND Corporation𝟚. Kubrick got the idea of a “Doomsday Machine” from Kahn whose 1960 book On Thermonuclear War posited the possibility of a winnable (sic) nuclear war. Kahn has been described as a “Megadeath Intellectual” with his robust insistence that the dangers of nuclear war were exaggerated (this also accords with the outlier position of General Buck Turgidson – see below)𝟛.

˚ Military madness Maverick general in the Strategic Air Command Jack D Ripper (played by Sterling Hayden) is gripped by the all-consuming communist conspiracy hysteria. His belief in the loony notion that the Soviets have been fluoridating American water supplies to pollute the “precious bodily fluids” of Americans leads him to initiate a H-Bomb onslaught on the USSR without consulting the Pentagon. Ripper’s wild rhetoric and blustery style has been compared to Robert Welch, the rabid anti-communist founder of the ultra-conservative and reactionary John Birch Society. Ripper’s loopy claim about Soviet water contamination echoes Welch’s baseless anti-fluoridation allegations (‘How I Learned to Stop Worrying’).

Gen. LeMay (Image: Mort Kunstler / Stag)

˚ “Expendable dead” Gen. Buck Turgidson (played by George C Scott) was largely modelled on four-star air force general Curtis LeMay𝟜. Turgidson is an unrepentant war hawk who wants to escalate Ripper’s nuclear attack on the Soviets, justifying it with the outrageous claim that it will result in only “limited” casualties from the ensuing superpower war, which in his estimate equates to 10 to 20 million dead! Like Turgidson LeMay danced to the beat of his own drum, he was well disposed towards a preemptive strike on the Russians and vociferously advocated nuclear strikes on Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis and on North Vietnam during the Indo-China War.

˚ The actions and statements of the clearly psychotic Ripper and morally reprehensible Turgidson convey insights into the level of paranoia gripping the real-life military commanders in the climate of the nuclear arms buildup in the Sixties. [Fred Kaplin, “Truth Stranger than ‘Strangelove‘“, New York Times, 10-Oct-2004, nytimes.com].

Fail Safe (1964)

Footnote: Satirical Dr Strangelove v Serious Fail Safe Intriguingly, at the same time Kubrick was making Dr Strangelove there was a separate film in the works also about an American nuclear attack on the USSR. Fail Safe dealt with the same subject but as a straight-up drama. In this second film about nuclear Armageddon the trigger to the catastrophic event however is not rogue generals but a technical glitch. Strangelove’s equivalent morality-free scientist character in Fail Safe is Professor Groeteschele (played by Walter Matthau) who draws similar comparisons with Herman Kahn.

𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪

𝟙 Dr Strangelove is broadly based on George’s novel Red Alert (1958), although the character of Dr Strangelove doesn’t appear in the novel 𝟚 mimicked in Dr Strangelove as the BLAND Corporation 𝟛 another Strangelove comparison is Henry Kissinger…suggested by a shared “eerie poise, lugubrious German accent and brutally pragmatic realpolitik” [Gary Susman, ‘Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb’, Time, 11-Feb-2013, www.entertainment.time.com] 𝟜 although behaviourally the Ripper character (“cigar-chomping, gruff-talking”) also resembles LeMay’s style

Dawn of the Open-All-Hours Banking Interface, AKA the ATM, a Finance World Game–Changer

Posted by Wolfgang Childerglas on March 13, 2023

Tags: ATM banking, Bankomat, Barclaycash, Docuteller, James Goodfellow, John Shepherd-Barron, Luther George Simjian, Online computer transactions, Reg Varney

🏧 🏧 🏧

ALTHOUGH computerised ATM machines didn’t emerge as a mainstream feature of the urban landscape until the 1970s and 1980s, the first Automated Teller Machine was opened as early as 1967. Barclays Bank introduced the ur-ATM machine (branded as Barclaycash) which was located at its Enfield Town, London, branch, with popular 1960s TV comedy actor Reg Varney (above, performing the “celebrity opening”) selected in the role as “Customer No 1”. Designed by John Shepherd-Barron, the DACS machine lacked one essential ingredient of the modern ATM – no magnetic plastic card! Instead, customers inserted a cheque-like token impregnated with a radioactive compound which when matched with the customer’s ID dispensed money (initially limited to a maximum of £10).

Barclaycash (Source: deccanchronicle.com)

The need for ATMs grew out of the service limitations of the highly regulated banking system in a changing modern world. Banks in the UK and elsewhere were hamstrung by quite restricted business hours, often open only around ten to three weekdays. Customers who worked during these hours found their access to personal banking severely curtailed, especially when it came to the withdrawal of cash. In the Sixties project teams in banks in the UK, Sweden and Japan were all working at developing a form of automated cash dispenser. The successful introduction of the ATM in public locations solved the problem, offering instant, 24-hour access to cash.

After the Enfield ATM and it’s successors opened their windows there was some initial reluctance by customers to embrace the radical new way of banking⌖…a wait-and-see attitude prevailed, but not for long. Today ATMs swamp the commercial retail world, at a rough estimate there is over three million units operate globally (there’s even one in Antarctica!)

The pioneer of the PIN 📌 As with the debate over the invention of the first flying machine, Shepherd-Barron’s claim to originality has its challengers. Around the same time development engineer James Goodfellow came up with his own version, a Chubb machine❂ which worked on a PIN number associated with a code token in the form of a plastic card with punched holes. Goodfellow’s innovation was installed in branches of the Westminster Bank one month after the Barclays ATM.

Innovative Scanda 🏧 But can we categorically say with 100% surety that Goodfellow was the sole originator of the PIN? Sweden has a claim here too for pioneering recognition. The Metior Company’s Bankomat came into operation at Uppsala Sparbank just one week after the Barclays’ machine. The Swedish technology, on display at a Stockholm fair in 1964, presented a plastic-coated card and linked PIN. It seems likely that Shepherd-Barron, Goodfellow and the Swedes all devised their ATMs at around the same time independently without any connexion to or cognisance of each other’s projects.

ATM pioneer Simjian (Source: alchetron.com)

Neither Shepherd-Barron or Goodfellow are credited with devising the concept of the ATM itself. The consensus tends to attribute this to Armenian-American inventor Luther George Simjian. Simjian’s Bankograph, patented in 1960 but never fully commercially developed, came up with the idea of a “hole-in-the wall machine” that would allow customers to make financial transactions.

As with the debate over the invention of the world’s first manned flying machine, Shepherd-Barron’s claim to prototype creation has its challengers. Around the same time as the Shepherd-Barron innovation development engineer James Goodfellow came up with his own version, a Chubb machine❂ which worked on a PIN number associated with a code token in the form of a plastic card with punched holes. Goodfellow’s innovation was installed in branches of the Westminster Bank one month after the Barclays ATM.

Introduction of the ATM in America 🏧 The first American ATM was introduced in 1969✪ at the Chemical Bank’s branch in New York’s Rockville Centre (in the US they are sometimes referred to as “cashpoints”). The pioneering 24/7 US ATM (designed by Donald Wetzel) the Docuteller utilised reusable magnetic coded cards.

Lloyd’s Cashpoint (Source: deccanchronicle.com)

On the road to digital banking 🏧 These early dinosaurs of the alternative to face-to-face banking, the 1960s generation of ATMs, were of course all offline. The world’s first computerised ATM, introduced by Lloyds Bank, didn’t have its genesis (again in the UK) until December 1972…installed in Brentwood, Essex, the ATM cash machine was developed in partnership with IBM.

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⌖ prior to the introduction of the ATM and in its formative stage there was unsurprisingly a degree of resistance to them from banking employee unions

❂ the Chubb cash dispensing machine in its earliest iteration retained the user’s card (as proof of receipt), which later was posted back to the owner

✪ coincidentally the same year of the first operating ATM machine in Spain

Brasília, Brazil’s Modernist Capital in the Interior: An Unliveable Utopian Showcase?

Posted by Bonza Rottwheeler on February 3, 2022

Tags: Avant-garde, Brasília, Brazil, Centre v periphery, Futurism, Juscelino Kubitschek, Lúcio Costa, Modernist architecture, Oscar Niemeyer, Plano Piloto, Robert Hughes, Roberto B Marx, Satellite towns, Simone de Beauvoir, Urban utopias

Brazil’s bold experiment in creating a new capital city from scratch in five years, Brasília, won much praise as a modern architectural marvel upon its inauguration in 1960. With project town planner Lúcio Costa’s radical, artistic urban plan (the Plano Piloto) for the central city in the shape of a bird in flight⦑a⦒, and the symmetry and spacing of architect Oscar Niemeyer’s stark white, curvilinear, futuristic structures with sculptural silhouettes⦑b⦒, Brasília was heralded as “a modern utopia (expressing) optimism and trust in the future” and a demonstration of Brazil’s capacity for modernising progress (Dr Steffen Lehmann, cited in ‘60 Years Ago, The Modernist City of Brasília Was Built From Scratch’, Stefanie Waldek, AD, 21-Aug-2020, www.architecturaldigest.com).

↟ Costa’s plan for Brasília (Source: nickkahler.tumblr.com)

Bland homogeneity? Detractors of the futuristic urban ‘miracle’ in Brazil’s central west however have been many and varied. Brasília’s inner city residential zones comprising superquadras (“superblocks”) were characterised by French writer Simone de Beauvoir as all exuding “the same air of elegant monotony”. The city’s large open lawns, plazas, and fields have been likened to wastelands. Structures intended 65 years ago to represent the future, now crumbling, accentuate this sense of decay and obsolescence (‘Brasília, national capital, Brazil’, Britannica, www.britannica.com)

The car is king! In a city built for the automobile, Brasília is uber-pedestrian-unfriendly. “With long distances and harrowing six-lane highways connected by spaghetti junctions, Brasília presents challenges for walkers” (Lonely Planet) – which is good news at least for the city’s car hire firms! Transport options for the non-driver in Brasília have been meagre…the subway was basically an afterthought; footpaths are confined to a scanty few, where they exist they are dwarfed by the criss-crossing gargantuan highways; the first set of traffic lights in Brasília didn’t get installed until the 1970s (‘Lost and Found – Brasília’, Blueprint, ABC Radio (broadcast 21-Jan-2022).

A lack of a pulse? Some critics point to the Brasília lifestyle’s deficit in “humanness”. The city centre is bereft of “the typical street life of other traditional Brazilian cities”. It is merely a place to work…night life is unstimulating, city workers tend not to hang around after hours, few stay to “live and play in the Pilot Plan” centre (Kobi Karp in Waldek). According to Prof. Ricky Burdett (LSE), Brasília flounders on the basics of what constitutes a city…no messy streets, no people living above shops, no mixed use neighbourhoods – rather it’s “a sort of office campus for a government” (‘Niemeyer’s Brasilia: Does it work as a city?”, Robin Banerji, BBC News, 06-Dec-2012, www.bbc.com). The scope for improvement is hamstrung as a result of restrictions on development and expansion in accordance with the city’s world heritage covenants.

The creation of two segregated communities Overpopulation is part of the Brasília problem…designed as a city for 500,000 people, it has five times that many residents today, hence the growth of satellite towns which the poorer residents of Brasília have been shunted into⦑c⦒. Allocation of resources is another…whereas in the centre everything was zoned, over-organised city blocks to the point of impracticality, the satellite towns have been neglected and left in a disorganised state without adequate infrastructure, services and civic spaces (Britannica; ‘Lost and Found – Brasília’). Accentuating the imbalance between the centre and the outliers, only 300,000 of the 2.5 million Brasiliense live in the Pilot Plan area where the jobs are!

”A monument to technocratic rationalism” One of the biggest savagings of Brasília’s architectural merit came from trenchant art critic Robert Hughes who brutally summed up the capital city’s shortcomings: “a ceremonial slum…this is what you get when you think in terms of space rather than place and about single rather than multiple meanings, when you design for political aspirations and not real human needs. Miles of jerry-built, platonic nowhere infested with Volkswagens” (The Shock of the New, Ep. 4 (BBC documentary, 1980). The “utopian” city of Niemeyer and Costa, lauded at its onset as ilha da fantasia has acquired other, less glowing epithets such as “concrete carbuncle” (‘fast:track’, BBC News). For Jane Jacobs (Death and Life of American Cities, the failure of Brasília and other such utopian dreamscapes was in making the mistake of trying to substitute art for life – with unworkable consequences for the inhabitants. Brasília has also come under fire on environmental grounds, the impact of its footprint has contributed to the deforestation of the Amazon region.

Postscript: the whole purpose of Brazil’s new capital in the interior for President Kubitschek⦑d⦒ and the urban planners was to create a modern city that avoided the excesses of Río and São Paulo (overcrowded slums, the preponderance of favelas). Costa’s “grand vision” envisaged a new urban centre that was deliberate, orderly, rational, dignified and systematic. In practice, the endgame to the myopic focus on the Plano Piloto was a city of inequality (with a good quality of life only for a minority of the inhabitants), congestion and urban sprawl (‘Inside Brazil’s ‘cautionary tale’ for utopian urbanises’, Diana Budds, Curbed, 07-Jun-2019, www.archive.curbed.com). Rather than being transformed into the shining exception, Brasília is “a mirror of Brazilian society…those with power live in a little island or cocoon. Those who don’t—which is the majority—live on the outside” (Prof. Vincente Del Rio).

⦑a⦒ alternately it has been likened to the Crucifix, to an airplane or even to a bow and arrow

⦑b⦒ and avant-garde landscape design by Roberto B Marx

⦑c⦒ 90% of the Brasiliense, in the lower or lowest income brackets, live outside the centre in satellite towns

⦑d⦒ the politician in power who initiated the Brasília project in the mid-1950s

Glasgow’s Postwar Planning Wars: Utopian Visions of Dystopia, Slum Clearances, New Towns and Social Engineering – Part 2

Posted by E Curb Nottus on December 25, 2021

Tags: Archibald Jury, Bruce Report 1945, Cadbury’s Bournville, Clyde Valley Regional Plan 1946, Garden Cities Movement, Glasgow Corporation, Glasgow’s Peripheral Housing Estates, Green-belts, New Towns Act 1946, Robert Bruce, Robert Matthew, Scottish “new towns”, Sir Patrick Abercrombie, Welwyn and Letchworth garden cities

In Part 1 of ‘Glasgow’s Postwar Planning Wars’ we saw how decades of neglect and torpor had resulted in a concentration of Victorian slums and a chronic housing crisis that Glasgow authorities coming out of World War 2 were forced to confront. This prompted the 1945 Bruce Report, proposing that what Glasgow needed to regenerate its overpopulated metropolis was a new approach which was in the words of its author Robert Bruce, ‘surgical’ and ‘bold’. While Bruce’s scheme emphasised slum clearance and a mega-sized re-building project within the city limits, other planners from outside Glasgow put forward a competing plan, one with a very different vision of Glasgow and its solution for the city’s problems.

The alternative model: ”New Towns” In 1949 the Scottish Office (in Edinburgh) presented the city of Glasgow with an alternate blueprint for improving living standards and renewing the city, the “Clyde Valley Regional Plan 1946” (CVRP), Advocacy of the CVRP model was spearheaded by English town planner Patrick Abercrombie〚𝔸〛, whose town planning CV included the City of London, Hong Kong and Addis Ababa. The Abercrombie Plan recommended rehousing much of the population outside the city largely in “New Towns” which would function as overspill areas for overcrowded central Glasgow…it proposed not Bruce’s skyscrapers but low-rise living, expanding out to spread the density beyond the city limits [‘Scotland from the Sky’, BBC One, Series 1, Episode 2, (TV documentary, 2018)]. Integral to the plan was the presence of green belts in unbuilt areas, establishing buffer zones between the city and the New Towns – an idea the CVRP got from the earlier Garden Cities Movement〚𝔹〛. The outcome of the authorities’ attempts to transform Glasgow’s urban landscape into New Towns and “Peripheral Housing Estates” will be outlined in detail in ‘Glasgow’s Postwar Planning Wars, Part 3’.

New Towns phenomena New Towns were not novel to Glasgow and Scotland, the new towns movement was an international one (from the 1950s on, spreading to developing and de-colonising countries in Africa, Middle East and Asia) [’New towns on the Cold War frontier’, (Michelle Provoost), Eurozone, 28-Jun-2006, www.eurozine.com]). Pioneered in Britain, the movement followed the passage of the 1946 New Towns Act—handing the UK government power to designate areas of land for new town development—kick-starting an ambitious program of new peripheral and outlying settlements across the Home Countries [‘New towns’, UK Parliament, www.parliament.uk].

Schism Over Glasgow: two distinct planning strategies Academic Florian Urban sees the contest to shape postwar Glasgow as one of national ’planners’ versus local ’housers’. The Scottish Office’s CVRP was national policy, Westminster’s optimal regional fix for the poverty, overcrowding and unsanitary nature of Glasgow’s urban inner core. Bruce’s plan was to be the intended local fix, the solution to Glasgow Corporation’s objective of eradicating the city’s slums and ghettos. The first group was advocating dispersal away from the centre and the other containment in newly configured but in some cases even denser concentrations within the metropolis. The schism between the planning philosophies of the planners and the housers tapped into other existing tensions at the time – Tory national government (1951-55) versus Labour Glasgow City Council〚ℂ〛; ’refined’ Edinburgh versus “gritty industrial” Glasgow [‘Modernizing Glasgow – Tower Blocks, Motorways, and New Towns 1940-2010’, (Florian Urban), Glasgow School of Arts, www.radar.gsa.ac.uk]. The Corporation’s opposition to the Scottish Office’s interference (as it saw it) was couched in existential terms…loss of population was equated with the Glasgow authority’s loss of political prestige [‘Building and Cityscape Council Housing’, (Ranald McInnes), The Glasgow Story, www.theglasgowstory.com].

Regionalisation v Containment: the first as advocated by the Scottish Office and Abercrombie entailed first and foremost the creation of new towns (low-rise housing consisting of “detached, semi-detached or terraced houses surrounded by ample green space”)…contrasting with the containment approach of Bruce and the Glasgow City Council which sought to create “an architecture based on the principles of the existing city (3 to 4-storey modern tenements and corridor streets)” (Urban).

Even after Glasgow Corporation withdrew its approval of Bruce’s proposals (too radical, too expensive), it never formally adopted the Clyde Valley Plan in its place…it did however accept many of the CVRP’s principles. In 1954 the Corporation made key concessions to the planners, agreeing to the creation of green belts around the city and accepting the inevitability of decentralisation (the need for 100,000 new flats outside the metropolis to alleviate the centralised overcrowding). The planners’ objectives were aided by the appointment of Archibald Jury as city architect〚𝔻〛 who was fully on board with the goals of (British) national planning (Urban).

A mishmash of “divergent visions” In the end the Corporation sat on the fence and opted for “two bob each way”…cherry-picking from both rival schemes — so that both modernist tower blocks and low-rise buildings got erected concurrently and haphazardly, oodles of high-rise and low-rise housing all mingled in together. This confused juggling of opposing plans by the Glasgow authorities led to construction delays and made for erratic even schizophrenic urban planning in the three decades after the late 1940s, contributing to high levels of dissatisfaction felt by many Glaswegians with their reassigned housing arrangements〚𝔼〛.

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〚𝔸〛 together with co-author Robert Matthew 〚𝔹〛 the New Towns movement can trace its British lineage to the “Garden cities movement” of the turn-of-the-Twentieth-century – to the pioneering experiments with Welwyn (later the first of the British New Towns), Letchworth and Cadbury’s Bournville 〚ℂ〛 Glasgow Corporation, still trading on its earlier status as an economic powerhouse within the British Empire, was staunchly committed to resist any attempt by Westminster to curtail its municipal powers (Urban) 〚𝔻〛 replacing Robert Bruce as Glasgow chief planner after he resigned in pique in 1951 following the rejection of his plan 〚𝔼〛 many of the residents removed (some forcibly) from inner Glasgow and relocated in the New Towns and the peripheral estates were sufficiently disenchanted with their new lot that they requested to be transferred to alternate accommodation

Glasgow’s Postwar Planning Wars: Utopian Visions of Dystopia, Slum Clearances, New Towns and Social Engineering – Part 1

Posted by E Curb Nottus on December 21, 2021

Tags: ‘Greek’ Thomson, Bruce Report 1945, Brutalist (postwar) architecture, Charles R Mackintosh, Clyde Valley Regional Plan 1949, Decentralisation, Glasgow Corporation, Glasgow Inner Ring Road/M8, Hutchesontown C estate (The Gorbals), Le Corbusier, Modernist architecture, Moss Heights, Postwar urban renewal, Red Road Flats, Robert Bruce, Scottish Office (Edinburgh), Sighthill Brutalism

⨳ ⨳ ⨳ As WWII drew to a close Glasgow Corporation (City Council) had big plans for changing the face of Scotland’s biggest city and the (British) “Empire’s Second City” in the postwar period. Determined to rid Glasgow of its unhealthy “ghettos of decay and decline”, its plague of overcrowded slums and entrenched poverty and to fix the city’s critical housing shortage, the Corporation was gearing up for a mission to transform the city-scape. In 1947 a plan for total urban renewal put forward by the city engineer and master of works, Robert Bruce, found favour with the authorities〚𝔸〛 [‘Streets in the Sky: a social history of Glasgow’s brutalist tower blocks to be documented’, Judith Duffy, The Herald, 29-Mar-2015, www.heraldscotland.com].

⨳ ⨳ ⨳

“New Glasgow”

Lakewood Park, Ca Housing Development, the West Coast Answer to Levittown

Posted by funambulator@live.com on October 18, 2021

Tags: ‘Contract City’, ‘Father Knows Best’, ‘Time’, Ben Weingart, Bill Levitt, GI Bill 1944, Housing racial covenants, John Todd, LA County California, Lakewood Center, Lakewood City, Lakewood Park Company, Levittown, Long Beach (Cal), Lou Boyar, May Company, Minimal cities (‘Lakewoodisation’), Montana Land Co, Montana Ranch, Prudential Insurance Co (LA), S Mark Taper, White homogeneity communities

In 2018 I posted up the two blogs linked below on the topic of Levittown, the postwar mass housing construction phenomena in the east of the United States. https://www.7dayadventurer.com/2018/10/11/levittown-the-attainment-of-an-affordable-upwardly-mobile-home-and-lifestyle-for-some-part-i/

https://www.7dayadventurer.com/2018/10/13/levittown-the-attainment-of-an-affordable-socially-upwardly-mobile-home-and-lifestyle-for-some-part-ii/

Source: dustyoldthing.com (screen shot)

Lakewood, Ca. (Image:City-Data.com)

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In the late 1940s Bill Levitt’s New York company started constructing a series of new housing estates in the Atlantic seaboard states, succeeding in building affordable houses in double-quick time and on a mega-scale. Not long after Levittown showed the way, a triad of developers in California started planning their own gigantic scale home building project in Lakewood, Los Angeles County, to reap the rewards. The three ’amigos’, Ben Weingart, S Mark Taper and Lou Boyar, formed the Lakewood Park Company (LPC) and bought close on 3,500 acres from the Montana Land Co (previously sugar beet and lima bean fields adjacent to the city of Long Beach)¹. With Weingart’s extensive connexions in LA financing circles, the LPC got backing to the tune of $8.8 million from the Prudential Insurance Co, and were cleverly able to exploit a legal anomaly, leveraging a stack of federal finance to pay the large part of the private project’s expenditure [Kevin Starr, Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950-1963, (2011)].

Photo: lakewoodcity.org

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A frenetic work schedule The LPC utilised the same approach to construction as the Levittown developers. Every aspect was coordinated, synchronised like clockwork, the 4,000-strong work force was divided into 30 separate teams each with their own specialised task. Rapidity of construction was achieved by adopting the production efficiency methods learnt during WWII, foundations were laid post-haste (15 minutes to dig the hole by machine and not much more to fill it with concrete). Output was phenomenal, they were building around 40 to 60 new houses a day² (even managing in a single day to reach a record tally 110!). Selling the American Dream When Lakewood Park’s subdivision of model homes—complete with a “Tile Pullman lavatory” and a built-in ‘Pulverizer’ garbage disposal unit in the kitchen—was opened up to the public, the sales office was inundated with aspiring home-owners all seeking their piece of the “Father Knows Best’ fantasy lifestyle. One salesman sold 107 of the homes in a single hour [‘A New Kind of City…Lakewood’, Los Angeles Almanac, www.laalmanac.com]. Many were “sold off the plan” at a time before that term was in vogue. The cost for a Lakewood ‘model’ mostly ranged from $7,500 to $9,500. Like Levittown, Lakewood Park particularly appealed to WWII veterans who under the GI Bill were guaranteed advantageous terms, no down payment and 4% interest over 30 years. Lakewood’s population exploded – what was a small unincorporated village in 1950 became a ‘city’ with in excess of 70,000 inhabitants by 1953.

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We’re all white thanks!: ‘Paradise’ homes for the white middle class Again as with Levittown the ugly spectre of racism raised its head in the Fifties Lakewood Park ‘model’ lifestyle. One former sales manager for the LPC explained that his part of his role involved guided homogeneity, dissuading black (and Latino) families from buying into the estate on the grounds that the overwhelmingly white neighbours would object to their presence on the same block. This was part of a wider practice of “steering buyers into racially defined neighbourhoods” which persisted into the 1960s…the developers’ rationale being “that racially mixed communities (they believed) would not retain their resale value” [‘Suburban pioneers’, Lakewood City, www.lakewoodcity.org].

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Developers with “laugh-lines around their pockets” A Senate hearing in 1954 troubled by the development’s ramifications concluded that the bulk of the profits from Lakewood Park‘s land sales and retail development ended up in the pockets of the LPC syndicate…finding that Weingart, Boyar and Taper in fact risked very little of their own money on the venture (about $15,000 altogether) by being able to (legally) rely on the accessible federal financing. Against their meagre personal outlays, newspapers estimated that the triumvirate made nearly a cool $12 million each from the deal (‘Lakewood California History’).

Photo: City of Lakewood historical collection

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Footnote: The Lakewood Plan, “Contract City“ Lakewood became an incorporated city in 1954—following a divisive community campaign and an attempt by larger neighbour Long Beach to absorb it—but of a unique kind. Foundation attorney John Todd and the developers opted to contract out the new city’s essential municipal services to LA County (police force, fire brigade, sanitation services, etc), an innovation (Lakewoodisation’) later copied widely in California and in other states (‘A New Kind of City…Lakewood’). The stated reason for going the “minimal city” route was financial efficiencies, but Gary Miller argues that self-advantage was the real purpose, allowing the wealthy to “insulate (their properties) from the burden of supporting public services…(thus) zoning out service-demanding low-income and renting populations”, “fueling white flight from Los Angeles” [quoted in Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, 1990]

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¹ the farming enterprise was known as the “Montana Ranch”…ironically, the land Weingart, Boyar and Taper bought included village housing estates which under Montana Land’s restrictive races covenant they as Jews would be barred from living in [‘The Lakewood Plan: Homeownership, Taxes, and Diversity in Postwar Suburbia’, Ryan Reft, Kcet, 16-Jan-2015, www.kcet.org]

² a house completed every 7½ minutes!

³ enticing the retail department giant the May Company as the mall’s flagship store

⁴ which had led to Levittown residents when returning home at night mistaking other houses for theirs’

In Pursuit of Vertical Take-off and Autorotation Landing: From Rotorcraft to Autogyro to Practical Helicopter

Posted by E Curb Nottus on August 12, 2021

Tags: Autogyros, Bréguet-Dorand “Gyroplane Laboratoire”, Etienne Oehmichen, Focke-Wulf Fw 61, Gustave Whitehead, Heinrich Focke, Helicopter development, Igor Sikorsky, Juan De la Cierva, Military helicopters and WWII, Paul Cornu, Rotorcrafts, Sikorsky VS-300 & R-4 prototypes, Wright Brothers

🚁 Helicopter, from the Greek: helix (‘spiral’ or ‘whirl’ or ’convolution’) + pteron (‘wing’); into French: hélicoptère.

We know that manned, powered, heavier-than-air flight in an aircraft began with the Wright brothers in 1903 at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina—unless that is you accept the audacious alternate candidate, Gustave Whitehead’s flight in Connecticut made two years earlier🅰—but when did the first helicopter get off the ground? The primitive archetype seems to be the brainchild of Frenchman Paul Cornu. Cornu, like the brothers Wright, started off as a bicycle maker before veering off into the nascent field of aerodynamic engineering.

Getting the concept off the ground Near Lisieux in northern France in 1907, Monsieur Cornu became the first person to (ever so briefly) pilot an airborne rotary-wing, vertical-lift aircraft. The rotorcraft (using an unpowered rotor in free autorotation to develop lift) from Cornu’s own design was a twin-rotor job, the blades rotating in opposite directions which neutralised the torque. M. Cornu’s craft levitated about 1.5 metres off the ground, hovering for some 20 seconds. The Cornu ”Ur-copter” wasn’t manoeuvrable at all (requiring manpower to hold it in position from the ground) and therefore wasn’t practical, but it is considered to be a forerunner of the modern helicopter.

De la Cierva and the autogyro From 1912 on, numerous inventors and engineers were turning their hands to building prototypes of the rotorcraft, but with limited or ephemeral success. Compared to fixed-wing aircrafts, progress with rotorcrafts evolved very slowly, due to intrinsic problems with torque, dissymmetry of lift and control. Sikorsky (below) spent 30 years working on developing helicopters before his breakthrough. Etienne Oehmichen, whose early prototypes included vertically-mounted rotors and a tail rotor, allowing it to fly a distance of one kilometre in 1924! Oehmichen was also the first to carry passengers in his Oehmichen No. 2 helicopter. By the early 1920s Spanish aviator and engineer Juan De la Cierva built the autogyro (sometimes called a “windmill plane” or ‘gyroplane’)… his success advanced the understanding of rotor dynamics. Cierva’s autogiro had air safety in mind, proposing a solution to the craft losing its lift or stalling even at very low speeds. The Spaniard worked out that the autogyro’s rotor function is driven by the speed of the air, cf. the helicopter’s which depends on a motor…in the descent of the autogyro the rotor functioned as a kind of parachute according to Cierva. Ultimately, the helicopter’s superior velocity made it the preferable mode of aerocraft, however Cierva’s principle of the self-turning rotor remained a vital contribution to the later development of functional helicopters. Cierva’s flapping rotor blades has been described as “the single most important discovery in helicopter development” (CV Glines). A countryman of Cornu’s, Louis Bréguet, also experimented with the autogyro in the Thirties, his Bréguet-Dorand “Gyroplane Laboratoire” improving both the craft’s speed to 120km/h and its control capacity. Another step forward in the evolution of helicopters came from Nazi Germany. Professor Heinrich Focke applied Cierva’s pioneering work on aerodynamics to the task of transitioning from the limitations of the autogyro to the creation of a “pure helicopter”. In 1936 Focke and Gerd Achgelis‘ Focke-Wulf Fw-61 smashed existing helicopter records for range and altitude and demonstrated autorotation descent to landing. This plus a control system much more reliable and robust than earlier rotorcrafts leads many aviation geeks to consider the Fw-61 to be “the world’s first truly functional helicopter”.

Sikorsky’s practical copter What Cornu started, Russian-born American designer Igor Sikorsky brought to commercial fruition. Sikorsky invented the first mass-produced, and in the opinion of many, the first practical helicopter, the VS-300, in Stratford, Connecticut in 1939🅱. In commercial production called the R–4, it would go on to play a significant role in the Second World War. By the war’s end Sikorsky had added the R–5 and the R–6 models, specifically designed for the military and specialising in search-and-rescue missions. Although he didn’t invent the first prototype of the helicopter, Sikorsky is commonly thought of as “the father of helicopters” because “he invented the first successful helicopter upon which further designs were based”. The VS-300 became the model for all modern single-rotor helicopters.

༻༺༻༺༻༺༻༺༻༺༻༺༻༺༻༺༻༺

🅰 see the November 2014 blog on this site, ‘Wright or Not Right?: The Controversy over who really was “First in Flight”’

🅱 Sikorsky’s 1939 flight was actually tethered, so the first ‘free’ copter flight (also by Sikorsky) didn’t take place until the following year, 1940

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Sites and articles consulted:

‘History of Flight: Breakthroughs, Disasters and More’, Aaron Randle, Inside History, 09-Jul-2021, www.insidehistory.com

’Focke-Wulf Fw-61’, Modelling Madness, Brian R Baker, www.modellingmadness.com

‘World’s First Helicopter — Today in History: September 14’, September 14, 2018, Connecticut History.org, www.connecticuthistory.org

‘History of the Helicopter’, Mary Bellis, ThoughtCo, Upd. 04-Oct-2019, www.thoughtco.com

‘Who Invented the Helicopter? (and When?)’, Aerocorner, www.aerocorner.com

‘Juan de la Cierva: Autogiro Genius’, C.V. Glines, Aviation History, Sept 2012, www.au.readly.com

‘History of the Helicopter from Concept to Modern Day’, Prime Industries Inc, 31-Aug-2015, www.primeinustriesusa.com

’Juan de la Cierva and the Autogyro’s Invention’, Javier Yanes, Ventana al Conocimiento, 21-Sep-2015, www.bbvaopenmind.com

Shinkansen, Japan’s Pioneering VFT and National Icon

Posted by E Curb Nottus on June 26, 2021

Tags: 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics, Chinese VFT, High-speed trains, Japan, Japan Railways Group companies, JapanRail Pass, JR Central, Kodama Express & Hikari Super Express, Linear Chūō Shinkansen, Maglev train, N700 series Shinkansen, Shinkansen “Bullet Train”, Taiwan High-Speed Rail, Technology transfer and export, Tōhoku Shinkansen Line, VFT

A symbol of modernisation 1964 was a bumper year for the Japanese. In October of that year two events helped the country finally break free of the persisting shadow of an an ultimately inglorious and painful World War II experience. Japan’s capital Tokyo staged the XVIII Summer Olympic Games and Japan launched its iconic high-speed train service, the Shinkansen (meaning literally “new trunk line” or “new main line”), popularly called the “Bullet Train” (弾丸列車 dangan ressha) because of the similarity of the initial (0 series) design of the nose✲. Together, the Olympics and the Shinkansen’s arrival symbolised the fulfilment of “Japan’s recovery from the devastation of war and the beginnings of Japan’s stratospheric rise as an economic superpower” (Braser & Tsubuku)⌧.

Planning for the Shinkansen started in the 1950s and had its origins in the realisation that Japan’s conventional rail network was reaching capacity and not up to the demands of modernisation. The country’s geography, climate and population needed a faster, modern network. A VFT was identified as imperative for a land mass that stretched over several islands north to south for thousands of kilometres. Construction (and operational) challenges were manifold and extremely formidable – a mountainous country subject to earthquakes, typhoons, heavy rain and snow and flooding (Hood).

The original rail service, the Tōhoku Shinkansen connected the three principal cities on Honshu island, Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka. The impact on intra-Japan rail travel was immediate and dramatic. With the sleek “whiz-bang” new train reaching speeds of up to 210 km/h⍟, the journey between Tokyo and Shin-Osaka was cut from 6 hrs & 30 mins in an conventional train to around 4 hrs & 10 minutes in the Bullet Train! (in 1965 it was reduced again by a further hour)✪.

An accident-free record As impressive as it is, the Shinkansen’s most impressive attribute is not its rapid speed, but its peerless safety history over a period of 57 years. The Shinkansen service has not suffered a single casualty or even one injury in the totality of its trips. The only blots on the perfect record in this time have been two derailments (one in an earthquake and one in a blizzard) (Glancey).

Rail privatisation Originally the Shinkansen train network was built and operated by the Japanese government (Japanese National Railways), but in 1987 it was privatised, coming under the ownership of six Japanese Railways Group (JRG) companies. Today they runs nine separate lines, smoothly criss-crossing the densely-populated Honshu and Kyushu islands and extending to the northern island of Hokkaido, it’s spotlessly clean carriages carrying an average of around 150 million passengers a year (JapanRail Pass). The network has two types of Shinkansen trains – Kodama Express and the limited stop Hikari Super Express train.

Personifying Nihongo efficiency The latest iteration of the Shinkansen, the N700 train with its aerodynamic duckbill-nose completes the Tokyo–Osaka journey in 2 hrs & 25 mins⌽. The N700S (Supreme) has the advanced capacity to continue operating during earthquakes. Punctuality is also the Shinkansen’s strong suit – the average delay for the railway’s fleet of trains is less than 60 seconds (Dow). The Shinkansen’s efficiency represents “an elegant solution for shuttling workers from one dense city to another” and doing it rapidly, workers living “in distant, relatively undeveloped areas can commute to Tokyo (for instance) in two hours” (Pinsker)⛃.

Local dissenters to the “love affair” with the Shinkansen The Shinkansen has been a change agent for Japanese economy and society, a potent symbol of the nation’s development. Research indicates that those urban hubs with a Shinkansen station experience higher population and higher employment growth rates (Sands). Not everyone in Japan however is 100% behind the Bullet Train companies’ unbending “full-steam ahead” approach. There have been pockets of local rural opposition pushing back against JRG’s relentless land acquisition process. Residents along the routes whose quality of life has been adversely affected by Shinkansen’s noise and vibration have also been vocal in their complaints (Hood).

Eye on the future Not resting on the laurels of the Shinkansen series’ cutting-edge technology, research has been happening since 1962 on a linear motor railway system. In the 2000s JR Central commenced testing a Maglev train prototype, the Linear Chūō Shinkansen, which can reach a speed in excess of 500 km/h – this service is slated for introduction in 2027 (Nippon.com).

Postscript: To transfer technology or not to transfer technology? Japan’s success with the Shinkansen has spawned imitators. China’s vaulting high-speed train ambitions—while denying charges of intellectual piracy by copying the Shinkansen—has seen it have to resort to reliance on German and French as well as Japanese VFT technology for its own high-speed train. Consequently some Japanese railway insiders have criticised the technology leak to China, lamenting that when you put high technical ability on display (as Japan has with its crown jewel train), it gets copied. However there’s no consensus on this point within Japanese government and business. Central Japan Railway Co (owner of Shinkansen and Linear Train Technology) have actively participated in the development of US high-speed trains on an ongoing basis, proponents of this approach argue that by not exporting the Bullet Train technology to countries with large markets, Japan risks losing out to competitors who’ll get in first…the Overseas Rapid Railway Project’s Katsunori Ochiai summed up the gains from exporting: “If the new Japanese model Shinkansen and linear trains are adopted in America, the market for manufacturers of the carriages and signal systems would be greatly expanded.” (Shimbun).

Shinkansen technology transfer’ first export overseas was to Taiwan, successfully helping to develop the Taiwanese High-Speed Rail system.

Taiwan HS Rail (Source: construction-post.com)

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✲ a blue snub-nosed design with white livery

⛃ present maximum operating speed of the Shinkansen clocks at 320 km/h

✪ another pioneering first for the Shinkansen: the first dedicated high-speed railtrack in the world

⌽ the N700 series has reached 332 km/h in trials

〥 the network’s efficiency and speed comes at a price – a typical ticket will set you back about $US130 (2014), unless you are subsidised by your employer (Pinsker)

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Articles and sites consulted:

’Japan’s Transfer of Bullet Train Technology A Mistake. China, Of Course, Has Copied It’, Sankei Shimbun, Japan-Forward, 18-Aug-2017, www.japan-forward.com

HOOD, Christopher P. “The Shinkansen’s Local Impact.” Social Science Japan Journal, vol. 13, no. 2, 2010, pp. 211–225. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40961264. Accessed 26 June 2021.

SANDS, BRIAN. “The Development Effects of High-Speed Rail Stations and Implications for California.” Built Environment (1978–), vol. 19, no. 3/4, 1993, pp. 257–284. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23288581. Accessed 26 June 2021.

‘How the Shinkansen bullet train made Tokyo into the monster it is today’, Philip Brasor & Masako Tsubuku, The Guardian, 30-Sep-2014, www.theguardian.com

‘What 50 Years of Bullet Trains Have Done for Japan’, Joe Pinsker, The Atlantic, 07-Oct-2014, www.theatlantic.com

‘Japan’s Shinkansen: Revolutionary design at 50’, Jonathan Glancey, BBC, 15-Jul-2014, www.bbc.com

‘The Shinkansen Turns 50: The History and Future of Japan’s High-Speed Train’, Nippon.com, 01-Oct-2014, www.nippon.com

‘Five things to know about Japan’s Shinkansen: The trains that always run on time’, Aisha Dow, 11-Nov-2016, https://i.stuff.co.nz/

L’Aérotrain Experiment: The Rise and Fall of a French Hovertrain

Posted by E Curb Nottus on June 22, 2021

Tags: Aérotrain # 02, Aérotrain 180, APT–E, Bertin & Cie, DATAR, Georges Pompidou, Giscard government 1974-1981, Hovertrain, Jean Bertin, Maglev train, Rohr Industries US, RTV–31 (Britain), Skinkansen 'Bullet' train, SNCF (French National Railway Company), TGV (TurboTrain à Grande Vitesse), Tracked Air Cushion Vehicle (TACV), Tridim, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, Very Fast Train, VFT

Before the Maglev (magnetic levitation) very fast train (VFT) system was developed—which we can observe today in commercial operation in Japan, China and South Korea—there was the Aérotrain prototype in France✳. Its story starts in the early 1960s when France was faced with a need to revitalise its declining railway sector. In 1963 aviation engineer Jean Bertin pitched his Aérotrain concept for a VFT mass transit system to France’s public transport czars. Over the next two years the government created a state company to study the Aérotrain while Bertin developed his 1:20 scale model train into the full-scale prototype.

Bertin’s invention was a Tracked Air Cushion Vehicle (TACV), a hovertrain riding on a cushion of air atop “a simple reinforced concrete track or guideway”∆. The Aérotrain design borrowed from the lifting technology of hovercraft vessels and from the arliner’s turbo fan. Both the ‘wheelless’ vehicle and the T-shaped track were radical designs at the time. Bertin’s intention was to come up with a simpler and cheaper alternative to the Maglev trains then in experimentation (‘France’s Aérotrain’, Ian Brown, Google Sighting, 10-Oct-2013, www.googlesighting.com).

Exporting the hovertrain By 1966 Bertin & Cie had built its first Aérotrain test track (6.7km-long) at Essonne, south of Paris. Interest in Bertin’s hovertrain concept was international, Britain designed its own version, the RTV-31 Tracked Hovercraft, and constructed a test track in 1970, in the US, Rohr Industries contracted with Bertin’s company to do the same. Bertin developed several prototypes, the ultimate bring the Aérotrain 180 HV, a 25.6m-long hovertrain seating 80 passengers and attaining a world record speed for overland cushion vehicles (430.3 km per hour).

Technical issues L’Aérotrain prototype presented Bertin with a series of design challenges — the system would require new elevated guideways for every implementation; the craft when passing other trains or entering tunnels experienced sudden changes in air pressure; the Aérotrain’s gas turbines operated with giant propellers which generated tremendous noise, necessitating a reduction in speed in urban areas (making it unattractive to some interested authorities) (‘Aerotrain’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org).

Aérotrain, not the people’s train? Although the technocrats in the state apparatus were favourably disposed to Bertin’s Aérotrain—especially DATAR (Delegation for Territory Planning and Regional Action)—its acceptance was not universal within France. Technical difficulties like the noise levels turned . many Parisians away from the vehicle. With such a “cutting-edge” special project, a perception grew that Aérotrain travel was for the elite commuter, not the average French worker, “(serving) only a rarefied strata of society”⟴ (Guigueno, Vincent. “Building a High-Speed Society: France and the Aérotrain, 1962-1974.” Technology and Culture, vol. 49, no. 1, 2008, pp. 21–40. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40061376. Accessed 20 June 2021).

Cost was increasingly a factor working against the Aérotrain, the system, requiring a dedicated track would be costly to implement. The 1973 oil crisis (also see End-note) and the imposition of new strictures on state spending didn’t help, leaving the Aérotrain Company in financial difficulties (Guigueno). Public authorities were increasingly reluctant to fund the Aérotrain project.

The modern versus the traditional The bureaucracy and SNCF (French National Railway Company) had its own agenda, which deviated from the objectives of Aérotrain. Transport planning in France was committed to a policy of maintaining the efficacy of “traditional modes of urban transport”, heavily investing in Aérotrain ran counter to that. The influential SNCF saw it as a “competitive threat to the traditional railway” (Guigueno).

The lethal blow came in 1974. French president, Georges Pompidou, who had been a moderniser, died. His more conservative replacement, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, coming down on the side of traditional technologies terminated the Aérotrain project just two months into office. The reasons for Giscard’s opposition to the project are not certain, Guigueno speculates that perhaps the president was reacting to Aérotrain’s unpopularity with the Paris suburbs and their representatives. The recently-approved Cergy—La Défense link for Aérotrain engendered scepticism from locals due to delays and cost overruns and was also canned by Giscard. Giscard whose previous ministerial job was controlling the nation’s pursestrings probably thought Aérotrain was too much of a financial risk at the time (‘Transport That Never Was Part 1: Aérotrain, a hovertrain in Paris’s western suburbs’, Fabric of France, 18-Feb-2020, www.fabricoffrance.com).

Replacing a revolutionary VFT with a conventional VFT Aérotrain’s misfortune was TGV’s good fortune. The Giscard government switched from Aérotrain to TGV¶, a rival turbo train design inspired by Japan’s Shinkansen, as the preferred provider for France’s inter-city high-speed rail service. In 1981 TGV became the VFT carrier for the new Paris to Lyon link. Essential to TGV’s triumph over Aérotrain was SNCF’s strategy of “develop(ing) TGV as a supplement to, rather than a replacement for the traditional rail service” (Guigueno)❂. On the matter of infrastructure TGV was a full circuit in front of Aérotrain. The TGV was a better fit with its huge advantage over Aérotrain in compatibility with existing railways in France, and it could extend, beyond the high-speed network, over much greater distances (‘Transport That Never Was’).

Aérotrain’s eclipse was devastating for its inventor … Bertin, already stricken with cancer, died several months later, aged just 58. In 1977 the Aérotrain project was abandoned, bringing an end to the Gallic hovertrain dream.

End-note: The hike in the world oil price after 1973 posed an acute problem for the TGV prototype, being as it was powered by gas turbines. Sagely, the company switched its prototype to all-electric trains to overcome this, and stay cost-competitive with Aérotrain (‘Transport That Never Was’).

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✳ the Aérotrain’s levitation anticipated the magnetic floating effect of the later Maglev train (‘1963-1980 The Aérotrain’, Alex Q. Arbuckle, www.mashable.com) ∆ Bertin understood that by compressing and enclosing air under the vehicle, “it was possible to produce an air cushion over which the craft could glide with minimum resistance and power” (Kaushik Patowary, ‘Aerotrain: The High-speed Train That Almost Revolutionized Transport’, Amusing Planet, 19-May-2020, www.amusingplanet.com)

⟴ Aérotrain #02 prototype and the small cabin-sized Tridim for instance are personal-type vehicles, not mass transit vehicles

¶ TurboTrain à Grande Vitesse

❂ Britain followed a similar path to France, the experimental RTV-31 ended up in the dumpster, superseded by the more conventional APT-E tilting high-speed train