The Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington is not necessarily associated with the design of Military paraphernalia but when considered more closely contains within its tomes the designs of every successful military leadership to have existed, Caeser through Victoria, all Empires are represented. The Cold War Exhibition then was one of the more technically oriented and largest exhibitions I have seen at the V&A during my time as a Member of the same institution.
The focus of the Cold war Exhibition was to communicate the technical design innovations brought about by the prevailing political rivalries that formed that period and its successor, our modern times with highlights such as the helicopter delivered multi-story geodesic structures of the US's display at the Kabul Int'l Trade Fair of 1956. The designer and engineer of those airborne geodomes was none other Richard Buckminster Fuller.
At the heart of Communism is communal living or Communes, there were a flurry of design innovations to deliver affordable living spaces in various environments. SAE-UK has its own pilot site for innovative solutions to transport and communes at www.mobdom.org
The Figure above right shows the infrastructure of the Mobile Domicile or Mobdom.
Other architectural contributions on show at the Cold War Exhibition included the Nagakin Capsule Towers by Kisho Kurokawa in a similar manner to mobdom.org.uk each room is hoisted to connect in this case permenantly to a 14 storey skeletal structure. A compromise between the Nagakin Capsules and the portable domiciles of mobdom.org.uk is found in the 'Archigram' walking cities of Ron Herron's 1964 designs showing
walking apartment blocks meandering deserted spaces as giant vehicles serving as cities. More conventionally, the London BT Tower, nerve-centre for the Birtish Telelcommunications Network, was classified as a 'High Security Installation and an 'Official Secret' until being declassified in 1991 - despite its visibility.
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Many of these architectural oddities with the exception of mobdom were constructed from the post war wonder called concrete or as we have come to think of it here in the UK, the second Luftwaffe. This is not the only material to rise to prominence during the Cold War. I have heard the advent
of modern science described as a three-fold revolution; the chemical revolution with the identification of the distinct atoms and the periodic table, the synthetic revolution which spawned all man-made materials and now, finally, the biological revolution where our own genes can be used to repair own bodies in gene therapies, many of which are currently under trial. To a great degree the Cold War was the larger part of that second revolution,
the synthetic revolution. Plastics developed largely after the advent of World War I and found application in the subsequent decades. One well known example was the Trabant of East Germany, a miserable two-stroke Bakelite icon of the East which a friend |
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