Города в воздухе.

 

1929 cover of the American science fiction magazine Air Wonder Stories, edited by Hugo Gernsback. Contains Edmond Hamilton's "Cities in the Air." Set in 2069, the story recounts a war between three empires — American, European, and Asiatic — whose inhabitants live in massive floating cities, suspended in the air on circular bases by antigravity generators. In the end, "Brant, with a small commando group invades Berlin, captures the control room, and whirls Berlin around like a yo-yo, bumping into and destroying the other enemy cities." (Science Fiction: The Gernsback Years, p. 162).

 

Georgii Krutikov, Flying City 1928.
(more soon)

 

 

Illustration from the 1910 Leipzig edition of Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels (1726).

 

Buckminster Fuller developed a plan for airborne cities in 1962 which he dubbed “Cloud Nines." These floating urban centers would be enclosed in enormous geodesic constructions called Tensegrity spheres; Fuller calculated that the mass of the sphere would be far less than that of the enclosed air, which when heated only slightly above the temperature of the ambient atmosphere would cause the whole structure to float. “Many thousands of passengers could be housed aboard one-mile-diameter and larger cloud structures. The passengers could come and go from cloud to cloud, or cloud to ground, as the clouds float around the Earth or are anchored to mountaintops” (Fuller, Critical Path, New York: St. Martin’s, 1981, pp. 336-337).

 

 

Illustration by Howard Brown, of the article "10,000 Years Hence" by Hugo Gernsback in the journal Science and Invention, February 1922. Gernsback speculates: "The city the size of New York will float several miles above the surface of the earth, where the air is cleaner and purer and free from disease carrying bacteria. Four gigantic generators will shoot earthward electric rays which by reaction with the earth produce the force to keep the city aloft. By increasing of decreasing the electrical energy the city may be raised or lowered as desired. The city is roofed over by a substance which is transparent, strong and unbreakable. The atmospheric pressure within the city will probably be four or five pounds per square inch instead of 14.7, as it now is. Possibly, therefore, future men will have larger chests than we do. Furthermore, by rising above the clouds we will be freed from rain, snow and thunder showers. We will have in fact perpetual sunlight. The city will derive its energy from the sun, the solar energy being converted into electrical energy."

 

 

Sassetta (Stefano di Giovanni), Saint Francis and the Poor Knight, and Francis's Vision, 1437-44. One of seven panels that come from the back of a large two-sided polyptych, the Borgo San Sepolcro Altarpiece, illustrating the life of St Francis.

 

 

 

Xul Solar, Vuel Villa (watercolor) 1936. Solar (Oscar Agustín Alejandro Schulz Solari) was an Argentine painter, sculptor, writer, and inventor; a visionary utopian; an occultist and astrologer who yet remained catholic; an accomplished musician who was fluent in seven languages, two of which were of his own devising; and a minor character in Borges’s Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.
(more soon)

 

Wenzel Hablik, Colony of Air. From the series "Architecture." Sheet 19, (Berlin), 1925, etching / Wolfgang Pehnt: Die Architektur des Expressionismus (Ostfildern: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1998), p. 140.

 

взято в файсбуке Арона Шустера