Absolute Superlinearity


The Gear Tek Corporation takes us on a brief visit to “the longest building I have ever seen,” located somewhere in the “physically oppressive and hallucinatory” flatlands of Illinois.


“This is the longest building I have ever seen,” GTC writes. “It is totally windowless and stretches for at least a mile, although it seems to defy laws of space-time so it may be longer or shorter than that.”

The building’s absolute superlinearity appears to be a “spatial illusion” that is only amplified by the “simple gray rectangles which glide along the blank facade like dotted lines on an overlay. It looks like an Ellsworth Kelly interpretation of Superman chasing a train.”

(Links to the original Gear Tek Corporation post have been removed because the URL now resolves to a porn site. Thanks to Tim Drage for the tip!)

8 thoughts on “Absolute Superlinearity”

  1. mildly related
    standford linear accelerator in palo alto,CA a mile long building that they use for the acceleration of atoms. it runs perpindicular to a highway. so the moment you pass it is the only chance you have to perceive its length.

  2. hey Geoff, this got me thinking of a couple of other extremely long buildings, both dating from the 1970s. Both are academic buildings.

    1) Lethbridge University in Alberta, designed by Arthur Erickson;

    http://www.arthurerickson.com/B_leth.html

    2) the University of Calabria, designed by Vittorio Gregotti.

    Hard to find good images of the second one…there’s a book, though:

    http://www.stoutbooks.com/cgi-bin/stoutbooks.cgi/42444.html

    Anyway, check those out!

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