Line

I wonder what Mohammed bin Salman is smoking. The Line seems claustrophobic and fragile.

Claustrophobic may be just me, but I'm probably not alone.

"Fragile" comes in several ways.

The ground shifts. What did your rail line just do?

If you make skyscrapers too tall you run into elevator capacity problems. You can avoid that in The Line by replicating everything every few miles, so you don't have to travel from one end to the other to get home. Except 1) people aren't quite like that; if this week's hot performer is appearing in the theater in Mile 82 you'll attract fans from all over and 2) it seems to lend itself to partitioning, with tribal zones appearing just as they do in Baltimore.

If a disaffected or striking group wanted to choke off transit, it would seem very hard to guard against--because they could strike almost anywhere, and there's no obvious way to flank blockages.

You can probably think of several others. I doubt this would be run as efficiently as the scheme Niven and Pournelle envisioned, though the conflicts outsiders seem like a reasonable prediction.

Another way to look at it is "What's in it for me?" "Why should I move there?"

• if you're a single out of school--flexibility
• married with small children--does it have schools, places to play?
• a gardener--where can I plant?
• someone with mobility problems--close to transport and to aides
• married with older kids who need more challenges, like first jobs--oh wait this is Saudi Arabia

That's an American way of looking at it. A more natural question, under the circumstances, might be "Where do my wives and my children and my cousins and my grandparents and so on fit in?" Physical distance matters--for that matter, just being on a different floor from another group at work can cut down communications. Will people be satisfied with adjacent apartments, or does one need large suites?

UPDATE: See comments

On the other hand

I suppose design could be worse: It isn't clear if the design of the Brain Health center is meant to encourage the sense that "I must be in trouble--I really need those people" or is an inadvertent warning not to come near.

Two cheers for brutalist concrete

Gov. Tony Evers ordered emergency repair work to Van Hise Hall after concrete slabs broke off the UW-Madison building earlier this week and an engineering company found the building’s remaining panels “pose an immediate threat to public health, welfare and safety.”

Brutal

How did the Humanities Building wind up so awful? And it is--it is hard to navigate, has lousy acoustics for concerts(!), single-pane windows to face Wisconsin winters, and it's uglier than homemade sin. How?

Step 1: Brutalist architecture. Step 2: Cut the budget.

"I always tell people, 'Look, it's a really cool piece of architecture, but it doesn't function,'" Brown says of Humanities. "And it really hasn't functioned from day one."

At SIU, Faner Hall, another Brutalist "masterpeice", needs a map. It used to house campus student computing, with IBM 370s and lots of noisy card punches. The curious are invited to try to trace a path through the halls from one end of the second floor to the other.

At UIC the Physics/Chem/Bio building is by no means the oddest architecture on campus. One building--I think it was art--had a layout in which the main hall went up and then down, and rooms branched off upwards from it. The campus once had an amphitheater sort of arrangement by the student center that reached down through the two-level walkway system, the latter presumably to expedite draining buildings in a hurry. For UICC (now UIC), probably the most brutal part was the eminent domain destruction of an ethnic neighborhood that had just undertaken major renovation. I was told that for years a student who showed up in one of the few remaining local businesses could stand waiting for hours.

UPDATE: "the 1st, 2nd, 6th and 7th floors on the northwest side of the Humanities building will be closed to staff, students and the public effective at 4 p.m. on Friday, April 30". "an expansion joint on the 6th floor of the west side of the building has failed"