fingers curled around air
Inspired by another post here on Tumblr, I decided to look into the Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong a bit more, it truly was one of the most amazing and terrifying places on earth. Being slightly smaller than an NFL stadium, the structure was built of 350 smaller interconnected buildings and hosted, at it’s peak, a population density of 5 million people per square mile.
To put those numbers in perspective, this would be like taking the entire population of metro Philadelphia, the 4th largest in the US, and putting it in 1 square mile instead of 1,744.
The area was also largely ungoverned and unregulated. Factories, apartments, schools, temples, churches, shops, cafes, hotels and almost anything else one could imagine were housed within the structure that never had a full blueprint of it done. Buildings were built onto buildings, expanded, rebuilt, and re-purposed as needed without a central authority of any kind.
Within the structure, natural light was almost non-existent, and an unknown number of miles of jury-rigged wires provided electricity to everything. Water constantly dripped down to the lower levels from both rain and leaking pipes, while garbage filled every passage. A constant yellow haze filled the structure and there were never any government safety inspections.
The Kowloon Walled City was demolished in the early 1990s as part of the deal that returned Hong Kong to the Chinese from the British. The entire area is now a park.
I find places like this fascinating, it is just incredible what we, humans, build and live in. This, hive, for lack of a better term, was one of the most interesting structures I’ve yet looked at. Documentary here.
cwnl:
Sky From the Equator
This long exposure image, made during a complete night by a custom made panoramic film camera, has captured the startrails around the south celestial pole. The equatorial region is the only place on the Earth that the celestial poles are located right at the horizon. by Kwon O Chul
(Source: ikenbot)
From the “Reconstructed Reliquaries” series by Stephani Lempert.
Artist’s statement:“My continued fascination with methods of communication, and more narrowly with language, lead to an exploration in the intertwined nature of cherished mementos and the childhood reminiscences that make them precious. Each piece consolidates complex and multifaceted family narratives held in the memory of the real life storytellers and connects them to a single inanimate object. Each object weaves stories, literally and figuratively reconstructing the memories in such a way as to create a repository. These touchstones are forged from the very words they emote. My first sculpture exhibition, Reconstructed Reliquaries, reveals for the viewer beautifully delicate, true size objects created from handwritten text.”
(Source: avataraang)
These custom TOMS canvas shoes are inspired by Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night. Sold on Etsy.
