Horizonless Manhattan

Here's a couple striking illustrations of Manhattan by Schulze & Webb, speculative projections looking downtown from 3rd Avenue and 35th Street...

horizonless-downtown.jpg
[Here & There horizonless downtown projection view | image source]

and uptown from 3rd Avenue and 7th Street...

horizonless-uptown.jpg
[Here & There horizonless uptown projection view | image source]

According to the designers:
"They're intended to be seen at those same places, putting the viewer simultaneously above the city and in it where she stands, both looking down and looking forward...The projection begins with a three-dimensional representation of the immediate environment. Close buildings are represented normally, and the viewer himself is shown in the third person, exactly where she stands. As the model bends from sideways to top-down in a smooth join, more distant parts of the city are revealed in plan view. The projection connects the viewer's local environment to remote destinations normally out of sight."
For those interested, high-resolution prints (3' tall by 2' wide) are available for purchase at Here & There.

(via City of Sound's Bookmarks on Delicious)

Comments

  1. I seem to be recalling a similar illustration, shown in a PBS Nova ep on string theory, wherein Manhattan is flipped onto itself like an omelette (but not completely folded; sort of like these spaceborne colonies, but an open loop and flattened) so that if you're at the north end, a Downtown skyscraper is dangling overhead, its antennas nearly touching the pavement.

    Something to do with the wormholes and the fabric of space.

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  2. Found the ep on YouTube. No surprise.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NWoxdJ1sIk&feature=related

    The omelette appears c. 7:50.

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  3. I think this could actually be a seriously useful application for maps applications on smartphones. Android phones like the G1 already support Google maps and street view which moves as you do using a built-in compass. If it would somehow be possible to fit a view like this onto a phone screen, it would be really handy to find your way around!

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  4. Those space colonies that Alex mentioned were the first thing I thought of. Maybe its due to a life-long of all things science fiction, but I just imagine cities like this in giant space rings that are constantly rotating to create an artificial gravity.

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  5. I zipped ahead to the folded in Manhattan section of the YouTube link. Pretty wild. Posting this I wasn't thinking of space colonies, but one of my favorite books as a kid (Future World, I recall) had many such images. I'm surprised those didn't enter my mind initially.

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  6. These are a couple fantastic images. I hope google earth can do something like this for every city.

    www.talkitect.com

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