What could possibly go wrong?
From the mechanism description it sounds pretty cool, but I wonder what it looks like when viewed from the ‘wrong’ angle (hopefully it’s pretty obvious from the air, for instance). Plus it’d be cool if they could make it play movies or be bright purple or whatever. Or with moving rainbow stripes.
The South Korean government has granted approval to begin construction on the world’s first “invisible” tower.
<snip>
It will be built just outside of Seoul near the Incheon International Airport.
“What could go wrong?” indeed.
Watch, they’ll build the foundation then quit.
Heh… It’s the Emperor’s new building!
Anyone else thinking of the Simpsons Stonecutters epsiode, where they paint a building sky blue?
In all seriousness, can you imagine what all of the N. Korean defectors will think when one of the first things they see upon entering S. Korea is a mostly invisible skyscraper? That will really hammer home how much they’ve been lied to over the past 60 years.
Minds. blown.
After it is finished remind me NOT to fly into Seoul Airport …
It’s not flying into the airport you should be worried about.
True, while flying towards the airport one needs to be worried about flying into the building …:eek:
I think we can safely assume that nobody in charge of the approval process thought of this. I’d love to be a fly on the wall when it finally occurs to someone during a meeting :smack:
My first thought was “that will be ungodly expensive”, and I would be totally unsurprised if, halfway through construction, they quietly drop the LED screens.
My second thought was that 1000 foot tall LED screens would be a hell of an advertising platform.
Impossible! No building that small has a cloaking device!
Back when Invisible Fences ® first became popular, I flirted with the idea of starting an installation service. I’d show up at the homeowners place with my trencher, tools, and supplies. Once they left for work, I would head home, having installed an “invisible fence”.
ISTM this is only going to be invisible from a specific angle. If I look at it from the ground and see ‘sky’ then a person looking at it from the top floor of a 30 story high rise is also going to see ‘sky’ when they should be seeing ‘ground’, same goes for an airplane flying nearby. In the pictures, they showed what one would see looking straight on, which isn’t what you should see if you were looking at it from the ground, or from the ground 100 feet away, or from the ground a mile away.
I wonder how they’re going to tackle that.
I wonder if, like yellowjacketcoder said, it’s going to run ads and they just stuck some cameras on the opposite sides for fun since that wouldn’t add a whole lot to the cost when you consider what the LED screens cost.
This has made my list of Worst Ideas of 2013!
In all seriousness, radio towers as tall as this building are already very difficult to see when you’re flying. In particular the guy wires are virtually invisible and can extend farther out from the tower than you might expect. That’s why they have flashing lights and are noted on charts. I can’t imagine this building would be any worse.