Monday 12 May 2014

Town planning

Buildings on the edge of a cliff in the middle of Tbilisi, image from here.

Restores your faith in humanity, it does:

6 comments:

Kj said...

It´s also depressing. It´s depressing that, except perhaps in the developed world, noone is ever again going to build something that violates H&S, minimum space requirements, disability access requirements, zoning plan, appropriate architecture, subject to environmental impact reports, geological surveys and so on. So to see slightly interesting architecture except modernist boxes, well, travel to Tblisi then.

DBC Reed said...

But they are on the side of a river so won't be undercut by wave action.
On the other hand, it might have been kinder to stop the laissez faire building of houses along the soft cliffs of the English East Coast.

Mark Wadsworth said...

Kj, exactly, that's what cheered me up.

DBC, those cliffs look like that because the river below has eroded the rock down to that depth, sooner or later the cliffs will crumble a bit further back (although admittedly that might take a thousand years, I dunno).

DBC Reed said...

Should think the rock they're built on is harder than the buildings.Contrast English East Coast.
Also Georgia was hardly exempt from planning during the Workers Utopia ( a description of USSR I once saw painted on a building in Rapallo!)

Mark Wadsworth said...

DBC, what does the East Coast have to do with it? I've seen similarly spectacularly sited buildings in Italy or Switzerland, I find it impressive, is all.

DBC Reed said...

A bit of planning ,bureaucratic interference etc might have stopped people building near the edge of soft cliffs on East Coast and seeing their 100 ft gardens disappear in a few years and the houses go into the sea. ( Don't go along with this all planning bad /no-planning good mantra.It leads to the land value fallacy: build over the Green Belt from Brighton to Bedford; build over the London Parks and all will be well.)