Most of you know, my thesis project last year was about painted advertisements on walls in St. Louis (In case you are unfamiliar, check it out here stlwalls.com).
Well, now that I work downtown I have gotten into this topic more, and someday I'm going to update that site with research about the specific buildings and add more pictures. I have also become obsessed recently with urban decay and what I think of as the life cycle of a city. Basically, you have buildings from around 1900 to 1930 that have been used by several different businesses, services, or factorys over the years that have come and gone. These buildings usually have something beautiful about them - architectural details which you don't see in buildings today. However they have decayed to the point where they either need to be torn down or renovated. Doing either of those completes the life cycle of the building because it is either being torn down and then a new building goes up in its place, or it is renovated (or basically gutted to a brick shell and rebuilt) which also makes it mostly a new building.
So why am I going on and on about this? Well, my new obsession (in addition to the wall paintings) is this urban decay - it's ugly but it's beautiful idea.
Here are some websites you can check out to help you figure out what I'm talking about:
3 comments:
It's not truly an obsession until you start you start spending your weekends dragging family and friends into random places around town "to see what's there."
Don't tempt me ;)
Except that I like to sleep too much on weekends...
Thanks for reading us!
Michael
Ecology of Absence
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