JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

These images “Traffic on Three Levels; Solving Street Congestion” from the Illustrated London News (15 August 1925) struck me as something much more–or much less?–than their appeal to urban design.  I think that it is very difficult to look at these images and not see them from the top, down. Even by the time you get to the fourth image at bottom right, the design still pulls attracts your eye to the top of the image and away from the traffic scene below.

They seem to have that sense of abstract art, achieving a type of geometry and disorientation, both at the same time, pulling you into the work and de-arranging it at teh same time.  And that to me makes it highly artful, if unintentional.  They are sort of hallucinating–I know that is a bit of a stretch–but their confusion of the expected with this sort of misty, unknown atmosphere, has a sense of Rene Magritte to them had he worked his magic in geometrical blocks.