Fantastic views of New York City from above.
http://www.pixelcase.com.au/vr/2009/newyork/
via {the fwa.com}
Archive for the 'architecture' Category
This from the New York Times graphic piece that appeared on the front page of The New York Times website yesterday.
To view Visit: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/03/10/us/20090310-immigration-explorer.html?hp
Web Tech Guy and Angry Staff Person
My friend George Anderson sent this to me from this smithsonian blog. It is right on the mark. I do have to say that my head is still partly stuck in the “don’t let it out the door mentality”. What do you think?
David W. Dunlap/The New York Times
This is from Dunlap about the NYTimes series
The Brooklyn Bridge The walkway across the bridge was not divided into lanes for walkers and bikers in 1978. The financial district looks much the same, save for the absence of the twin towers.
Mind you, I didn’t set out to take vintage photos.
The assignment in 1978 was simply to illustrate “The City Observed: New York,” a guidebook to Manhattan by Paul Goldberger, who was then the architecture critic for The New York Times. (He is now the architecture critic for The New Yorker.) Paul instructed me to keep the pictures straightforward, documentary and as free of optical distortion as possible. He handed me a carbon copy of his manuscript as my guide, and off I went, with my Nikons and Plus-X film.
Because I can still remember what the weather was like on the days I took these pictures, what the city sounded and smelled like, I was startled to look through my contact sheets recently and realize how much Manhattan had changed. New York did not just crawl out of its near-collapse in the mid-70s, it had boomed almost without interruption. Towers were inserted. Landmarks were deleted. And even in cityscapes that looked unchanged, I knew that far wealthier occupants — residential and commercial — could now be found behind familiar old facades.
My editors and I thought that pairing photos from then and now would be a graphic way to examine the phenomenon of urban churn that so defines this city. The series will visit a dozen or so neighborhoods, uptown and downtown, before the end of 2008. Each diptych tells its own tale, but the overall story is clear: It doesn’t take much longer than a generation for New York to regenerate itself completely. DAVID W. DUNLAP
Follow this link to view these and other pairs in an interesting embedded Flash application.
New book, you decide. Read review in ICONEYE here.
A fantastic project by University at Buffalo architecture students where they bought a vacant city home from the city and created a work of art last year. Then gave it to a family to live in.
This house at 15 S. Putnam has stood victim to the elements – it’s been vandalized, looted, and its leaking roof has made it uninhabitable. In June 2006, the structure was condemned by the city due to structural problems, destined for demo.
But now – thanks to cooperation between the University of Buffalo School of Architecture, Harvey Garrett, and home owner Dennetta Stikkel – new, and decidedly unique, life will be breathed into the otherwise abandoned house. Under the direction of Professors Frank Fantauzzi and Brad Wales, the project architect, 14 graduate students will be working creatively to revitalize the structure. It is a unique opportunity for the students to use their classroom architecture training in a real-life application.
This from Buffalo Rising Story
View another video where UB professors Frank Fantauzzi and Brad Wales demonstrate the sliding façade at 15 South Putnam St and discuss the future of the project in progress here. A longer article on the project from Artvoice here. More on the project here too.
A must see short film about photographer John Chiara. Chiara works with a home made, portable camera obscura.
via {elphistone channel}
Wonderful short film on Steven Shore, how he works, and why he works.
via {elphistone channel}
BREAKING NEWS, May 6, 2008 – The House is meeting tomorrow 2:00 p.m. Wednesday, May 7, 2008, 2141 Rayburn House Office Building markup of H.R. 5889, the “Orphan Works Act of 2008″
This means that if you oppose the House Bill as it stands, it is extremely important to make your voice heard before that meeting begins.
At this time, it is understood that the House believes that photographers and other visual artists including their trade associations are in agreement with the current bills. APA opposes both the House and Senate bills as written.
Please take a moment to be heard via a prepared letter of your choice, or by including your own reasoned thoughts in a professional courteous manner.
This link <http://capwiz.com/illustratorspartnership/home/> will allow you to be heard.
Scroll down about half way to see “For Photographers”.
It is important to be heard. It is your future.
Martin Trailer
National President
Constance Evans
National CEO
Credit: Courtesy of the Telegraph
Gangster House (Archangelsk, Russia)
Though incomplete, the “Gangster House” is believed to be the world’s tallest wooden house, soaring thirteen floors to reach 144 feet (about half the size of London’s Big Ben). The homeowner or gangster, Nikolai Sutyagin, had all intentions of finishing the construction but his dream went on hold when he got locked up behind bars for his third jail sentence. Now out of jail and out of money, the ex-convict lives at the bottom of this precarious tower of wood.
Credit: Microscopiq.com
Floating Castle (Ukraine)
Supported by a single cantilever, this mysterious levitating farm house belongs in a sci-fi flick. It’s claimed to be an old bunker for the overload of mineral fertilizers but we’re sure there’s a better back story . . . alien architects probably had a hand in it.
Credit: Freshome.com
Upside-Down House (Syzmbark, Poland)
This upside down design seems totally nonsensical–but that is exactly the message the Polish philanthropist and designer, Daniel Czapiewski, was trying to send. The unstable and backward construction was built as a social commentary on Poland’s former Communist era. The monument is worth a trip be it for a lesson in history or balance.
All copy and images from Pointclickhome. Find more at the link.
{via archidose}
“Paul Lacy, 50, has lived in Brooklyn for all but two years since 1983. He has worked as a factory night watchman and an apprentice furniture maker. Now he does freelance page layout for publishers of science and technical books. But Mr. Lacy’s real passion — like that of so many New Yorkers who are defined as much by their hobbies as their day jobs — is street photography. He has just published his first book, “Brooklyn Storefronts,” a collection of 75 color photographs of small, independently owned stores throughout the borough.”
More at below links.
Breathtaking book by David Stephenson and Victoria Hammond. To view many more images go to Julie Saul Gallery and be sure to click on the view images link.
Visions of Heaven: The Dome in European Architecture
David Stephenson , Victoria Hammond
“There’s an ethereal magic to standing beneath a dome, neck craned, looking up at a vision of the heavens created by some long-ago figure of genius. From the Pantheon to the Hagia Sophia, the power of the dome seems transcen-dent. Photographer David Stephenson’s magnificently kaleidoscopic images of dome interiors capture this evanescent drama, and make Visions of Heaven one of the most spectacularly beautiful books we’ve ever produced.
Traveling from Italy to Spain, Turkey, England, Germany, and Russia, among other countries, and photographing churches, palaces, mosques, and synagogues from the second to the early twentieth century, Stephenson’s work amounts to a veritable typology of the cupola. His images present complex geometrical structures, rich stucco decorations, and elaborate paintings as they have never been seen before. Brilliantly calibrated exposures reveal details and colors that would otherwise remain hidden in these dimly lit spaces.”
{via papress}
San-Zhr Pod Village, by photographer Craig Ferguson, is a project that features images of an abandoned pod development in the small Taiwanese town of San-zhr. These images have a post-apocalyptic flavor that seem like they are right out of a dystopian novel, and as Craig explains, the truth is no less bizarre: “I first heard about this [place] a couple of years ago, but it was only recently that I was able to get out there. The complex was left in its unfinished state because no amount of redevelopment will bring people to the area due to superstitions about ghosts, and it can’t be demolished because destroying the homes of spirits and lost souls is taboo in Asian culture.” We are glad that Craig braved the ominous warnings to produce these incredible images, and we think you will agree.
{via file magazine}
I love the work of Lucio Santos, on his blog. Below is Santos’ work on a “Cellular House. Lucio “Have you been to Taiwan lately?” I see some inspiration here.
What if I told you you could download high resolution digital files, that you could print yourself, of some of the most famous images in American photo history? Well you can. Images like Dorthea Lange’s, Migrant Mother or Walker Evans Graveyard and Steel Mill, Bethlehem, PA and Gordon Parks, Newspaper Boy. You can search on Flickr but you need to go to the LOC website to get the large resolution files. So the Flickr is more of a tease but well worth it. As well I highly recommend viewing the 15 Popular Requests From the FSA-OWI Collection also follow the 15 “Staff Selections” which showcase some of their personal favorites from the collection.
{via metafilter}
A strange sight at Grand Central. A couple of hundred people, indistinguishable from the 500,000 commuters who pass through the midtown station each day, suddenly freeze. They were part of an improv group which has put on this public event before, but never in such a theatrical space. A cop was asked what was going on: “I have no idea! That is the craziest shit I’ve ever seen in my life, and I’m a cop!” (Click play to start the clip.)
Time stands still in New York City’s Grand Central Station.
{via swissmiss}
The discovery of the World’s Oldest Photographic Lab opens the door to Petiot-Groffier’s photography darkroom, closed for 152 years. Complete with cameras, chemicals sealed in glass bottles, and notebooks for processing and printing Daguerrotypes and Collodions. The room was revealed when the building changed hands and the new owner entrusted Pierre-Yves Mahé, the initiator of the Niépce House in Saint-Loup de Varennes, France, to preserve and protect the long hidden treasures.
photos Pierre-Yves Mahé
“The decline in church attendance over the last several decades has meant that countless churches across the Netherlands have lost their function. They are crumbling, are demolished, or are put to new uses. Their specific architecturalmunicipal exhibition hall, and if, for example, a residential use is chosen, the original spatial qualities are usually lost. A dutch firm named Zecc has converted an old chapel into an apartment, carefully respecting and enhancing the character of the original building. The chapel was part of a large housing complex of the Friars of Utrecht, which at its height, around the mid-20th century, housed 217 residents. The remaining 13 elderly friars, however, moved to a nursing home in 2005, and the complex was divided up and converted into about 40 apartments.”
quoted from freshome. Many more images here.
{via freshome and metafilter}
Even as a child I questioned the significance of abandoned buildings and the stories they could tell by simply walking through them and seeing what is left, or more importantly, what isn’t.
Due to years of neglect, these sites have typically become eyesores for those who pass by them everyday. What remains inside tells a different story altogether. Whether it be industrial or insitutional, each doorway within is another opening to the past, behind each one a unique story is told, Each stairwell leads to another chapter.
I find as a photographer I am able to give these abandoned structures a second life of sorts, preserving them in a picture for others to see and interpret the history for themselves.
quoteded from Ron Dobi
There are a lot of photography sites of decaying America. For me Rob does it right. Well worth the trip.
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