This is not modern, but we had to tear down a small traditional house in Japan that was rotting away- but the inside space, although smelly and very dusty, was amazing. One of the most beautiful space was the hallway, and the wooden panels that separate the hallway and the outside was old and rotting, and the wood becoming warped. this created slits in the panels and light leaked through- the light quality was amazing
I know this isnt exactly what yoru looking for, but its one example of deterioration being beautiful. I was runnign around the soon to-be-torn-apart house with a camera, and everybody thought I was crazy...
...now how do i post a image here? do I first have to have it up on some website in order to link it?
If you're looking for some interesting examples of modern decay, I highly recommend you take a look at this website: http://www.kiddofspeed.com/chernobyl-revisited/
It's a series of photos from one woman's tour of present day Chernobyl. Some very cool pictures indeed.
last summer, i was working with a young woman, a writer who was really into "urban exploration"... some of these activities of course are illegal, but there are some very experienced hardcore explorers who do this as a hobby-- they actually do plenty of research in advance and prepare all kinds of necessary gear...
she was telling me that there are all kinds of groups of people who you can try to hook up with to do this type of stuff-- exploring, documenting and photographing abandoned, derelict, and often dangerous urban (or rural) sites like abandoned tunnels or other underground spaces in the city, old buildings, caves, ruins, old mines and things... i can't remmebr the details, but one of the trips she was telling me about was some old tunnel system (i forget what it was used for) but it was long abandoned and had been flooded, and they explored them in inflatable rafts as far as they could go, eventually wading chest deep because the ceilings were too low...
she gave me a bunch of good website dedicated to this type of thing, but i've lost the links... here's a web ring i found just now on google, not sure if its good: http://e.webring.com/hub?ring=draining
I love this type of thing. I didn't realize, however, that there were others. I haven't been to Detroit, but I've heard that it is America's greatest modern ruin. Parts of it, anyhow.
Pittsburgh used to be great (I should say "great," because this fascination is a bit perverse), but has been largely cleaned up. In fact, I've heard that one of my favorite abandoned factories down in the Strip District is now luxury lofts.
Which would bring me to my next observation, that graf artists would be the original urban explorers. I wouldn't necessarily include squatters, because I think the impulse is different -- inhabiting vs. visiting, making a mark, and leaving. Graf artists document by making visible that which has been forgotten, even if they overwrite the surface.
this type of thing was a big part of my senior undergraduate project. One of the most interesting buildings to me was the UA theater in detroit, I'm curious about what you guys think of it:
those pictures are a little old. today every window in the building is tagged, most of it is believed to be the work of 3 prominent detroit taggers
Here's the story of the building:
Built in the late 20's, long considered one of the top designs architect C. Howard Crane did for the UA film company.
theater closes in 1971 after a long decline. the DSO uses the space for recordings until the mid 80s
periodic ground floor shops start and close sporadically until the mid 90s, including a Bank, and later a nightclub called "the currency exchange", which used the bank's vault for a bar.
in 1997 Don Barden purchases the building with the intent to review the space for redevelopment. When progress stalls, Barden gives control of the building to the city, with the expressed condition that it not be sold to the ilitchs. Shortly after, the city sells it to the ilitches. Barden goes to court in an attempt to nulify the sale, however he is unsuccessful (one source said he lost, one said he gave up)
1998: Ilitch leaves the building open and unguarded, and very shortly virtually all of the buildings plasterwork and accessable materials are removed or destroyed by vandals.
currently the building is slightly better sealed, however it is in abysmal condition, with holes in the theater roof (which some believe were caused by vandals throwing heavy materials from the attached office tower) allowing nature to destroy what is left of the theater's interior. Not a single person I found believes there to be a financially feasible way to restore the building anytime in the near future.
but then there's the issue of the office tower's windows: a small number of people did most of the tags (or so it's believed) during the few years ilitch left the building to rot, and most of the tags are variations on myan heiroglyphs. Most people who see building and don't know the story believe it is a public arts project, and there are endless debates about whether the tags are an improvement (since the building probably won't be restored) or mere vandalism.
This building occupies alot of my thoughts on detroit and its decline and causes. What do you think?
is that the building in berlin? i think its some kind of old gov't building. i also think its my favorite building in berlin. i've got some photos of if that havent been developed. thanks for reminding me.
Yes, it's the Palast der Rebublik in central East Berlin. It used to be a cultural centre for DDR in the 1970s, and is now awaiting a probable demolition to make way for a reconstruction of the City Palace. The interior has been stripped of a huge amount of asbestos, leaving only a wonderful steel structure interior:
Has anyone ever been up the 405, near the city of Wilmington? The iron and steel oil rigs (or whatever those rib-like forms are) that are dotted with lights are night look like modern dinosaur ruins...
someone above mentioned ruins in detroit. though not always modern, the subject buildings of camilo jose vergara ("american ruins") are incredible and his photography sublime.
I didn't realize there was a name for this... I just called it climbing into old buildings and wandering around. I've been doing quite a bit of this lately, and using photoshop to place experimental projects within the photos I take. *sorry nothing to show right now*
Kweiser - that site is a fake, the photos for the most part aren't, but that women's a fraud. One of the ladies that runs the tours into Pripyat, said that elena and her husband brought along a motorcycle helmet to place in photos. And they rearranged some of the debris to make the images more interesting (ex. childs doll etc.)
The cities is real though, pretty crazy stuff if one of the buildings there falls down the dust from the collapse could create a hazard outside the zone all over again. so it's kind of a ticking time bomb in that aspect.
I'm a big fan of abandoned industrial areas and mental hospitals.
If that bldg gets demo'd it will be a real shame. Hopefully, it can have a fate like another well known Trust Co. bank branch in town by Henri Jova. This bldg was rescued & is now a chic-eee restaurant called PieBarlink
I don't know how mush I like the tensile structure addition. Maybe it'll grow on me.
I hope it's a good place to eat. It would be ashame to see this bldg go away.
wait wait architecturegeek, what exactly are the frauds of that page? all those family photos that look like it was abandoned, was actually their photos, and not left on the site? sorry, im kinda confused.
frogpiss - the images are real, aside from a few of them being staged...
The story the women tells on the site of travelling the evacuation zone alone a motorcycle is completely fabricated.
I did a ton of research on Pripyat last year for a project and over the course of it heard the story from one of the tour companies about how she was taking dolls/pictures etc. from one house and placing them in another. The images on the site are real though, her stories and info about the town is a little off.
Nevertheless, even if some of it was staged, I think kiddofspeed is pretty neat... Its creative, has beautiful images, and its a good story... Isn't all history just fiction with embedded truths anyway?
bRink - Possibly, but banking on tragedy to increase your fame as a photographer, isn't.
I do agree that the story is compelling, fiction or otherwise.
I'm sorry I completely shoved this thread off track..
These are modern but not decaying you ought to visit bombay india to really see what modern ruins are, cause buildings decay here within a span of ten years.It rains like crazy over here to top it this place is near the sea and hecnce very very very very humid and there is no winter at all so all the sun the humidity and the four months of contnuous rain really kiss it.
There was an article in the latest The Wire (excellent UK music magazine) about artist Carl Michael von Hausswolff's documentation of the abandoned japanese Hashima Island, which had the highest population density on earth 40 years ago. Check it out (Cabinet Magazine)
sorry for another word on this, but your post begs a response... i don't mean to derail again but i think maybe our discussion isn't so much a derailment of this thread as an interesting offshoot regarding urban ruins in general... i think the controversy over the kiddofspeed work points to something about the nature of these ruins, and the act of transgressing them which is itself "illegitimate".
i do respect your point... however i don't see the photographer's intentions in this story as negative or profit seeking... photography is both art and representation, and i feel that a photograph has filters from the moment the camera is pointed / images are cropped, they are contrived... she is certainly not profiting from any ratings the way the majority of mass media we consume on a daily basis is or what we read in history books... (which are equally staged). and the medium of the internet has always been in that grey zone of truth and legitimacy... a relatively uncensored and unfiltered realm of information...
but i think maybe one of the things that make this type of work compelling is also that it is by its nature "unofficial" / "not legit"... it is more the stuff of journalistic or investigative "delinquents" than the politically correct "journalist"... it is documenting things which are out of public access, and which we are not supposed to see, that are hidden from the public eye... perhaps urban exploration is disrespectful by its nature? maybe climbing the fence is not that different than defacing public property with graffiti... is it wrong? we are generally told by authorities that it is.... or at least that there are proper avenues of red tape to pass through in order to obtain legitimate access.
it was originally an imperial chinese fortress within british held hongkong, but after WW2 taken over by squatters, drug addicts, the triads, and was like the center of the black market... but basically it was a self contained city... it had 50,000 inhabitants in 0.026 km², a density of 1,900,000 / km² which was also said to be the most densely populated spot on earth... The place was insane, total fire hazard, like a huge solid maze of corridors and rooms... They eventually tore it down...
Aaron Tan, the principle of RAD Architecture in Hong Kong (formerly OMA Asia) documented its demolition-- I believe it was a research project he was doing while at Harvard... The walled city was so huge that they had to dismantle it in layers, so he mapped the layers something like an archaelogical excavation...
The Iranian Embassy in DC is abandoned and falling apart - it is pretty incredible, and jarring, right on tony Embassy Row on Massachusetts Avenue (and across from the very tropicalismo Brazilian Embassy). The US kicked them out in the seventies, then there were some random tenants, the last of whom was booted maybe five years ago. Now there is a big dumpster in front and parts of the buildings are falling off.
Aug 24, 05 11:09 am ·
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I Wanna See Some Modern Ruins.
Come up w/ some architecture that is covered in Kudzu, rusting away, falling down,etc I wanna see some beauty in the form of decay.
Wonderful. Im not alone.
Be careful around that Kudzu, folks, it'll eat you alive!
..ever been to Jersey?
This is not modern, but we had to tear down a small traditional house in Japan that was rotting away- but the inside space, although smelly and very dusty, was amazing. One of the most beautiful space was the hallway, and the wooden panels that separate the hallway and the outside was old and rotting, and the wood becoming warped. this created slits in the panels and light leaked through- the light quality was amazing
I know this isnt exactly what yoru looking for, but its one example of deterioration being beautiful. I was runnign around the soon to-be-torn-apart house with a camera, and everybody thought I was crazy...
...now how do i post a image here? do I first have to have it up on some website in order to link it?
If you're looking for some interesting examples of modern decay, I highly recommend you take a look at this website:
http://www.kiddofspeed.com/chernobyl-revisited/
It's a series of photos from one woman's tour of present day Chernobyl. Some very cool pictures indeed.
last summer, i was working with a young woman, a writer who was really into "urban exploration"... some of these activities of course are illegal, but there are some very experienced hardcore explorers who do this as a hobby-- they actually do plenty of research in advance and prepare all kinds of necessary gear...
she was telling me that there are all kinds of groups of people who you can try to hook up with to do this type of stuff-- exploring, documenting and photographing abandoned, derelict, and often dangerous urban (or rural) sites like abandoned tunnels or other underground spaces in the city, old buildings, caves, ruins, old mines and things... i can't remmebr the details, but one of the trips she was telling me about was some old tunnel system (i forget what it was used for) but it was long abandoned and had been flooded, and they explored them in inflatable rafts as far as they could go, eventually wading chest deep because the ceilings were too low...
she gave me a bunch of good website dedicated to this type of thing, but i've lost the links... here's a web ring i found just now on google, not sure if its good: http://e.webring.com/hub?ring=draining
This e-zine is a pretty good summary of what urban exploration is about: http://www.infiltration.org/
[img]http://www.image.com/image.jpeg{/img}
my prof is all about reclaiming these spaces. If I wasn't such a code-tard an image would be posted above
I love this type of thing. I didn't realize, however, that there were others. I haven't been to Detroit, but I've heard that it is America's greatest modern ruin. Parts of it, anyhow.
Pittsburgh used to be great (I should say "great," because this fascination is a bit perverse), but has been largely cleaned up. In fact, I've heard that one of my favorite abandoned factories down in the Strip District is now luxury lofts.
Which would bring me to my next observation, that graf artists would be the original urban explorers. I wouldn't necessarily include squatters, because I think the impulse is different -- inhabiting vs. visiting, making a mark, and leaving. Graf artists document by making visible that which has been forgotten, even if they overwrite the surface.
http://forgottenmichigan.com/
(hit "places")
this type of thing was a big part of my senior undergraduate project. One of the most interesting buildings to me was the UA theater in detroit, I'm curious about what you guys think of it:
http://forgottenmichigan.com/gallery/UE/UnitedArtists/
http://forgottendetroit.com/uat/photos.html
those pictures are a little old. today every window in the building is tagged, most of it is believed to be the work of 3 prominent detroit taggers
Here's the story of the building:
Built in the late 20's, long considered one of the top designs architect C. Howard Crane did for the UA film company.
theater closes in 1971 after a long decline. the DSO uses the space for recordings until the mid 80s
periodic ground floor shops start and close sporadically until the mid 90s, including a Bank, and later a nightclub called "the currency exchange", which used the bank's vault for a bar.
in 1997 Don Barden purchases the building with the intent to review the space for redevelopment. When progress stalls, Barden gives control of the building to the city, with the expressed condition that it not be sold to the ilitchs. Shortly after, the city sells it to the ilitches. Barden goes to court in an attempt to nulify the sale, however he is unsuccessful (one source said he lost, one said he gave up)
1998: Ilitch leaves the building open and unguarded, and very shortly virtually all of the buildings plasterwork and accessable materials are removed or destroyed by vandals.
currently the building is slightly better sealed, however it is in abysmal condition, with holes in the theater roof (which some believe were caused by vandals throwing heavy materials from the attached office tower) allowing nature to destroy what is left of the theater's interior. Not a single person I found believes there to be a financially feasible way to restore the building anytime in the near future.
but then there's the issue of the office tower's windows: a small number of people did most of the tags (or so it's believed) during the few years ilitch left the building to rot, and most of the tags are variations on myan heiroglyphs. Most people who see building and don't know the story believe it is a public arts project, and there are endless debates about whether the tags are an improvement (since the building probably won't be restored) or mere vandalism.
This building occupies alot of my thoughts on detroit and its decline and causes. What do you think?
a-f........
is that the building in berlin? i think its some kind of old gov't building. i also think its my favorite building in berlin. i've got some photos of if that havent been developed. thanks for reminding me.
These are my favorite. Yeah, I've got that same fascination but never the guts to actually tresspass into those places.
If you want to see modern ruins, just go to Iraq or Afghanistan!
batiment:
Yes, it's the Palast der Rebublik in central East Berlin. It used to be a cultural centre for DDR in the 1970s, and is now awaiting a probable demolition to make way for a reconstruction of the City Palace. The interior has been stripped of a huge amount of asbestos, leaving only a wonderful steel structure interior:
(Image from Zwischen palast nutzung)
Also, along the Karl Marx Allee nearby, there are several small pavillions that are desolate or half used (like Café Moscow), which could be fantastic with a bit of basic renovation work.
great book: "dead tech", out of print, facsinating imagery
Has anyone ever been up the 405, near the city of Wilmington? The iron and steel oil rigs (or whatever those rib-like forms are) that are dotted with lights are night look like modern dinosaur ruins...
someone above mentioned ruins in detroit. though not always modern, the subject buildings of camilo jose vergara ("american ruins") are incredible and his photography sublime.
Brighton West Pier - beautifully tragic decay
some of the 60's 'modern' frontages of our inner cities pocess more character in their personal ruin than they did on their conception
and some have that magical draw that the architect fights as a flights of fancy.
I didn't realize there was a name for this... I just called it climbing into old buildings and wandering around. I've been doing quite a bit of this lately, and using photoshop to place experimental projects within the photos I take. *sorry nothing to show right now*
Kweiser - that site is a fake, the photos for the most part aren't, but that women's a fraud. One of the ladies that runs the tours into Pripyat, said that elena and her husband brought along a motorcycle helmet to place in photos. And they rearranged some of the debris to make the images more interesting (ex. childs doll etc.)
The cities is real though, pretty crazy stuff if one of the buildings there falls down the dust from the collapse could create a hazard outside the zone all over again. so it's kind of a ticking time bomb in that aspect.
I'm a big fan of abandoned industrial areas and mental hospitals.
Anyone seen session 9?
Philadelphia State Hospital -- Byberry
http://www.opacity.us/site10.htm
An old C&S Bank branch on Moreland in ATL:
link
To think that this was a bank blows my mind.
If that bldg gets demo'd it will be a real shame. Hopefully, it can have a fate like another well known Trust Co. bank branch in town by Henri Jova. This bldg was rescued & is now a chic-eee restaurant called PieBarlink
I don't know how mush I like the tensile structure addition. Maybe it'll grow on me.
I hope it's a good place to eat. It would be ashame to see this bldg go away.
wait wait architecturegeek, what exactly are the frauds of that page? all those family photos that look like it was abandoned, was actually their photos, and not left on the site? sorry, im kinda confused.
frogpiss - the images are real, aside from a few of them being staged...
The story the women tells on the site of travelling the evacuation zone alone a motorcycle is completely fabricated.
Wiki Link
I did a ton of research on Pripyat last year for a project and over the course of it heard the story from one of the tour companies about how she was taking dolls/pictures etc. from one house and placing them in another. The images on the site are real though, her stories and info about the town is a little off.
Pripyat.com
Quite a few members of the Oblivion-Lost community have visted pripyat or compiled some good video/photos, if your interested.
Oblivion Lost
Yeah I did question how she was able to get through the contaminated area with a bike and all...
And that opens up a new set of questions- can you justify staging for a photo? hmm, maybe ill open up another forum about that.
Thanks for the links, this is all very interesting
Nevertheless, even if some of it was staged, I think kiddofspeed is pretty neat... Its creative, has beautiful images, and its a good story... Isn't all history just fiction with embedded truths anyway?
bRink - Possibly, but banking on tragedy to increase your fame as a photographer, isn't.
I do agree that the story is compelling, fiction or otherwise.
I'm sorry I completely shoved this thread off track..
speaking of tracks here's a link to abandoned stations in New York to get back on subject
These are modern but not decaying you ought to visit bombay india to really see what modern ruins are, cause buildings decay here within a span of ten years.It rains like crazy over here to top it this place is near the sea and hecnce very very very very humid and there is no winter at all so all the sun the humidity and the four months of contnuous rain really kiss it.
you will never want to see ruins again and will never call all those abandoned buildings decayed.
There was an article in the latest The Wire (excellent UK music magazine) about artist Carl Michael von Hausswolff's documentation of the abandoned japanese Hashima Island, which had the highest population density on earth 40 years ago. Check it out (Cabinet Magazine)
architecturegeek:
sorry for another word on this, but your post begs a response... i don't mean to derail again but i think maybe our discussion isn't so much a derailment of this thread as an interesting offshoot regarding urban ruins in general... i think the controversy over the kiddofspeed work points to something about the nature of these ruins, and the act of transgressing them which is itself "illegitimate".
i do respect your point... however i don't see the photographer's intentions in this story as negative or profit seeking... photography is both art and representation, and i feel that a photograph has filters from the moment the camera is pointed / images are cropped, they are contrived... she is certainly not profiting from any ratings the way the majority of mass media we consume on a daily basis is or what we read in history books... (which are equally staged). and the medium of the internet has always been in that grey zone of truth and legitimacy... a relatively uncensored and unfiltered realm of information...
but i think maybe one of the things that make this type of work compelling is also that it is by its nature "unofficial" / "not legit"... it is more the stuff of journalistic or investigative "delinquents" than the politically correct "journalist"... it is documenting things which are out of public access, and which we are not supposed to see, that are hidden from the public eye... perhaps urban exploration is disrespectful by its nature? maybe climbing the fence is not that different than defacing public property with graffiti... is it wrong? we are generally told by authorities that it is.... or at least that there are proper avenues of red tape to pass through in order to obtain legitimate access.
Hashima Island
a-f: that kind of reminds me of the kowloon walled city in hong kong:
http://www.adventurocity.com/images/cn/cnhkg007.php
wikipedia site
it was originally an imperial chinese fortress within british held hongkong, but after WW2 taken over by squatters, drug addicts, the triads, and was like the center of the black market... but basically it was a self contained city... it had 50,000 inhabitants in 0.026 km², a density of 1,900,000 / km² which was also said to be the most densely populated spot on earth... The place was insane, total fire hazard, like a huge solid maze of corridors and rooms... They eventually tore it down...
Aaron Tan, the principle of RAD Architecture in Hong Kong (formerly OMA Asia) documented its demolition-- I believe it was a research project he was doing while at Harvard... The walled city was so huge that they had to dismantle it in layers, so he mapped the layers something like an archaelogical excavation...
some cool photos in this book: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1873200137/qid=1124877390/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-3186746-9906257?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
The Iranian Embassy in DC is abandoned and falling apart - it is pretty incredible, and jarring, right on tony Embassy Row on Massachusetts Avenue (and across from the very tropicalismo Brazilian Embassy). The US kicked them out in the seventies, then there were some random tenants, the last of whom was booted maybe five years ago. Now there is a big dumpster in front and parts of the buildings are falling off.
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