http://dprbcn.wordpress.com/2010/01/16/takis-zenetos-electronic-urbanism/

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Takis Zenetos was born in Athens, Greece, and would design some of the most beautiful buildings in Greece during the 60′s and early 70′s. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, graduating in 1954. Living in Paris in the lively atmosphere of pioneering artistic and cultural life of the postwar period. His few remaining modernist buildings are out of favor and some are targets for demolition. Sadly, Zenetos committed suicide in 1977.

Zenetos worked in some interesting avant-garde speculative projects, one of them known as Electronic Urbanism. The basic idea of Electronic Urbanism [which Zenetos designed, developed and investigated from 1952 to 1974] is the creation of a system with diverse levels and locations for different urban functions, primarily residential, suspended from natural environments [as cantilevers or mountains] and integrated with all communications technologies, that allow wide-ranging connections among people and social groups. The extensive use of tele-work, tele-management, tele-medicine and tele-education redefines the human environment geared to free communication and creative occupation.

As Jane Jacobs says in her great book The Death and Life of Great American Cities:

Cities are an inmense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success, in city building and city design. This is the laboratory in which city planning should have been learning and forming and testing its theories.

Even if Zenetos didn’t have the opportunity to know if the ideas behind Electronic Urbanism would have worked or not, his approach to technologies focused on telecommunications, was really innovative for the time.

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