JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

In just three or four decades into the skyscraper era and heavier-than-air powered flight there was a certain sense of planning to join those two technological (series of) achievements. This sense of enlightenment though didn’t seem very enlightened, or practical. The idea of locating airports on the tops of tall buildings, or on structures covering rivers (like the Hudson or Thames), or on long and wide structures built over expanses of shorter inner-city buildings, seem to have had a life from the late ‘teens into the 1940s.  They were struggling ideas that struggled. 

I found two more examples of this stuff-on-top-of-other-stuff tech thinking today. The first shows a structure 950′ tall made to accommodate a strained amount of air traffic in the heart of a large metropolitan center. (There are numerous examples of this idea sprinkled throughout this blog–just pop the word “airport” into the Google search box at upper right and you should find 10 or so posts on the topic, all with great illustrations.) By the way, this was one busy dream of an airport, what with 20 planes coming and going. 

The second image is unusual but less-techy: a tennis court built on top of a reservoir:

I ‘m not sure how hurting people were for spaces for a tennis court in 1926, but the competition for the open land for such a thing couldn’t’ve been that severe.