Why are ruins so inherently fascinating? Is it really about rampant nostaglia? How you can be nostalgic for something you've never experienced? The romance of ruins applies equally to the creeper-strewn columns and porticos of the long-lost ancient city as it does to the rust-spattered girders and empty machine halls of forgotten industry. Artificial Owl is a good name for a website. So is Bearings. An apparently abandoned submarine (seems to be still powered up, so probably just mothballed, rather than abandoned).

The usual collection of image link blogs and tumblrs: Ablest Image; Ephemera Assembly (exceptional); Re-think; the white ship; Brief Epigrams; Sara Zucker. Ultimately, what sites like tumblr are resulting in the slow death of attribution, with trails dying swiftly like tracks in the sand. E.g. nearly 550 pages of things (some of which are nsfw).

A fine round-up of Op-ed pieces on Why GM failed, collated by Kottke. Just about every reason under the sun, really. Related, Production Cars, a vast collection of scanned adverts and brochures

Underground Cities and Bunkers: Living Down Below / Decommissioned: Turnstile Nuclear Bunker / The Japanese Village at the Nevada Test Site (pdf) / productivity destroyer: Crush the Castle / the official website of Ghosts of the Civil Dead, made in the late 80s but revisited in 2005 / @Paris, a photographic competition.

Moving Cities, 'a Beijing-based think-thank investigating the role that architecture and urbanism play in shaping the contemporary city' / movies in frames, reducing cinema down to its essence. Sort of related, runpee.com (via) / Staying Put on Earth, Taking a Step to Mars, with a great gallery.

Wayfarer, a retro dungeon-foraging type game (via), very reminiscent of the old Spectrum game Out of the Shadows. From an April 1985 article on the game's developers: 'The next game will be releasing is going to incorporate a naturalistic landscape, displayed from a projection. The closer you get to, say, a coastline, the more detail you will see. To do this, they will be using the same sort of mathematical techniques, involving fractal numbers, as the programs on the Cray II to produce animated landscapes.' Now this is nostalgia: ZX Spectrum classics. Play them here (including OOTS).

Labels: architecture

posted by things at 08:53 / 1 comments