The LA Underground

Our fair city (well, mine at least, and yours too if you live here) used to have a pretty large subway system, and though we still have the subterranean trains, like the rest of history, our present day is built upon the ruins of the past.

Awalkerinla (get it?) took the trek last year to revisit the parts of the metro from yesteryear, and shared the results on her blog.

Because Watching It In Real Time Was Too Slow

Brickville

Not For The Claustrophobic

Maybe There's A Few More Kinks To Iron Out

The bigger they are, the harder they fail.

The world's tallest skyscraper was unexpectedly closed to the public a month after its lavish opening, disappointing tourists headed for the observation deck and casting doubt over plans to welcome its first permanent occupants in the coming weeks.

Weekend visitors on the observation deck heard a loud boom, then saw dust that looked like smoke seeping through a crack in an elevator door 124 floors above the ground. The 15 people inside were trapped for 45 minutes until rescuers managed to pry open the doors. Because the elevator was apparently stuck between floors, rescuers had to drop a ladder into the shaft so those inside could crawl out. On the observation deck, about 60 more people were stranded.

Emaar Properties, the state-linked company that owns Burj Khalifa, has said little about the incident and nothing about an elevator malfunction. It remains unclear what caused the elevator to the observation deck — the only part of the building that was open. The tower's 57 elevators are supplied by Connecticut based Otis Elevator Co., and a spokesman said the installation is ongoing - but declined to comment on the malfunction, saying it was up to owner Emaar to release details.

Because of its immense height, the Burj will have separate sections on levels 43, 76 and 123 known as "sky lobbies" where tenants will change from express elevators to local ones that stop on each floor. Visitors to the observation deck use dedicated elevators that whisk them from the base to the 124th viewing floor in about a minute. The tower was designed by Chicago-based Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, which has a long track record engineering some of the world's tallest buildings, including Chicago's Willis (Sears) Tower. Skidmore engineers involved in the Burj's construction would not comment either.

Emaar issued a brief statement in response to continued questioning, with the vague information that the viewing platform was temporarily shut for "maintenance and upgrade" because of "unexpected high traffic." It also hinted at electrical problems, saying "technical issues with the power supply are being worked on by the main and subcontractors."

Electrical problems are at least partly to blame for the closure of the Burj Khalifa's viewing platform — the only part of the half-mile high tower open yet. But a lack of detailed information left it unclear whether the rest of the largely empty building was affected by the shutdown. The indefinite closure dopes not help Dubai's struggle to revive its international image as a cutting-edge Arab metropolis amid nagging questions about its financial health. The city-state is facing a slump in tourism — which accounts for nearly a fifth of the local economy — while fending off negative publicity caused by more than $80 billion in debt it is struggling to repay.

It's too bad they'll have to wipe their asses with $20s instead of the $100s they were accustomed to now that their lavish lifestyle is slowly disappearing. And don't think that this is the last time Dubai is going to slowly bleed out publicly. they've got a long, ugly fall from decadent grace. It was a pretty big pile of money they were sitting on top of.

For Your Anywhere, Anytime Man-Cave

Concrete Cloth was the winner of the "Material of the Year Award" from Material ConneXion. Haven't you heard?

It’s a concrete permeated canvas that can be formed and tacked down as easily as a thick cloth, but once exposed to water (including rain and seawater) it becomes a waterproof, fireproof, bullet-resistant concrete surface that lasts for 10 years. Kinda like Famous-Ex, but without the hip haircut. They’re now using it for lining ditches; reinforcing pipes, gabions (thank goodness!), bunkers, and sandbag walls; creating shelters; and making impromptu driveways and helipads.

You've got not one, not two, but three videos showing their applications. The first and last video show its multiple civil engineering and military applications. The second video shows how they make a 269 square foot (25 square meter, you Euros) inflatable shelter using two people without any special training.

It takes less than an hour to set up, is ready to use in 24 hours, can withstand the pressure of being covered with earth, and has a sterile plastic liner that makes it possible to be used for emergency medical relief. Or, there's your automatic guest house...and special retreat for doing your private, dirty things.

Bridge Wobble

Keeping up with a motion theme, here's time-lapse video of the Manhattan Bridge in New York City, showing the how the bridge bounces as traffic flows over it.

From the NY Department of Transportation:

"The bridge has moved this way for the last 100 years - exactly the way it was designed to - and it can move up to 16 inches daily with normal traffic conditions. The long-span suspension bridge flexibility by design allows the bridge to manage the weight of the traffic and subway cars it carries and the temperature shifts that occur throughout the year."

Ramp House

Recently created by Archivirus Architecture and Design, the Ramp House is a response to the client’s request for a “skatable habitat”. According to architect Athanasia Psaraki, the Ramp House is a project which tries to reconsider and redefine the living space. The result of the client’s request is a curved form interior, which “set the whole house as well as the inhabitant’s life, into motion”.

In the space, which is a roof addition to an existing three-storey building, she tries to achieve a balance between old and new. The dominant material was wood, so a wooden pergola and wooden horizontal louvers surround the new structure, connecting the old and new.

The architect wanted the ‘skateboarding’ element to be more than simply putting a mini ramp in the living room. Rather, the ramp, the bowl and all the interpretations of those terms would actually become the building elements for this space. It is intended to be a ‘ramp house’ and not a ‘house with a ramp’. Straight lines are curved and the flat surface becomes a ramp or a bowl. Basic house elements such as the fireplace and storage units are hidden inside the ramp forms.

The street aesthetics of the skate scene are combined with a home atmosphere by combining concrete and wood. Concrete walls mould into the floor and concrete turns into wood to create a ramp partition with the kitchen. In that way, says the architect, somebody can flow from one space to the other, skating or walking.

Artitecture

In 2007, Richard Wilson created art using a building in the Liverpool city center.

The commissioned piece of public art, "Turning The Place Over", consists of an 15 foot diameter ovoid cut from the facade of a building made to oscillate in three dimensions. The revolving façade rests on a specially designed giant rotator, usually used in the shipping and nuclear industries, and acts as a huge opening and closing ‘window’, offering recurrent glimpses of the interior during its constant cycle during daylight hours.

Concrete Lighting

Concrete has a sometimes-bad reputation as a harsh, rigid, cold-to-the-touch and straight-edged material. Litracon is doing a great deal to change that image of concrete through a score of creative and sustainable applications for their patented light-transmitting concrete.

Filled with optical fibers that run from one end of a poured piece of concrete to the other, these prefabricated blocks and panels effectively transmit light from one side to the other. Colors and light remain remarkably consistent from end to end, but with a natural variation from the pouring process that actually softens the effects considerably.

The fibers can transmit light to over 50 feet and, as they occupy only a small percentage of the total concrete block or panel, they do not significantly effect the structural capabilities of the poured pieces.

Cityscapes

Unreal Scene

Chinese artist Liu Jianhua created this cityscape of Shanghai out of poker chips and dice.

San Francisco (edible)

Liz Hickock made a cityscape of The City out of Jell-O.

San Francisco (inedible)

Here's another one by Zhan Wang, who used stainless steel pots and pans, as well as silverware.

Egg City

I don't know much about the background of this Egg City, but it's also the image of a RMB 50 bill.

Biscuit City

In his installation titled "Eating the City," Chinese artist Sang Dong used about 72,000 biscuits, including "digestives, chocolate digestives, rich tea, hobnobs, caramels and fruit shortcake."

Atlantis Cityscape

Gayle Chong Kwan used hundreds of old plastic bottles and food packagings to create a cityscape of the lost city.

Colour Reading and Contexture

Jacob Dahlgren used colored tiles and wooden blocks to create this virtual cityscape installation.

Urville

Urville is an island off Côte d'Azur, between Cannes and St. Tropez. If you've never heard of it, that's because it exists only in the mind of a savant named Gilles Tréhin. Gilles started building Urville, named after Durmont d'Urville, a French scientific base in the Antarctic, when he was 12. Now, he has hundreds of detailed drawings, as well as a "historical" narrative on the founding of the city.

Cityscape II

For her exhibition titled "Uncharted Terrain," Grace Grothous made an imaginary topographic landscale out of discarded circuit boards.

Jerusalem Sphere

Inspired by ancient maps showing Jerusalem as a circular city, Frank Meisler created this sculpture of the city in the form of a sphere. It is a replica of the Jerusalem Fountain, commissioned by the King Solomon Hotel.

RPM-1200 "Junk City"

Japanese artist Enoki Chu created his futuristic cityscape out of polished old drill bits and machine parts.

Underwater Town

No, that's not Lake Cumberland...

Something you don't normally is a town built in the middle of a lake. Not on an island, but actually below water level. It's the ancient city of Seuthopolis, in Bulgaria, which was discovered in 1948. Six years later, a dam was destroyed and it was covered in water, ending up at the bottom of a huge lake. Now, the city is being unearthed via the most insane architectural project ever.

This is going to be done via the construction of a huge circular dike that'll be a whopping 1,377 feet in diameter and 65 feet high. People will be able to access the recessed city by boat, heading down into it to see the city. And the focus isn't on archeology here, but rather on tourism, with Bulgaria looking to create a striking image that draws people in. And really, there are few things that make a town more striking than have it sit on the bottom of a lake.

Tourist Jurist

Nevermind the case so much, which if I'm lucky will start deliberating at the end of the week. During lunch I had a chance to stop off at the Bradbury Buliding (yes, the very same as used in Blade Runner), which was beautiful. The wiki:

The building was commissioned by Lewis Bradbury (after whom it is named), a mining millionaire who had become a real estate developer in the later part of his life. His plan (in 1892) was to have a five story building constructed at Third Street and Broadway in Los Angeles, close to the Bunker Hill neighborhood.

A local architect, Sumner Hunt, was first hired to complete a design for the building but Bradbury ruled against constructing his plans which he did not view as adequately matching the grandeur of his vision. Bradbury then hired George Wyman, one of Hunt's draftsmen, to design the building.

Wyman at first refused the offer to design the building. However Wyman supposedly had a ghostly talk with his dead brother Mark Wyman (who had been dead for six years) while using a planchette board with his wife. The ghostly message that came through supposedly said "Mark Wyman / take the / Bradbury building / and you will be / successful" with the word "successful" written upside down. After the episode, Wyman took the job and is now regarded as the architect of the Bradbury Building. Wyman's grandson, the science fiction publisher Forrest J. Ackerman, owns the original of this document. Coincidentally, Ackerman is a close friend of science fiction author Ray Bradbury.

Wyman was especially influenced in the construction of the building by Edward Bellamy's book Looking Backward (published in 1887) which described a utopian society in the year 2000. In the book, the average commercial building was described as a "vast hall full of light, received not alone from the windows on all sides, but from the dome, the point of which was a hundred feet above ... The walls and ceiling were frescoed in mellow tints, calculated to soften without absorbing the light which flooded the interior." This description greatly influenced the Bradbury Building.

The building itself features an Italian Renaissance-style exterior facade of brown brick, sandstone and panels of terra cotta details, in the "commercial Romanesque" that was the current idiom in East Coast American cities. But the magnificence of the building is the interior that you reach through the entrance with its low ceiling and minimal light that seems to hug your senses until you are welcomed with the flood of natural light and expanse within great center court.

The five-story central court features glazed brick, ornamental cast iron, tiling, rich marble, and polished wood, capped by a skylight that allows the court to be flooded with natural rather than artificial light creating ever changing shadows and accents during the day. The elevators in the building are also famous for their being cage elevators surrounded by wrought-iron grillwork rather than masonry. They go up to the fifth floor.

The entire main building features geometric patterned staircases at all ends. The building is known for its large use of ornately designed wrought-iron railings which are supposed to give the illusion of hanging vegetation and are found throughout the building. This wrought-iron was executed in France and displayed at the Chicago World's Fair before being installed in the building. Freestanding mail-chutes are also made out of ironwork. The walls are made of pale glazed brick, the marble used in the staircase was imported from Belgium, and the floors are composed of Mexican tile.

Abandoned Asia

Abandoned buildings, properties and places take on remarkably different aesthetic character and are treated differently from one culture to the next - particularly in Asian nations where beliefs about the cultural roll of architecture or the whims of a dictator can vary greatly. From the Near East to the Far East, here are some abandonments.

The Lawless Kowloon Walled City, Hong Kong

In the rogue ungoverned Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong things were so tightly packed that trash blocked off parts of buildings and many occupied apartments literally never saw the light of day. Like something straight from a William Gibson novel, there were no police or building codes - there was no law. For nearly 50 years this slice of Hong Kong was allowed to exist and grow independently due to a legal technicality. After the Japanese left following the second World War squatters swarmed to fill the space, with the population at 10,000 people (living on seven acres) by the early 1970s - a combination of dissidents, outlaws and both organized and disorganized criminals. Professionals who couldn’t get a license set up shop, criminals hiding from the law thrived, and the self-organized community grew to 35,000. Then in 1993 everything changed - no one wants to deal with this lawless place anymore and it is promptly destroyed and turned into a park.

The Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang, North Korea

The Ryugyong Hotel in the capital city of Pyongyang, North Korea, was supposed to be a record-setting testament to the power, pride and ingenuity of one of the most totalitarian and self-insulating nations in the world. The building, meant to be a core monument to the strength of North Korea, was added to city maps and stamps before it was even half-built and was all set to be the tallest hotel in the world. At first the project simply ran out of funding, then as the low-quality concrete of which it was built began to sag and crack the sobering reality began to set it: the structure would need a massive overhaul to ever be completed. Now it goes unmentioned by tour guides, absent from maps and stamps, a symbolic blight towering on the capital city skyline.

The Pod City of San Zhi, Taiwan

Rumors abound regarding this legendary abandoned pod city (aka ‘UFO town’) of San Zhi, Taiwan, which was supposedly built by the government of Taipei to be a luxury resort for expensive holidays on the water. Built in the 1970s or early 1980s the modularity of the designs has raised retroactive suspicions that perhaps these stacks were intended to be built vertically over time. Theories on the abandonment of this massively strange undertaken range from poor insulation in a difficult climate, the dissolution of business partnerships, the failure of a regional real estate bubble or even that so many workers died during construction that the place was abandoned as haunted - unable to be destroyed out of a cultural taboo on interfering with the homes of spirits and lost souls. See it from above using Google Maps.

The Abandoned City of Agdam, Azerbaijan

Once a capital city with over 150,000 people Agdam, Azerbaijan has been variously treated as a ghost town, a no-man’s-land and a military buffer zone in a troubled area of the world. In the 1990s it was vandalized and largely destroyed during Armenian occupation, its buildings looted and gutted and its mosque completely covered in graffiti. Currently considered part of Armenia this husk of a city sits in the heart of an area that is at the core of conflicted set of nations from Russia in the north and Georgia in the northwest to Armenia and Iran in the soutwest and south. It also sits at the curious geographical intersection of Europe and Asia, ambiguously defined as being part of both or either one of these continents. Given turmoil in the region it is unlikely to be rebuilt anytime soon - if ever - and its citizens have been displaced in all directions with little likelihood of returning home.

Bokor Hill Station in Phnom Bokor, Cambodia

Bokor Hill Station is located on the mountain of Phnom Bokor, Cambodia and accessible only by a long trek across an overgrown dirt road to an elevation of 3,000 feet. At the top? The remains of a 1920s French retreat that has been deserted since the second World War including a hotel, casino, church, police station, post office, royal residences and other support structures. And today? The damage from mortar shells can be seen in shattered windows, crumbling staircases and decimated walls. The Khmer Rouge removed everything of any value - including the very wiring in the walls of the buildings. The ruins were later taken over by the Vietnamese in the 1970s before they were finally and permanently abandoned, though land mines in the area remain a danger to visitors who stray from the beaten path. Originally built due to the relatively temperate climate and wonderful views to the coast the area still boasts great sites from waterfalls to jungles and a vast array of wildlife.

Opko Land Theme Park in Opko, South Korea

Once a thriving amusement park Opko Land in Opko, South Korea was abandoned after a young girl was killed in a tragic accident while on one of the ride’s. Though the park was shut down and deserted the family of the unfortunate victim was never compensated for their loss. Most of the structures remain more-or-less intact including roller coasters, bumper cars, a pool building and various smaller rides. The top image above was taken from the highest point of the roller coaster - an ambitious location to seek out and shoot from given the partial disrepair of so much structural elements in this abandoned amusement park. One would think they would go all the way and destroy these buildings before some adventurous building infiltrators and urban explorers hurt themselves.

Chiang Shopping Complex in Chiang Mai, Thailand

The Five Chiang Shopping Complex is a beautiful series of interlocked wooden structures that once constituted one of the most magnificent malls in Chiang Mai, Thailand, a city which (including sprawl) has nearly a million inhabitants. The city attracts many tourists each year who are drawn in part to local handcrafted goods such as umbrellas, jewelry and woodcarving - some of which is evidenced in the wooden decorations, balconies and terraces of this deserted shopping center. The complex was an international joint project that fell victim to conflicting political opinions and a depressed Thai economy and now sits remarkably intact but closed, locked and boarded and utterly unused. However, the local guards are reportedly quite friendly and a few kind words can let you slip past and get some essential background questions answered.