Continuing with the recent trend in “ruin porn” – the phenomenon of almost voyeuristic hindsight and awe with America’s urban past and what has become the present – the notoriously iconic St. Louis housing complex Pruitt-Igoe will get an injection of interest next month when the new film The Pruitt-Igoe Myth: an Urban Historypremieres at the Oxford Film Festival. That’s Oxford, Mississippi. It’s no surprise to me of course that this film isn’t debuting in St. Louis itself, a city in almost permanent conflict with its own past, identity and desires.
For two years I drove by the grounds where Pruitt-Igoe stood on my way to high school – up North Jefferson, the main street bordering on the west (above). Not that I understood then the impact P-I had on the landscape – I didn’t – but it was even then a point of fascination that something so grande and ambitious was attempted in my fair and diminutif city during an era of otherwise obvious decline. It lasted only 20 years, and was destroyed before I was born – but for the adults around me who lived through that era, something always seemed to stick at their side. Perhaps the film will shed light on what that thing is, but I like to think not – in the same way that looking at the contemporary satellite map above, which we now have easy access to, makes one think “awwww, that’s nice” – and actually yes the green is pleasant to look at – but it’s ultimately impossible to answer the question “What went wrong?”
some footage from Koyaanisqatsi shows Pruitt-Igoe getting blow’d up:
…
on another note I’m currently reading Franzen’s The Twenty-Seventh City, which I highly recommend to any native from the region, as well as anyone looking for a good (although I think he’s very cynical at times) American satire.
I bet they didn’t have this in Tokyo when you were there! (he loves these things)
Whereas most American roller coasters are in theme parks that are outside of some nearby city, surrounded by rural or wooded terrain, it seems the Japanese have a fascination with their theme parks being situation in urban environments, to the degree that at one point this roller coaster even goes through a building. Watch for yourself:
On an aside my webhost is really fukhing with me these days. I can’t auto-create thumbnails of the above images anymore because suddenly they’ve dropped some PHP library support. I guess with the new month they rolled out some new code and for anybody unwilling or unable to pay $50/month for the primo-package you get left in the dust. Even though everything worked before they don’t simply drop support they remove the code entirely! So I’ll have to be moving webhosts again soon in the next month I reckon. Yeah I’m really looking forward to that.
I originally thought this might by the KLVY-TV mast in North Dakota but I was wrong. Appears to be some guy-wired radio mast in Russia originally taken by Victor Professor (some great photos of high-altitude icing there!). His stuff is in Russian so don’t worry you won’t be able to read anything, but the photos are marvelous! Now imagine the radio mast in North Dakota is 2.3 times taller than the radio mast his images come from! And imagine furthermore that the Burj Dubai recently surpassed the KLVY-TV mast as the tallest structure in the world and will double as the tallest building upon its completion later this year.
And a video about high voltage cable repairmen that remains one of my favorite videos on the nets:
I hope more people who work these jobs, window washing the Burj Dubai or scaling the KLVY-TV tower to replace a light bulb take their becoming-ubiquitous digital cameras with them because this stuffs is amazings!
I’m thinking a lot lately about green roofs (not only green in terms of sustainability and renewal but simply color also!) and I’ve always been confused by how parts of Manhattan have always been considered ‘undesireable’ simply because they’re more than two whole blocks from a subway or aren’t pre-existing dense residential neighborhoods like Greenwich Village or Murray Hill. Sure it would suck having to hunt for food and you’d always have to go ‘back there’ to get home but you’d still be on the island and it’s all within walking distance from my experiences (I used to walk from SoHo to Bryant Park from spring to fall because the walk was pleasant, the weather nice, and I preferred taking the 7 train to the R or V to get to where I used to live in Queens, and the lost time walking was worth the reward of sights, people and adventures). Those days will one day be over and the west side of Manhattan completely redone, rezoned and re-bought, thanks to impressive architectural projects like Clinton Park designed by TenArquitectos slated for construction in Hell’s Kitchen. More impressive than their inclusion of a uniformed southpaw baseball player in their render is of course the green stepped roof atop a zig-zag building. I’d love to know what’s going in the courtyard areas below too but the roof itself is pretty genius. Lots of space there for catching and running water to feed the garden, and to absorb and convert solar heat. I hope they do it right.
[from TenArquitectos - I hate flash popup websites though!]
