San Diego: scifi city
Wandering around San Diego for ETech 2008 makes me realize how this city displays a peculiar sense of science fiction. It’s not the first time that I visit that place but it’s perhaps the conjunction of that tech conference and the watching of Battlestar Galactica that made me me thinking about this.
Downtown SF definitely looks as if colonial spaceships-shaped building had to suffer for a temporarily grounding and were ready to take off or spacefold to another dimension:
That impression also materializes at the ground level with all those city infrastructures that are generally hidden/covered but not here:
Unlike Rotterdam that I described last week as the automatic/mechanic/electronic city to shows how the town is a “process”, San Diego looks rather more about “shapes”. Processes are present of course but they are more hidden, often more about access to buildings (through contactless cards) or the presence of the wifi clouds.
Why do I blog this? this is not very rocket-science thoughts, just psychogeographic feelings on a sunday morning.
March 10th, 2008 at 11:02 pm
That is a very interesting perspective on my city. I’ll have to look at it in a new light. It reminds me of a harbor cruise I took several years ago. They pointed out the skyline is built very much like a toolbox. The most notable features are buildings that resemble a phillips head screwdriver (One America Plaza), a straight-edge screwdriver (Hyatt), and socket wrenches (Emerald Plaza). You will also see a champagne glass, with the impression that bubbles are rising during sunset, when you look at the First National Bank building from the harbor.