This link has been bookmarked by 6 people . It was first bookmarked on 23 Jul 2010, by Mike Dubé.
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02 Apr 15
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King Camp Gillette was a futurist. In 1894, he published plans for a porcelain, hexagonal city with transparent sidewalks
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Gillette wanted to solve the problem of social inequality with his perfect city, which he named Metropolis
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The sidewalks of the city would be transparent so that workers laboring beneath the buildings, dealing with plumbing and other infrastructure, would have light. But Gillette also wanted the city's residents to see the people at work below their feet. The idea was to prevent people from forgetting about all the essential work that goes into making a city run.
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Gillette laid his city out in a hexagonal grid that would accommodate the many vast, perfectly round buildings where people lived, worked, and indulged in recreation
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It is my firm belief that under conditions of material equality, all necessary labor could be forwarded without friction
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a system of compensation to balance supply and demand for labor, carried out on plan proposed, could be reduced to an exact science
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The whole channel of conversation and thought would be turned, as if by magic, into the field of scientific research and improvement in invention and devices for production that would save manual labor and increase the quantity and quality of products.
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The thoughts and conversation would no longer turn to wealth and production, for production and distribution would be mechanical, based on our progressive position; and to advance this progressive position would be the field of competition, and demand all thought and conversation.
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Gillette first hatched his wild ideas for a city through his association with a group called the Twentieth Century Society. The group, ironically, did not actually last into the era that was its namesake
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And living, vital societies are always in the process of producing cities for the future.
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We dream cities because we dream of rebuilding our civilizations.
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09 Aug 10
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01 Aug 10
Daniel AndrlikThis piece from Annalee Newitz is an overview of the utopian city designed by King Camp Gillette back before he began his razor empire. He diagrammed out this future city -- which he named Metropolis -- in his book *The Human Drift*, which was released in 1894. Gillette apparently designed his city not just for efficiency, but also in an attempt to resolve the issues of social inequality.
From the article:
>[Metropolis] would be built on top of Niagara Falls. Gillette wanted to Nikola Tesla design a water-powered electrical grid, which would be amply supplied with energy from the falls.
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>The sidewalks of the city would be transparent so that workers laboring beneath the buildings, dealing with plumbing and other infrastructure, would have light. But Gillette also wanted the city's residents to see the people at work below their feet. The idea was to prevent people from forgetting about all the essential work that goes into making a city run.
It's a fascinating article, but to be fair, Newitz never successfully makes the case for claiming that this design in any way "changed the twentieth century". Regardless, it's still a great read and well worth your time.-
Gillette wanted to solve the problem of social inequality with his perfect city, which he named Metropolis. The city, which he outlines in his book The Human Drift, would be built on top of Niagara Falls. Gillette wanted to Nikola Tesla design a water-powered electrical grid, which would be amply supplied with energy from the falls.
The sidewalks of the city would be transparent so that workers laboring beneath the buildings, dealing with plumbing and other infrastructure, would have light. But Gillette also wanted the city's residents to see the people at work below their feet. The idea was to prevent people from forgetting about all the essential work that goes into making a city run.
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23 Jul 10
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22 Jul 10
Michael DuffIf you can't make your dreams of Utopia real, at least you can import a few small objects from that dreamworld into ours. And that's just what Gillette did. Ultimately the scifi entrepreneurialism of The Human Drift paid off for him in real-world money. T
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