Sunday 17 January 2021

motown

Via the always excellent Things Magazine (with several other utopian visions to explore and debate in this instalment), we learn about Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe (*1900 – †1996), town planner, landscape developer and architecture and his 1959 project Motopia, which despite its automobile-centric name, really was dedicated to the prevention of sprawl and spill-over and the preservation of green spaces where no car or lorry could encroach—see also. Instead what Jellicoe envisioned was a grid of mixed-used residential towers connected by elevated jetways, whose intersections were all roundabouts following the roofline of the blocks with the option to spiral down to one’s home or office, leaving the land below pristine and even wild. Though never realised according to plan, districts like Shanghai’s Oriental Pearl Radio and Television Tower were informed by Jellicoe’s design. Much more at the links above.