The Case for Design

One doesn’t necessarily think of “elegant design” and “public infrastructure” as going hand in hand, but in a lot of ways these are important issues. People don’t like to see really ugly things built near where they live. But infrastructure is especially needed where people live, so that it can serve actual people. Consequently, a lot of useful stuff winds up going unbuilt since people don’t want to see something ugly put in their line of sight. Which brings me to James Wimberly on building electrical transmission lines we can believe in:

The EDF is rare and possibly unique among big utilities in seriously exploring new transmission tower designs to reduce visual nuisance. The model in the photo – “Roseau”, or reed – is part of its second generation of tubular towers; the other is the asymmetric “Fougère” – heather – which is fun but might become irritating after a few years. The first generation was the workmanlike “Muguet” – lily of the valley – , which is a common sight:

EDF has formidable engineering resources and reputation, and you can take it that these designs meet high specifications, including 170 km/hour winds. But it is coy on costs. The designer Marc Mimram gives the unit cost of the complex “Roseau” pylon as 580k. The typical cost of a traditional 400kv backbone line in France was 600k/km in 2002, of which about a third went on the pylons, making 70k each. Say 100k now.

Along those same lines, I was reading an interview with some architect/urban planner guy in Dwell on a plane over the weekend and he was arguing that we ought to pay more attention to the design of our garbage cans. He points out that large cities have a ton of these, so the cost-per-unit of investing in design would be pretty low. And on top of that, good garbage cans are integral to the success of public spaces. You can’t have tons of litter everywhere in a good public space. But a public space that’s actually used by people is likely to generate a lot of litter — soda cans, food wrappers, etc. — as a consequence of its success. Hence, garbage cans. But garbage is ugly undermining your effort to build a good public space. Hence, design is needed.

For power lines, meanwhile, the point is not merely that we need these lines to power our homes but that building next-generation renewable energy facilities on a mass scale is going to require next-generation transmission lines to move electricity from where the wind and sun is to where the people live.