The fifth fragment: notes on cities and things fragmented, ruined, re-used.
James Joyce on Ulysses:
I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book(Ulysses, 15: Old and secret she had entered from a morning world, maybe a messenger.)
Alfred Jarry, bike rider, world destroyer:
We shall not have succeeded in demolishing everything unless we demolish the ruins as well. But the only way I can see of doing that is to use them to put up a lot of fine, well-designed buildings.
Re-using the ruins (precursor to adaptive design):
- Roman buildings into Anglo-Saxon churches
- Ships' timbers reused as roof and floor joists in houses throughout England
- Stone from Roman roads used for a villa (and when the Roman government stopped administering Britain, the economic structure fell apart, followed by the buildings)
- Canal routes repurposed for railways and Power stations into galleries
- More Ricky Jay, more dice: a profile of Ricky Jay. And a taxonomy of dice.
- More Rosamund Purcell: Owl's Head, 2004; Two Rooms, 2003; Swift as a Shadow: Extinct and Endangered Animals, 2001; "Purcell's prints are actually 20" by 24" Polaroid shots, taken with one of four such cameras in existence capable of the shot", 1984.
The majority of these buildings are made from concrete. Crumbling and stained, they lack the romance of polished marble or rough-hewn stone. Desolate car parks and redundant shopping centres seldom attract the sympathy and support of the public, despite being of potentially great architectural importance. [via Chris]How to photoshop modern ruins and The Decay of a City (uses some material from Laura Spinney's New Scientist article)
Previous fragments:
Note that some of Ricky Jay's collection are on display in the rather fine Museum of Jurassic Technology in LA.
http://www.mjt.org
Posted by: Chris | June 21, 2004 at 09:29 PM