@mattblaze There’s some saying I’ve heard about a thing becoming a source for nostalgia and fondness only once it is no longer a necessity.

@mattblaze (My personal nails-on-chalkboard feature in the landscape is cellphone towers ‘disguised’ as trees — they fall straight into an arboreal Uncanny Valley and draw my attention, where an unadorned tower or a real tree would go unremarked.)

@mattblaze To that end, while I laugh at it, part of me appreciates what T-Mobile had to do in our town to put a cell tower in a cemetery.Behold: the monument to Our Lady of Perpetual Communication.

@mattblaze the one in Downtown Los Angeles was at least somewhat interesting to look at. Attractive in a mid century modern kind of way.

@mattblaze In the world of more-than-utilitarian communications towers, my favorite is the Telefonica tower designed by Calatrava and built for the Barcelona 1992 Olympics. It doubles as a sundial, projecting the hour as a shadow on the plaza below.

@mattblaze I think we will, in the same way gasometers or electricity pylons now have admirers. A lot of ‘strictly functional’ infrastructure seems to quickly become invisible (I think it’s partly sensory adaptation and partly opacity ie seeing it but not knowing what it does) and eventually appreciated. But trying to make it decorative seems to mostly backfire, since invisibility is no longer an option and it’s hard to do well.

@mattblaze Beautiful radio towers? There‘s one in the Netherlands that I saw being mentioned here on Mastodon a while ago: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_KoIt‘s on my list - but it being a 9h+ drive from where I haven’t been there yet.