shakahislop

Well-known member
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been watching these get built over the past couple of years on the north brooklyn waterfront. this is something that happens in nyc that i don't think happens in london, that whole area was low rise even five years ago, and now there's a load of massive towers like this. new people about in the area obviously, coz the kind of people who like this stuff are not the same people who like living in old houses where you have to take your own bins out, with the cockroaches at night and lugging laundry to the laundromat, which is most of what you get round there.

the cantilevered thing is at least a bit interesting, they look a bit less like dicks shooting up into the sky than some of the others. still the same social process at work though, even if you cover it up with some vaguely cool design.

one of the other ones round there has a KAWS sculpture outside, it's the right level of bad art for the building i think
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
This sort of lego bricky piecemeal type thing like in the first ones I posted is one of the few ways you can make buildings look totally new so it wouldn't surprise me to see quite a lot of it in the future. By the time we realise we're bored of it there will be so much in construction that we're gonna be swamped.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Isn't there something about how you have to buy the amount of volume you take up, so if you make it thinner you can build higher at the same price.
 

william_kent

Well-known member
this Manchester landmark is under threat

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The Gamecock pub

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evil developers want to stick a horrible high rise student tower on this iconic spot

estate pubs are under attack
 

william_kent

Well-known member
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The Spinners, Hulme, Manchester

A long lost to "gentrification" Manchester estate pub - should have had a blue plaque: "Nico, ex-velvet underground, scored here"

( sure it's ugly, but estate pubs are slowly being wiped out and their memory needs preserving )
 

wild greens

Well-known member
What's the look of cities that got bombed in WW2? I've never been to Coventry or Hull, read they were two of the worst hit there. How's Dresden?
Liverpool was the worst hit and is beautiful now but was a fucking mess 70s-80s
 

william_kent

Well-known member
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The Eagle Pub, Hulme, Manchester ( lower right )

the Eagle was ran by the famous '70s wrester, Honeyboy Zimba, who fought Big Daddy and the like

I can see my old flat in this photo, long gone due to the evils of "gentrification"

"The people in the pub were like inmates from an insane asylum. First of all, the mad Irish pool playing dwarf ex- boxer who kept coming up to me whilst I was trying to vanish into the wall. Smacking his fist into his palm and shouting "fair play, foul play" at me whilst staring at me with mad red chicken eyes. The unbelievable heavy metal Rasta guy tripping off his head, dancing in the middle of the pub to a tune in his own head with a chair and the arse completely ripped out of his jeans.
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
No don't have to be new... is that Samarkand?
that's herat in afghanistan but it's the same style. presumably there's a historical reason why that specific part of the world all has the same style, it's definitely done differently by the time you get to pakistan to the east or jordan to the west, i don't know what that reason is though

hard to think of buildings from the last fifty years or whatever which are as beautiful as the old stuff. the innovation seems to be in the big skinny towers at the moment. but then i guess a lot of what gets put up is to a large extent an expression of the values of whoever has a fuckton of money at the time, serves the function that they want it to serve
 

wild greens

Well-known member
I love Freddy Mamani's stuff. Bolivia on the list, it will get done one day.

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shakahislop

Well-known member
There's that ridiculously tall building in NYC that apparently moves in the wind - 432 Park Avenue.

there's a load of them now, well several at least, the skyline has changed a lot over the last five years. the empire state still stands proud but the chrysler stands out a lot less. they've really let loose.

i noticed recently that there's a big discrepancy between what manhattan looks like from a distance, where you can see this really quite beautiful collection of lights, the whole skyline thing, it looks quite peaceful, quite elegant. when you're actually in it though at street level its nothing like that at all, it's total carnage, disorganised, intense.
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
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Reading station is an interesting one coz it's (I'd imagine) public money and a public building built to provide obviously a public service, but visually it looks more like something that's directed towards a london imagination than a reading one. it suits the fancy first great western trains that take people wearing suits from here into london offices, fits very well with that aesthetic i think, i don't think that's accidental. Reading itself as a place feels like its being propelled into the london orbit now, rather than what i think it used to be, which was a less fancy place that served the countryside around it rather than london. the old station looked more in keeping with that.
 

Leo

Well-known member
it's a shopping center that quite annoyingly hides a subway line i can never find when i need it. it's next to where the world trade center was, i guess they had to build something there out of the rubble

quite like the oculus i guess, brings something new to the table at least. aside from the very frustrating content of the museum, that whole new development is pretty good, the 9/11 memorial is such an incredible bit of art for something that you'd expect to be so much less tasteful and more jingoistic given the american mood at the time, kicks the arse out of all the stuff in the galleries

funny, I described it as a transportation hub and you called it a shopping center with subway lines. I was surprised I liked it, just imaged it would be some typical shopping mall but it has a pleasant vibe. again, maybe I'm just projecting the Matthew Barney element to it but think it's kind of cool inside.

btw, I don't know one NYer who has been to the 9/11 Museum, I've never even walked up to the memorial footprint of the towers. I agree, based on photos I've seen, that part is much better done than expected.
 
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