Plan Magazine - Dancing with nature

5 February 12

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Dancing with nature
Paris studio Hugh Dutton Associés have won a competition to design electricity pylons for Italian energy company Terna

Image: PYLONS2

Called Pylons of the Future Dancing with Nature, the design is based on the conviction that new technologies represent a powerful tool to individualise architecture. The designers say that this avoids the banality of modernism standardisation whilst limiting material wastage, in a similar process to nature’s own selectivity and optimisation.
Each pylon would be made of welded sheet steel, individually shaped according to its location and the forces acting on it. The pylons are inspired by the form of the first shoots of a young plant; the first shoots grow out of the ground and are stabilised by a system of tension cables at their tips.

Image: PYLONS1

According to the architects: “The very idea of designing an electrical pylon in harmony with nature from the outset seems a fundamental contradiction of principle. Traditional pylons are the very symbol of insensitive intervention of mankind on the landscape. For this reason HDA’s design for the pylons of the future, like nature’s own process, is not guided purely by an intellectual aesthetic. Form and spatial configuration are defined by the forces of nature itself, such as wind, light and temperature, as well as many other parameters of the surroundings, so the pylons respond individually to their natural context and forces, and each one is different from another.”

Image: HDA3

Image: HDA4