Open Architecture Network

PROJECT DESCRIPTION:
(To see a scan of the painting in much greater detail (94 megs) click here: http://towerofbabel.com/BabelTowerPoster2.jpg)

The Tower of Babel will be a multilingual, multicultural master planned community based on the 1563 painting of the Bruegel tower and environs, and constructed around a global barter exchange in Dubai where citizens of Babel can trade, sell, buy or loan with micropayments multilingual and multicultural timeshare vocation vacations worldwide and accumulate points which will be matched by stock options for ownership of the non-profit company.

The master planned community part of Babel invites imagineers of theme parks and the film industry to design it as a year round arts festival of culture and academia. Babel will also promote cultural events globally.

The tower will offer its citizens a unique opportunity to contribute and participate in a reciprocal global community, by relying on the time, ideas, content, and skills that our citizens contribute. In exchange, Babel citizens are recognized and rewarded for their contributions through award programs, access to our worldwide mentoring program and stock ownership.

The exchange service will be as large as RCI which today has over 4,000 affiliated resorts located in 100 countries, with over three million subscribing members living in more than 200 countries.

The journeys and adventures of Babelonians will be published in the flagship journal, online since 1996, in every language mankind has to offer, which since 2001 has been recognized by the United Nations as one of the most significant social and human sciences periodicals.

The translators of over 250+ languages will comprise the for-profit translation subsidiary Babel Translations, and other for-profit subsidiaries will include Babel Publishing and Babel Imagineering.

Whether you’re an electrical engineer in Ohio who has always wanted to make wine in France or a tailor in India who has always wanted to go to Fashion Week in New York City, Babel is here.

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The construction of Babel began in January 1996 as the development of a new multilingual, multicultural online journal of arts and ideas, utilizing the new media of the web to reach out to as large and inclusive a world community as possible and celebrate human enlightenment regardless of language, cultural or social restrictions. Over the past twelve years, Towerofbabel.com has advanced to become a global non-profit educational and vocational experience, aiming for the highest egalitarian, altruistic and philanthropic structure. It has been recognized since 2001 by the United Nations as one of the most import social and human sciences online periodicals.

Babel is now repositioning itself to take advantage of the advancements in web tools since its inception as well as the opportunities available in the 21st century.

Babel citizens team up to form interconnected global workforces and use tools such as blogs, Wiki, Moodle and PHP Forum to facilitate communication and collaboration. Citizens work together to build the tower infrastructure, contribute content (drawings, paintings, literature, music, ideas), and translate the journal into all of the world’s languages.

Towerofbabel.com partners with a worldwide team of expert mentors to provide a hands-on cooperative immersion experience to Babel citizens. Citizens select from any academic or vocational field offered, and spend one week, working one-on-one with the mentor on a project to help build the tower.

There are over 250 subdomains of towerofbabel.com ready to be configured by those who are interested in taking the language-oriented subdomains and helping to build the tower, with the ability to install WordPress, Gallery, ZenCart, PhpGedView, Pligg, dotProject, Moodle, Joomla, phpbb, MediaWiki, WebCalendar, and Advanced Poll.

Design your language’s tower however you wish but continue what has already been pioneered as an attempt to build a tower aiming for the highest egalitarian, altruistic and philanthropic structures.

Imagine turning the legendary Bruegel painting of the tower of Babel into a three dimensional reality as the focus of a non-profit multilingual, multicultural theme park dedicated to the riches of culture and the world of arts and ideas. A theme park for the rest of us. Like a big bouquet of roses hanging down from the heavens to the ground. Taking the basic passion behind an idea like the Experience Music Project in Seattle and Frank Gehry's structure for it but broadening the scope so it's not so narrowly focused on just rock and roll. Imagine a year round arts festival with a building of the Tower of Babel in Dubai with an outdoor stage near the waterline. A skate park. A cybercafe in the middle of a huge new and used bookstore ala Powells in Portland, with a huge bulletin board where people could leave their contact information all divided up into sections of the world. A theatre for plays and a theatre for films, different double features every night. Independently run pubs and restaurants from all over, Italian, Greek, Thai, Ethiopian, Chinese, Japanese etc. Literary readings and a set of brick catacombs (like Fellini's in Utrecht) where you can see rock bands, jazz, alternative country, classical... Floodlit at night like the Colosseum in Rome. Be able to rappel up one side of the Tower. A language school for all of the world's languages and a press for multilingual books.

Eddie Sotto, recently Senior Vice President of Concept Design at Walt Disney Imagineering and currently Chief Creative Officer at Progress City, wrote me back after I sent him an email describing my ideas, saying:

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Malcolm,

My sense is that your idea sounds very interesting (I like the juxtapositions of the bookstore, skatepark and language school) and potentially really successful.

Have you taken this idea to developers? It could be really unique.

Thanks for letting me in on your vision,

Eddie Sotto

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