I stole this shamlessly from Cheryl Morgan’s blog.
Artificial Owl is so many types of awesome, a blog with photographs of the bizarre and once-decadent decaying man-made structures littering the Earth. What Artificial Owl also does is provide a concise summary – where possible – of function and history.
What I love about these kinds of constructs is how they once had a specific purpose, and now abandoned, they take on a totally different kind of aesthetic value which is totally separate to what the designers had in mind.
Could an architect plan for such decay in his or her drawings? It’s rather like planning what to wear at your own funeral.
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1 june 21 Blog » Blog Archive » Sustainable Building workshop by Petaluma artist Miguel Elliott // Sunday, May 10th, 2009 at 10:59 pm
[...] am very thankful for the very delightful posts from download-earth.org, andrenavarro.wordpress.com, blog.markcnewton.com – all of them 3 helped me forming my [...]
2 Alex Carnegie // Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 at 9:16 am
http://www.artificialowl.net/2009/03/giant-hand-of-atacama-desert.html > Brings to mind Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’, and just about everything I’ve ever read/seen with a Lost City in the Desert.
I know what you mean about these structures taking on an entirely new aspect, it’s like the landscape’s claimed/reclaimed it for its own purposes after man’s discarded it. Very Dying Earth indeed! ‘Postcards from Zothique / ‘Holiday Snaps Under a Red Sun’
Would be interesting if people did design sculptures and other structures to decay in a predetermined way, for instance using materials that erode at different speeds so you might start with a statue of a person, then a skeleton, then nothing…
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