Abandoned Houses.
The Packard Automotive Plant in Detroit opened in 1907, and until it shut down in 1958, it was considered one of the more advanced car factories in the world. The 3.5-million-square-foot structure is now a junk-filled ruin, and you’d be surprised to learn a human being lives inside, legally and all by himself. Here’s Hill’s story:
The short doc is part of filmmakers Ben Wu and David Usui’s “This Must Be the Place,” a series of shorts exploring the idea of what constitutes a “home.”
(via For Those Who Dream of Living in Abandoned Factories, Here is Your King - Core77)
“Drive-In Movie Theatres” is a black & white series by the Connecticut-based photographer Carl Weese documenting these much forgotten relics of 1950s cinema. At one point there were over 4,000 of the giant white screens dotted throughout the American landscape but now, with the shift away from film to digital, there are just 500 remaining.
Christopher Woodward’s In Ruins (2001) is a wonderfully written account of art history and literature’s relationship with the ruin, from Gustave Doré’s New Zealander of 1872 contemplating the crumbling edifices of a future London to John Piper’s Second World War paintings of bomb-damaged Coventry and Bath (Woodward also discusses W.G. Sebald’s visit to Orford Ness in The Rings of Saturn). Brian Dillon’s new book Ruins, in the excellent Documents of Contemporary Art series, has 20th-century texts on our complex reactions to ruins by Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin (The Arcades Project) and Rose Macaulay (Pleasure of Ruins, 1953).
The reductive “ruin porn” tag ignores the cultural history of the ruin, along with its deeper philosophical dimensions.
More: Rick Poynor: The Unspeakable Pleasure of Ruins: Observers Room: Design Observer
That insight, in effect, set Jacobson off on the curious-sounding mission of documenting this easily overlooked visual trace. And so he’s ended up collecting nearly a thousand photographs of “Space Available” signage, from dozens of cities all across the country…
Suddenly this near-invisible, mundane element of urban environments everywhere popped into focus. When grouped in a relentless series of hundreds of images, the signs struck me as adding up to a kind of involuntary monument to the Great Recession.
(via Rob Walker: A Place Called “Space Available”: Observers Room: Design Observer)
Brooklyn-based photographer Emily Schiffer came to Chicago last summer to explore food scarcity issues in the city. While shooting on the South Side, she met Orrin Williams, founder of the Center for Urban Transformation, and came up with an idea for another project that involves using “large-scale photographic installations and urban redevelopment as strategies for pre-visualizing a transformed landscape.”
With the help of Williams and other community leaders, Schiffer plans to locate unoccupied buildings and transform them into indoor growing spaces and grocery stores. Then, Schiffer will install large photographs on the front of blighted buildings.
Photographer To Transform South Side Blight With Public Art - Art - Curbed Chicago
Thx for the tip: Sarah C.!
Photographer Kevin Bauman started documenting the decline of Detroit in the mid-’90s, as seen in his 100 Abandoned Houses project. Don’t let the title fool you—Bauman estimates the actual number of neglected homes is closer to 12,000. “The abandoned house problem,” Bauman writes, “is not likely to go away any time soon.”
One abandoned yard is a mess; 20,000 abandoned yards is an ecosystem. At this scale, Cleveland’s vacant land begins to look less like a sign of neglect and more like an ecological experiment spread over some 3,600 acres. As it happens, a team of local scientists has designated this accidental landscape an Urban Long-Term Research Area — that is, Ultra. And having won a $272,000 exploratory award from the National Science Foundation, the researchers call their project Ultra-Ex.
There’s enough turf here for everybody: Ultra-Ex scientists are studying bird and insect populations, watershed systems, soil nematodes and urban farms. Along with its sci-fi name, Ultra-Ex advances a forward-looking mission: to document the ecological benefits that vacant lots might provide and to redefine the land, from neighborhood blight to community asset.
Shells of the town’s businesses sit amongst brushes, shrubs, and old sidewalks, such as this former lumber store. This Victorian-style hospital has sat neglected at the edge of town since the 1930s, while the community hall, last refurbished decades ago, still bears the symbol of Canada’s 1967 centennial.
