Now here’s an electric story from the BBC website: an international design competition has been organised which may see the transformation of our nation’s pylons into more attractive looking structures.
We’re not too sure what to make of this story in the office, with mixed opinions on whether our pylons are traditional and iconic or just aesthetically displeasing.
New energy generating schemes, particularly green ones like hydro and wind, are being put in place. This has seen the need for more pylons to be built as they represent a much better alternative to costly underground cables that require digging up mass amounts of land. The UK is now looking for suggestions from the international floor on what they should look like, but do we really need to see a change?
They have, after all, been around since the 1920s and have even inspired poets - the word itself was taken from Spender’s 1933 poem ‘The Pylons’ and means an ‘Egyptian gateway to the Sun’.
Landsnet, a major power company based in Iceland, ran the competition in 2008 and, to be fair, the humanoid designs from US-based architects Choi + Sine that have since been built look pretty cool. These white pylons stand out against the landscape and the architects claim that since pylons are necessary anyway, why not combine industry and art to this effect?
The National Grid has already offered a new ‘monopole design’ but the general feedback is that people are used to the lattice design that they don’t see the need to mix it up - some would say this was pretty shocking…





















