November 13, 2006 – 8:49 pm
Although the essay in its adapted blog form is not yet the essay of Bacon, Montaigne, Addison or Orwell you can nonetheless see what may lie in the future as the form refines itself. Brief and pointed, visual as well as literary, loaded with allusion and subterranean complexity via links, and potentially collaborative and [...]
November 13, 2006 – 6:52 pm
1964… it seems millenia ago. The American Empire had reached its zenith and the few things that were starting to go wrong seemed like minor glitches although the massive humiliation of defeat in Vietnam was soon to define the limit of US power.
In that year New York hosted a World Fair at Queens in what [...]
November 6, 2006 – 10:29 pm
We live midway between a number of huge abandoned industrial sites.
Ten kilometres in one direction is Portland with its cement works closed since 1991,
and ten kilometres in another is Lithgow blast furnace, site of the first steel production in Australia, abandoned since 1928.
About thirty kilometres away as the crow flies is Glen Davis with [...]
October 22, 2006 – 4:50 pm
The current redevelopment of East Darling Harbour to create some of the most expensively mediocre real estate in Sydney also produced an attempted piece of culture history whitewashing, the renaming of Hickson Road. This roadway surrounded by cliffs and warehouses has always been colloquially known as The Hungry Mile in memory of the [...]
October 22, 2006 – 11:48 am
Louise T Blouin is a squillionaire Canadian publisher with an interest in the arts. Having acquired the iconoclastic art magazine Modern Painters and turned it into a fashion magazine she has now set up a foundation in her own name and its new headquarters have just opened in London.
The Louise T Blouin Institute is one [...]
October 11, 2006 – 11:44 pm
Our last post about gas holders brought another almost identical one to our attention, demolished in Ipswich Queensland at about the same time as the Lithgow gas holder.
In case you think we are being a bit silly about this you have to remember that there are now very few left in Australia. In the [...]
October 7, 2006 – 1:12 am
Three years ago we helped form the Lithgow Branch of the National Trust. One of the things that drove us to it was the pointless demolition of the old gas holder near the centre of town,
“that old eyesore” as it was known. A valiant defence campaign by a resident (who we later discovered was an [...]
September 6, 2006 – 10:25 pm
The crazy proliferation of highways has left a century or more of rail infrastructure redundant. As it languishes it often turns into the only nature reserve in highly urbanised areas.
The High Line in New York is a typical example. If you’ve ever been to Chelsea you’ve probably seen it. It’s a mile and a [...]
Describing a project as adaptive reuse is often no more than an attempt to give a bit more credibility to a boring renovation. It is further complicated by the difficulties inherent in bringing heritage buildings back into use. But occasionally there is an exemplary project where the restoration of a heritage building is successfully combined [...]
Well maybe not all glass boxes are bad. And this has to be the most extreme makeover of a warehouse to be found anywhere in the world.
It’s the proposed new Hamburg concert hall by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, 2001 Pritzker Prize winners, architects of Tate Modern (another great adaptive reuse), etcetera etcetera etcetera [...]
