In Soviet Russia, accident prevent you! That’s the message rendered in classic commie-propaganda style via these thirty soviet accident prevention posters.

Graphic workplace accident prevention posters are nothing new, neither are they the purview of any one nation. That said, this selection of vintage Soviet accident prevention posters reflects a period in Russian history that was drenched in blood, sorrow, violence and loss – and not only on the factory floor.

Oleg Atbashian, a former citizen of the Soviet Union who moved to the United States in 1994, doesn’t recall ever seeing these horrifying-to-the-point-of-being-comical posters. Atbashian worked as a metal worker apprentice at a large Ukrainian factory when he was a teenager and later, as a visual agitprop (agitation and propaganda) artist specializing in posters directed at construction workers. Atbashian was in the right place; just at the wrong time.

Indeed, Atbashian’s USSR of the 1970s was quite a different place from the fledgling “communist paradise” of Lenin and Stalin. “They (the posters) reflect the zeitgeist of a completely different, less sensitive generation of Soviet citizens,” explains Atbashian, “who were so used to being disciplined, humiliated, and terrorized by the authorities that the least of their concerns would be to question some silly presumptive posters that described them as a herd of bumbling idiots being gored by machinery.” Geez Oleg, tell us what you really think!

Just as the communist system of government represented a clean break from the Czarist regimes which preceded it, graphic art in the nascent Soviet Union aspired to blaze a new trail in lockstep with the policies and philosophies of the Red Revolution.

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Blood Red 30 Vintage Soviet Accident Prevention Posters

The creators of the world’s first working hoverboard have turned their sights toward larger-scale projects, patenting a three-part hovering foundation system to defend houses in earthquake- and flood-prone areas facing threats from natural disasters. The basic idea: decouple buildings from the ground temporarily, isolating them from unwanted movement happening below and around them.

Arx Pax, based in Silicon Valley and the creators of the Hendo Hoverboard using Magnetic Field Architecture (MFA), designed this new approach to floating homes during emergencies, using a buffer medium over a construction platform. Their physical technologies will be connected to ShakeAlert, an automatic warning software developed in part by the University of California, Berkeley and the U.S. Geological Survey.

“The ShakeAlert program aligns well with our long-term vision,” said Greg Henderson, co-founder and CEO at Arx Pax. “Weaving ShakeAlert into our MFA seismic isolation solution provides a valuable new tool to architects, engineers, and developers who are looking for a better way to build in areas affected by earthquakes. Our goal is to eliminate structural movement by pinpointing the exact time an object or building’s ‘landing gear’ should retract and activate the hover engines.”

Currently, many large buildings already have countermeasures to protect them from strong winds or earthquake forces, but few small structures can afford similar protections. Arx Pax hopes to make similar approaches cost-effective for individual houses and lower buildings in general, raising them up in the face of floodwaters or shaking ground.

In addition to helping homeowners, Arx Pax sees applications for this technology for places including surgical operating rooms where stability is essential or laboratories, server farms and other spaces with sensitively calibrated equipment.

A huge infrastructure project designed to prevent future Hurricane Sandy-style devastation, the Dryline is a perfectly-named solution for a city already sporting a successful High Line and an underground Low Line currently under construction. In the wake of that devastating super-storm, over 300,000 homes were left damaged or destroyed and nearly 20 billion dollars of destruction was caused in total – the first section of the Dryline is slated to cost a few hundred million, which in contrast does not seem like so much money.

Developed by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), the scheme continuous to evolve with each iteration. This latest video illustrates many of the mechanisms of action through easy-to-understand sketches and diagrams. It also features interviews with New Yorkers about their vision for a greener southern tip for Manhattan.

Designed to be deployed incrementally, the grand plan involves many discrete steps, each intended to shore up the lower portion of the city – the place that takes the brunt of incoming tides. The individual interventions vary, from berms that double as parks to sliding barriers that move into position during unusually high tides. Ultimately, “the Dryline imagines a landscaped buffer stretching all the way from West 57th Street, looping down to the Battery and back up to East 42nd Street, bestowing Manhattan with a protective green cushion.”

At the same time, the design follows classic principles of urban landscape pioneers like Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, taking this environmental challenge as an opportunity to create more park and civic space. Per The Guardian, “With a sprinkling of fairy-dust, the shoreline becomes furnished with undulating berms and protective planting, flip-down baffles and defensive kiosks, promenades and bike paths, bringing pedestrian life worthy of Lisbon or Barcelona to the gritty banks of Manhattan.”

BIG is a firm known for thinking large and this project is no exception. Then again, lessons learned from the other ambitious urban projects (like NYC’s High Line) can be applied here: built it piece by piece to reduce one-time costs and provide room for adjustment, and take citizen input into account. In the end, anyone who has walked the south edge of Manhattan knows it is a disjointed and, in many places, unwelcoming space – there is a huge opportunity for a new kind of part to provide connectivity and green space from this disparate set of urban landscapes.

“The Dryline consists of multiple but linked design opportunities; each on different scales of time, size and investment; each local neighborhood tailoring its own set of programs, functions, and opportunities. Small, relatively simple projects maintain the resiliency investment momentum post-Sandy, while setting in motion the longer-term solutions that will be necessary in the future.”