The Abyss Also Stares

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how DARE you try to leave this in the tags

Gasunie office building in Groningen, the Netherlands. Designed by Alberts & van Huut in anthroposophical style. Realised in 1994. Chosen by the public as most beautiful building in the country in 2007. Images from the architect's website.

MEMENTO MORI AD ASTRA (PIRANESI/DYSON METAPHOR)

Indiana limestone, Irish slate, Georgia Regal black marble, French Marbre du Roi marble, glazed ceramic, glass, zinc - 20¼" x 11¼"x 9¾"

MEMENTO MORI AD ASTRA (PIRANESI-DYSON METAPHOR) addresses the idea of the ‘History of the Future’.  When I began working on it I thought the piece of limestone would be only half of the piece – the past element made of stone – and that there would be a future element made of glass, acrylic, and metal.  As the past element work developed it became clear an additional  element for the future was unnecessary — all that was needed was the directional perception of the future from the past.  A throne was the first metaphorical choice for this directional perception, but after making a throne of limestone, it was discarded in favor of the simple red-marble bench, below the crystal sphere (the future - the stars) and next to the top of the ladder coming-up out of the hole-in-the-floor.  The dual textured base represents the impetus of our collective human reality and the collective ideal of the microcosm  (the black marble was used in this particular case because of its tracery of white veining to represent the intricacies of the ‘ideal’ in humanity’s collective mind’s-eye). My bastardized Latin MEMENTO MORI AD ASTRA roughly translates to “remember your mortality - to the stars!”  I wanted to contrast the backward-looking 18th century Italian etcher Giovanni Piranesi with the forward-looking pioneer of astrophysics Freeman Dyson — and something of a nod to the Greek Titans Epimetheus and his brother Prometheus (whose names literally translate as ‘backward-thought’ and ‘forward-thought’).

Giovanni Battista Piranesi (October 4, 1720 - November 9, 1778) was an Venetian artist famous for his etchings of the ruins of Rome. 

Freeman Dyson (December 15, 1923 - February 28, 2020) was a British-American theoretical physicist and mathematician, famous for his work in quantum electrodynamics, solid-state physics, astronomy and nuclear engineering.

ever since i learned about ghost buildings i haven't been able to stop thinking about them

this is body horror

it's also yuri

Brutalism is when there’s concrete. The more conk they crete, the more brutalismer it is.

i feel like we don’t talk about things like this enough

these are literally all SO COOL!!

Taipei 101 is THE MOST EVIL building on the planet

Look at this fucking Judge Dredd-level shit, god damn.

This is where the final boss is

it has a gigantic counterweight towards the top to reduce swaying, which is kind of necessary for any very tall building, but its out in public view and painted gold and you can see it like, swinging around

#this whips ass youre all just weak

Is it brilliant architecture? Yes. Is it glaringly obvious that this is a supervillain aesthetic? Also yes.

Maybe if someone posted a photo of this building not covered in dark fog and shot from an ominous angle, you would see that actually she is very friendly and beautiful.

You could certainly make all buildings look evil given that angle and lighting. Observe this, brother.

All you are proving is that all tall buildings are evil, which we already knew

“From an ominous angle” you… you mean the ground? Which is the angle most people around it will see it from?

Dragons in architecture

“Budapest Courtyards” by Yves Marchand et Romain Meffre, Budapest, Hongrie, 2015.

someone in the notes on that “stop fetishizing old houses” post commented that builders before the 1970s were too concerned with elegance and grandeur, and that was all really just wastefulness

and I think about my apartment, a duplex from 1912, surely built for a middle- or working-class family. spartan, really; quite basic and no-frills. not much to look at from the outside. just like a thousand buildings of similar provenance in the Boston area.

there are flowers molded in the chunky, cast-iron radiators

there’s a design of concentric circles in the carved door-lintels

many buildings of this type have a little stained-glass window somewhere

 I think about ornate door hinges in the staff wing of a country estate from 1878.  think of patterned wallpaper in a mansion’s kitchen, from 1797. I think about purely functional spaces someone looked at and said, “this needs beauty”

the past was certainly guilty of waste in many ways. but I cannot call making a house more than just a box to live in one of them

Even beyond how the aesthetics of a space can be good for the soul, old houses can sometimes be designed in ways that make them more efficient to heat and cool. When you get into turn of the century properties, especially, you get spaces that are designed with the idea that you (probably) don't have central heating and air, so the layout of the home needs to focus on having air flow to keep it cool in the summers and warmer in the winters. In a properly maintained building, that means the home is already doing a lot of heavy lifting that means the HVAC doesn't have to work as hard. A lot of modern buildings are just like EH FUCK IT THERE'S GONNA BE AC AND HEAT ANYWAY, WHO CARES IT ITS A BUNCH OF TINY ROOMS WITH NO AIRFLOW! The architecture world is starting to catch on that maybe "streamlined, efficient" brutalist architecture is actually anything but efficient, and I'm hopeful that we'll get some sort of vernacular architecture rennaissance as modern builders try to figure out how to use historical techniques to make modern buildings work better.

Also, new doesn't necessarily mean you're avoiding poor choices in building materials and wiring... US-based for this but, uh, a lot of homes built in the early 2000s are absolute crap. The housing boom that was fueled by banks granting mortgages people couldn't afford created a massive demand for homes, and lots of people wanted new, new, NEW. This meant a lot of houses were built very quickly and cheaply to try to meet the demand of people who wanted to live out their suburban mcmansion dreams. I know this because I spent my teen years in such a house, with its kitchen smoke fan that dumped the smoke out directly beneath the fire alarm and it's upstairs heating/cooling that crapped out within two years of the home being built.

That house isn't there anymore because it burned down in 2016. A small spark ignited in the electrical, and within 45 minutes the entire 2200 square foot, two story plus basement house had burned down to its foundation, leaving only the chimney standing. The fire department didn't arrive until about 20 minutes later. Miraculously, my family and pets were all okay, but it just goes to show that "newer" doesn't guarantee that things are safer or better built.

Xiangyu Xiangyuan B&B Siheyuan, 

Dazhai Village, Xiang'an District, Xiamen, China,

The Design Institute Of Landscape & Architecture, China Academy Of Art Co.,Ltd.

Photographs by Aoguan Performance of Architecture

You might think that indie horror game level design is unrealistic, but back when I was working for a local Internet service provider I ended up having to check something out in an abandoned building that had once been an elementary school, and I discovered the following:

I guess what I’m saying is those games are basically documentaries.

(One of the rooms contained an industrial freezer unit that seemed to have been partially stripped for parts that I’m pretty sure was larger in its smallest dimension than any of the doors leading to the room that contained it. Like, was the room built around it? That one still bothers me a little.)

I worked at a newspaper that had been in the same 150 year old building for 40 years, but it had lost most of its staff and gradually only occupied a small portion of the space. But it was this block-long nest of low, windowless rooms and corridors that seemed to follow no coherent plan, just endless tetris-piece shaped offices with doors to offices with doors to hallways filled with doors to more hallways and tetris offices, all of it with sagging wood paneling and forgotten furniture and only 40% of the lighting worked, and again — no windows — and drifts of ancient office equipment and stacks of water damaged boxes full of paperwork and then occasionally you’d pull aside a hanging dusty plastic sheet or roll away a metal fire door and be in a vast empty space that smelled like pigeon shit and cigarettes from the 80s and had unfinished floors and brick walls and dishwater light through a skylight onto an abandoned portable golf driving range surrounded by dusty old inert Macs.

i explored an abandoned factory in the snow once and found, in a crumbled-down courtyard, a small child’s school chair, the kind with the partial desk built in. the seat had no snow on it, though the cement all around it had half an inch. it was next to a huge garage bay door that had been haphazardly bricked up over the pull-down sheet metal.

a little ways away was a small cubical guard shack type outbuilding that had a working light bulb still lit up and shining above the locked metal door. the steps up to that door were completely ripped away and lay crumpled a few yards away from the building.

which also had no windows.

there were also sheets of newspaper blown everywhere from 2006, looking fairly fresh–the weather had been terrible for weeks, but these random sheets looked, if not new, then like they’d been inside somewhere until just that morning. it was 2018 at the time.

old buildings just have unimaginably fucked up shit. horror games only add the monsters.

The basement of the porn store I used to manage (which is now managed by my more managerially-minded wife, instead) was... hmm. I believe “deeply fucking cursed” is the right way to put it? The building was, and still is, owned by a real slum lord; we have to rent the basement as a separate space because he was otherwise going to rent it out as tenement housing OR to a “massage parlor.” (No shade on massage parlors or sex work, obviously, but we have enough trouble with the cops being pissed that innocent adults are allowed to purchase lingerie and dildos that we didn’t need extra reason for the cops to bug us or the parlor staff. We had, at one point, considered converting it into a space for our Private DVD Viewing (read: jack-off and gay hookup) Booths, but the space was too grody AND we couldn’t figure out how best to Tetris a staircase into available space.

So, that leaves us with the only-accessible-from-the-outside-basement, and its hodgepodge rooms all representing the futures it could never have. Features include:

- The door is secured with a padlock. We don’t have a copy of the key to the door itself; which has proved an issue when employees have locked it and then muscled it to actually fit into the doorframe. Thankfully our company handyman is pretty adept at picking locks.

- All windows have been bricked up. It was the only way to keep them from leaking in the rain.

- The stairs, purchased and assembled but never connected to anything, which lay unused in the largest room.

- The remnants of the bathroom from when it was meant to be a tenement. The tub is filled with some sort of unctuous filth of unknowable origin, and in the four years I’ve worked for the company, no attempt has ever been made to remove it.

- Rooms, just so many rooms, some small, some large. Two years ago we finally paid someone to clean the trash and old product storage out of them, but until then they were stuffed with broken shelving, moldering lingerie, and boxes and boxes of books from when we had to keep up more of the “bookstore” image to get around the zoning laws... Just boxes and boxes of the paperback alternate history LENIN LIVES!

- The lights stop working about halfway back. I don’t know if it’s a wiring issue or if things are burnt out but... yeah you go out of the main area where the stairs are and pretty soon you’re operating on flashlights alone, babyyy

- Before we bricked up the last window that had been left, the water leaking in from it had reduced the books and product in that room into a green-blue sludge that sloughed off from the wall towards the doorless doorframe in a slow wave of netting, mold, and decomposing pages.

- The furthest back room on the RIGHT side contains one of those drainage pits that used to be in basements before sump pumps were a thing. It goes far enough down that you hear nothing when you drop a rock down it.

- Finally, there’s the leftover switchboards and pieces of wall that we use to make/run our booths, which would probably be creepy as hell if you didn’t have the context of “oh don’t worry we just use this to make sure people can change the channels on the porno TVs”

It looks somebody used the photoshop stamp tool but It’s real. Why would they think people would want identical castles with no space between them? Bizarre.

this looks like a minecraft glitch i’m