JULES VERNE CITIES OF THE FUTURE

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 80, Issue 59, 11 March 1937, Page 10

JULES VERNE CITIES OF THE FUTURE

Architectural Imaginings

r jpOWN houses, set in their own separate plots, are relics of the past to modernist town planners. Such houses find no place at all in the plans of British architects for cities of the future. These are planned as great apartment cities, from which the single house has vanished without trace; they are cities of concrete and stone, planned on parkland; they are cities where there are no cross roads and no traffic lights. These architects imaginings were shown in models at the Building Exhibition in London, together with more actual wonders of building research. When the garden cities of the drawing boards are built they will find, the exhibition showed, progress in building has anticipated them. Great buildings without stairs but only inclined ramps and elevators, office blocks where managers and clerks drive their automobiles up to the office door and leave them there instead of in the street, markets in 10-storey structures which allow of trucks driving right through them, every conceivable type of large building designed with one-way motor roads through them instead of passages—these are not buildings of the past but of the present. This new building system has been established in Britain, from a Netherlands’ parent firm. Its first acceptance lias been in the erection of great four and five-storey garages, in England and Scotland. Drivers pilot their cars up a ramp to a park on one of the stories and return to take them down a second ramp; the ramps are so constructed that cars going in opposite directions do not meet. But the firm plans also to build

suites of offices, apartments .'-ports l stadiums and markets on the same limn claiming that the parking problem m thus solved and greater safely a«-lii<*v« ed. Exhaust gases are drawn by kuc' lion into eliminators set in lhe ra np>. Glass, too, plays a. dominant part >n modern building. Glass bricks, lighu r but equally as safe as ordinary bricks, are finding their way into modem British buildings, as ceilings, walls, floors, decorations. Building research has also caused t invention of a “floating floor,” cutting out noise of footsteps when one fellow floor is another’s ceiling. This floating floor lias been the object > of tests recently at the National I’liy sical Laboratory at Teddington on th© Thames. It is officially described as “a supplementary massive floor supported on the structural floor by insulating blocks of an elastic material, such aa rubber, proportioned so that the fre» qucncy of vibration of lhe floating fluor is low.” This departure is considered her© to be of considerable value in making buildings sound-proof, both from noi>© caused inside the building and outside. The Building Exhibition also served to show’ latest developments in housing for poor persons, proving that costs of building apartment blocks have becoiu© so economical that what might -be ter tied “luxury” blocks can be built pro* fitably at low rentals. Instrumental in helping toward this has been a competition for architect© run by the British Cement and Conciet© Association to find best designs of fifestorey concrete blocks of workers’ residential apartments. In the winning design the building© are in four equal blocks. All bedrooms face east and all living rooms west. Total cost is estimated at £57,600. Cost of the buildings per habitable room is given as just over £94. Another exhibit of the Cement and Concrete Association was the garden city of the future. This provided for a planned parkland town, with all rail communications under ground, an airport, “flyover” roads, inter-related and planned areas for shopping, recreation, living nnd working, all flats having balconies facing south, ramped cal parks under all buildings.

Miniature ivory animals and other figures, so tiny that their band-carved details are visible only under a powerful lens, are the product of a Bombay, India, craftsman who markets his creations to collectors all over the world. One of his accomplishments is packing from one to 125 carved elephants within a single hollowed-out seed no larger than an ordinary pea.—“ Popular Science. ’ ’