The enlargeable Jerusalem photo beamed to us by Todd Bolen via bibleplaces.com. We are probably looking at the Christian or the Arab quarters of the old city. Comfortably reclining under the sun are the square and symmetrical wattage of the solar panels, the high-strung, cross-like “traditional” TV antennas, the voluptuous water barrels painted black to appear thinner and to trap heat, the breathlessly perspiring condensation boxes and of course the attentively detached, confidently dominant satellite TV dishes. That house in the middle got more disks than apartments, perhaps a radio signal outpost? What the dude on the broadcast minaret is thinking when he dishes the takbir, is the reception as good? The Crescent Moon above the minaret’s green dome wired somewhere down below, it moonlights as a lightning rod for the neighborhood.
Behold an allegorical layer superimposed on the ancient urban fabric. The “dish veil” looks like a foreign fashion. But if you walk the narrow streets facing the facades you will hardly see it. The “dish veil” is easily and quickly removable. To clean the dirty dishes off the table slate grab the four corners of a magical tablecloth…abracadabra there is no trace of the feast for the senses, the buildings appear au naturel circa 18th century – naked, pure and innocent like Adam and Eve. Yet there is the claustrophobic, choking, uneasy apprehension that all the gadgets are permanently anchored, dialed directly into the brains of the inhabitants, the tubes of the information life support IV dripping into the blood stream of imagination. You can picture the wires snaking down the soft, apple rotten crevasses of the pale, pinkish limestone, plugged and soldered into the human conscience circuit. A reversal along the metaphorical vertical access, the flip of the modernity flop played out on the most stubborn of stages. Traditionally the submerged dark mystery is below ground in the proverbial basement, the hidden foundation, while the persona emerges above ground lit by the sun. Here the captured sun energy descents from the soaked with revelation firmament to energize and illuminate the concealed subterranean layer of dreams and desires. The Jerusalem roof is the new spiritual catacomb. The Jerusalem of Gold glistening with shadows of the parabolic reflections.
Rob Dobi undertaken a tremendous project of photographing New England Ruins, abandoned institutional structures. The light and lighting is magical and makes all the difference in the photos. It has a Stalker feel. Especially the markers of human life left around the empty buildings.
by Ben Atlas on 03.3.2010.8:34am
I went to breath in the air of the Great Hall of the New York Public Library. Much has changed there since it was my reading room in the late eighties. Only the last three southern rows are specifically computer free. Everyone else is looking at a screen of some sort. There is an annoying constant trickle of tourists taking digital photos, even I took a few… This must be unbearable for the volumes.
Alas the blue recycling bins is a visual insult to the magnificent millwork, far worse than the laptops. But still there is a magic about the room. It must be one of the best places in the world to read and dream.
by Ben Atlas on 02.17.2010.9:33am
Church of St Vladimir, Podporozhye, Arkhangelsk region (1757). Photo by Richard Davies
In 2007 Matilda Moreton and Richard Davies retraced the 1902 inspirational trip by the famous Russian artist and illustrator Ivan Bilibin. The result is this wonderful virtual exhibition.
When I was in the architecture school in Moscow in the summer students went on a month long trip to paint historic architecture. Some of my classmates went to Kizhi to paint and draw these wooden churches. I went to Kamenetzk-Podolsk to paint the old Turkish ruins and keep an eye for the rare sightings of the bearer of the good name. Those quash paintings are still on my walls.
by Ben Atlas on 02.3.2010.6:15pm
Unhappy Hipsters is am amusing blog that comments on the modernist building to illustrate human alienation. To be sure geometric structures are not the case of loneliness. But the way buildings are photographed often lends to the feeling. People who pose in the photographs for the humans scale are often staged awkwardly, they are amatures and don’t know how to relax naturally during a photo shoot. Often perfect strangers or worse are called upon to impersonate a family, the result is sad, comical and profound.
by Ben Atlas on 01.8.2010.7:08am
Wassily Kandinsky, A Colorful Life (Das Bunte Leben), 1907. Tempera on canvas. Bayerische Landesbank, on permanent loan to the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich
Das Bunte Leben is the first painting on display at the Guggenheim retrospective. And although the Frank Lloyd Wright spiral trends upward, the decent into abstraction is the breakthrough downfall for the Kandinsky’s art. You can see in this early painting that Kandinsky was an unmatched colorist. He had an innate feel for drawing, Chagall for example would never be able to do a figurative drawings as well as Kandinsky. He was thinking pointillistically long before brother Camille Pissarro did. When Kandinsky’s became more and more abstract, his art became less and less interesting and naturally art critics started to value and praise it more and more. Did I mention there is a “free audio tour” included with the $18 admission?
What is missing from the exhibition are his books, the books that now theoretician Kandinsky wrote to explain the circles, the lines and the squares. And there is the trap. We think and see metaphorically, even when we imagine an abstract concept. The world is presented to us as people and objects and they are the screen in front of the essence. Kandinsky insisted on looking the essence directly in the eye, alas this is not how it works. The essence is too intense to be able to gaze at it directly.
P.S. Was there a better stylization of the Mother Russia than Das Bunte Leben?
by Ben Atlas on 01.6.2010.7:33pm
Time to open a bucket list. Starting with the Monastic State of Meteora in Greece. The effort required in schlepping construction material by hand up the rock formation is unimaginable. And you can see that even in the 13th century, when Athanasios Koinovitis brought a splinter monastic group of followers from Mount Athos, Greeks haven’t lost their sense of architectural beauty.
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by Ben Atlas on 12.28.2009.8:56am
by Ben Atlas on 12.27.2009.11:26pm
Photo taken on December 23, 2009 shows St. Mark's Square under water. Much of the historic Italian city of Venice, including St. Mark's Square, has been underwater since November 30 following a meteorological depression combined with natural tide waters. ANDREA PATTARO/AFP/Getty Images
by Ben Atlas on 12.21.2009.10:17am
bibleplaces.com: “Expect a media frenzy with the timing of this story a few days ahead of Christmas. A minor sidenote: this discovery should put to rest the theory of at least person who has claimed that since Nazareth is mentioned in the first century only in the New Testament, the city did not exist at that time. It is true that Nazareth is not mentioned in Josephus and other contemporary sources, but that is only an indication of how insignificant the town was.”
Israel Antiquities Authority – A Residential Building from the Time of Jesus was Exposed in the Heart of Nazareth.More about the house in the AP Article, especially on the configuration of the house-grotto as a hiding place for the Jews from the Romans.
by Ben Atlas on 12.8.2009.8:37pm
This drawing was sold yesterday for £29,161,250 or $47,941,095 in London (Christie’s). This head is a sketch for one of the figures on the “Parnassus” wall in Stanza della Segnatura in Vatican. I wrote about one of the walls in Stanza della Segnatura – “The School of Athens” in my post Hypatia of Alexandria and the End of Reason.
I wonder if the Hypatia sketch would go on sale? I doubt it will beat this, there is somehting magical about this muse. Plus the androgynous confusion with Hypatia. The irony of this is that the Vatican apparatchiks had the ideological problem with Hypatia but they let the beautiful muses on the “Parnassus” wall slide.
Below is the “Parnassus” wall facing “The School of Athens” wall (there are two more walls: “La Disputa”, “The Cardinal Virtues and two scenes” and the ceiling frescoes).
Stanza della Segnatura, Palazzi Pontifici, Vatican
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On the subject of Dubai’s debt default, most articles are missing the essential point. The question is not if the Sovereign is credit worthy but if Dubai can populate and lease the millions of square meters of the spare commercial real estate.
Dubai is a religious idea, promoted after the dotcom crash in USA, the belief that construction on easy credit is the catalysis for the broader economy. Dubai took this ethos to the extreme. Free from the American overregulation and environmental concerts, Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum followed the Singapore model of the free market dictatorship and the ancient Egyptian model of the slave construction labor. All the land in Dubai belongs to the Sheik and he parceled it out for free with the explicit condition of the rapid development.
Let’s say magically tomorrow Dubai would lease or sell all its vast and unused office and commercial capacity. The country would immediately choke, even without the benefit of a sand storm. The infrastructure is lagging the building construction. Firstly it takes decades to develop an urban project, secondly this is the neglected area because no one has the ownership of the public desert and here the Sheiks inevitably revert to the good old socialist model.
The vast unused capacity would remain empty in the foreseeable future. This creates an urban cancer that is impossible to cure. Just go to the heavily foreclosed areas in America and observe the effect of empty houses of the neighborhoods. Even many American downtowns still have not fully recovered from the flight to the suburbia. But this problem is much more severe in Dubai. Essentially it doesn’t have a habitable climate. For months people never go outside but live in the hermetically sealed, air-conditioned structures. An empty building without a rental income becomes an energy money sink even when the energy is cheap (see my post What’s easier, to build or to destroy?). The question is not how soon Dubai will repay its debt but how soon will it become an international exotic park and a futuristic sand canyon.
Photos of the Dubai Sand Storm on July 21st, 2006 via flickr/jgavinha
The enlargeable Jerusalem photo beamed to us by Todd Bolen via bibleplaces.com. We are probably looking at the Christian or the Arab quarters of the old city. Comfortably reclining under the sun are the square and symmetrical wattage of the solar panels, the high-strung, cross-like “traditional” TV antennas, the voluptuous water barrels painted black to appear thinner and to trap heat, the breathlessly perspiring condensation boxes and of course the attentively detached, confidently dominant satellite TV dishes. That house in the middle got more disks than apartments, perhaps a radio signal outpost? What the dude on the broadcast minaret is thinking when he dishes the takbir, is the reception as good? The Crescent Moon above the minaret’s green dome wired somewhere down below, it moonlights as a lightning rod for the neighborhood.
