Frederick Leighton: Solitude
The Wrapping House in Korea
Today marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of one of the world’s biggest literary stars, Charles Dickens. The beloved British storyteller was the original literary celebrity and creator of more than two dozen works of fiction that have never gone out of print. His influence lives on in musicals, film, television, art, and literature. Here, a visual history of his life and enduring legacy.
(via stevens-cat)
Inspired by another post here on Tumblr, I decided to look into the Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong a bit more, it truly was one of the most amazing and terrifying places on earth. Being slightly smaller than an NFL stadium, the structure was built of 350 smaller interconnected buildings and hosted, at it’s peak, a population density of 5 million people per square mile.
To put those numbers in perspective, this would be like taking the entire population of metro Philadelphia, the 4th largest in the US, and putting it in 1 square mile instead of 1,744.
The area was also largely ungoverned and unregulated. Factories, apartments, schools, temples, churches, shops, cafes, hotels and almost anything else one could imagine were housed within the structure that never had a full blueprint of it done. Buildings were built onto buildings, expanded, rebuilt, and re-purposed as needed without a central authority of any kind.
Within the structure, natural light was almost non-existent, and an unknown number of miles of jury-rigged wires provided electricity to everything. Water constantly dripped down to the lower levels from both rain and leaking pipes, while garbage filled every passage. A constant yellow haze filled the structure and there were never any government safety inspections.
The Kowloon Walled City was demolished in the early 1990s as part of the deal that returned Hong Kong to the Chinese from the British. The entire area is now a park.
I find places like this fascinating, it is just incredible what we, humans, build and live in. This, hive, for lack of a better term, was one of the most interesting structures I’ve yet looked at. Documentary here.
(via leppu)
Unfinished Modernizations / Between Utopia and Pragmatism
Maribor Art Gallery, Slovenia: The presentation of architectural projects and large-scale urbanistic plannings which denote the period of (socialist) Yugoslavia is a long-expected project that will focus on the milestones and visions of the (unfinished) modernisation of cities during socialism as well as answer the questions about their role and legacy in the successor countries. The Unfinished modernisations illuminates spaces that were created by the “socialist progress” in the former Yugoslavia and thus establishes what has happened with these spaces after the collapse of the common state and the disappearance of socialism. The exhibition focuses on the physical space, e.g. on the production of city or town planning respectively as one of the fundamental means of socialist modernisation; and on the role that architecture had in this production.
(via easteuropeftw)
Yugoslav War Memorials ( Spomeniks )
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During the 1960s and 70s, thousands of monuments commemorating the Second World War – called ‘Spomeniks’ – were built throughout the former Yugoslavia; striking monumental sculptures, with an angular geometry echoing the shapes of flowers, crystals, and macro-views of viruses or DNA. In the 1980s the Spomeniks still attracted millions of visitors from the Eastern bloc; today they are largely neglected and unknown, their symbolism lost and unwanted. Antwerp-based photographer Jan Kempenaers travelled the Balkans photographing these eerie objects, presented in this book as a powerful typological series. The beauty and mystery of the isolated, crumbling Spomeniks informs Kempenaer’s enquiry into memory, found beauty, and whether former monuments can function as pure sculpture.’
(via easteuropeftw)
not quite done, but oh well, i have do work on other things now.
(via fuckyeahillustrativeart)
Lantern Festival, Chiang Mai, Thailand
(via my-mewling-quim)
