Making the functional beautiful

via Prospero by R.B. | LONDON on 15/09/11

INDUSTRIAL art is thriving. The shortlist has just been announced for a new pylon design in Britain, a government-sponsored competition run by the Royal Institute of British Architects. The finalists have all come up with possible replacements to the 1927 construction of Sir Reginald Blomfeld, which continues to march across the landscape barely changed (except a little taller). The winner is announced on October 5th and National Grid, the company that runs the electricity network, will consider whether to use that design in the future.

There are some interesting structures in the mix: one is a painted, lattice cylinder; another has slivers of steel pointing up to the sun. Others seem to perform the function—there is a Y-shaped offering, for example—albeit with a less-striking form.

My personal favourite in design terms, though, is a pylon that didn't make this list but won the 2010 Boston Society of Architects Unbuilt Architecture award. Called "The Land of Giants", it features huge lattice men who look as though they're carrying the wires across the landscape (pictured). It was designed by Choi+Shine Architects, and the images on the firm's site are simply stunning. A feasibility study was under way in Iceland to see if the figures could be used, but when things got a little tricky in the Icelandic economy in 2010, the project was put on hold. It's unlikely to thaw any time soon.

These designs all try to do something laudable: make the functional beautiful. The problem for pylons is that they're not really meant to draw the eye. They should be chameleons that blend in to the landscape rather than dominate it.

In other spheres that constraint is not so marked. In March 2011, for example, in a triumph of clever thinking, a new design of energy-efficient light bulb, called the plumen, won a British design award. The original Edison bulb was pear-shaped, built around an internal filament. Until now, in a prime example of path dependency, most energy-efficient bulbs have roughly assumed that shape.

What the Plumen's creators did was to acknowledge that the new technology was more flexible: the bulb they sculpted has intertwining swirls of light which seem to flow like a current. I suspect others will follow this thinking and energy-efficient bulbs may become a little more interesting over the next few years, even if they still take a while to brighten a room.

Reclaiming industrial structures for aesthetic purposes has been a trend in real estate for some time. On September 8th the Tate Modern, a London art museum that was itself once a power station, announced plans to open three new gallery spaces inside former oil tanks. The chambers, measuring 30m high and 7m wide, will show art for the first time in the summer of 2012, in time for the Olympics.

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