(Source: homedesigning)
fingers curled around air
Bâtiment is a mirrored installation by artist Leandro Erlich currently on display at Le 104 in Paris as part of their In_Perceptions exhibition. The piece is clever in its simplicity: a massive building facade is constructed on the floor near a towering mirror giving anyone reflected the uncanny appearance of being weightless.
Working aquatic-elephants like Rajan used to be a regular sight in the Andaman Islands, south of India, but this 60-year-old five tonne Asian elephant is the last of his kind. Thanks to the introduction of motor boats and other energy-saving technology, Rajan no longer needs to swim miles between islands to work for his masters, but can now enjoy swimming purely for pleasure. Rajan still swims for ten minutes twice a day, completing about 500 yards before heading back to shore. Brazilian Photographer, Daniel Botelho, 30, travelled to the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean after hearing stories of islanders swimming with the giant beasts. He said: “I almost got killed by the elephant during one photo shoot. Suddenly a swell came and took me and the elephant by surprise. I was stuck in the sand because of the crash of the wave. He did his best not to kill me - I felt him rolling on top and away from me.” Picture: Daniel Botelho / Barcroft Media
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.
Aaaaaand page 3 of 3! Click here to read the whole comic start to finish!
Now Gandalf is going to have to call his friends the Eagles to come pick him up…
Restaurant to die for
Like I always say ”as long as it’s free” or ”if there’s food”
