(Photo courtesy of Büro Wehberg.)

Now for a different sort of swing, something less ominous than the Congressional variety and more likely to induce squee: Büro Wehberg's giant swings.

There's three of them, and they've been installed every summer at Autostadt, which is a kind of theme park devoted to cars located next to a Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg, Germany. Surely streets everywhere could use one of these. Instead of swinging (that is, if you can call swaying mere inches back and forth swinging) in cramped bus stops and subway trains, you fly between skyscrapers, above bumper to bumper traffic, and perhaps plunge into a lake or river right at the end. And it should be a permanent fixture, not a temporary hack. Have a cooling ride during the scorching heat of summer, and a few months later, an even more invigorating ride after the blizzard of the century has emptied out the streets.


(Photo courtesy of Büro Wehberg.)

Now how about giant see-saws?

(Via People and Place via In public space we trust.)