Ringstraße des Proletariats

up_wien_azw_karlmarxhof_01_h25, originally uploaded by urbanpilgrim.

This Viennese residence spans just over 1 kilometer (.68 miles) making it the longest continuous housing structure in the world. Not unlike Chicago's Hancock Tower, the building contains many of the amenities that its denizens need: kindergartens, doctors' offices, and a library. From a different perspective you can see the arches under this massive building that allow traffic to pass through it.

Karl Marx Hof is an example of a Gemeindebauten: municipal building (like public housing in the U.S.). The fortress-like construction of these buildings made them durable and also ideal for use by the military. Karl Marx Hof played an important part in Austria's February Uprising in 1934.

When I was in Vienna I got on a bus near Karl Marx Hof. Once I saw these pictures I immediately remembered having seen these enormous arches.

Sea Gypsies

The Moken People anticipated the 2004 Tsunami that crushed Sri Lanka and Thailand. I mentioned them in an earlier post, but now (through the magic of YouTube!) we can have a look at this fascinating society.

Atlas Underground

Time lapse video of the construction of the Atlas experiment at CERN. The underground particle accelerator will be the largest ever constructed, and perhaps the most complex experiment in the history of science.

Estonia Unexpected

Tallinn, originally uploaded by Tashi Delek.

Helsinki's neighbor across the gulf is on its way to become the celebrity nation of post-communism. When compared to other former Soviet states, Estonia rated at the top of the heap in terms of economic and individual freedom, corruption, and human development. Furthermore, Estonia ranked at the top globally in the composite index State of World Liberty.

While other former Soviet states have devolved into despotism and disorder, Estonia has nurtured the growth of a legitimate, representative government. Most of the nation's trade goes through Nordic states with historic and cultural similarities. Iceland was the first nation to recognize the independent Estonia after the final Soviet forces left.

Soviet withdrawal from the Baltic states was precipitated by the longest human chain ever created. Around 2 million people held hands across Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, it reached over 370 miles. The deteriorating remains of the Soviet military installations in Estonia are easy to find. So called, "ghost bases" that many native Estonians weren't aware of until the departure of the Soviet military are beginning to attract tourists interested in the history of nuclear warfare and communism.

Have a look at Tallinn's old city hall and an inviting street cafe.

The Land God Made in Anger

Namibie_Skeleton_Coast_02, originally uploaded by calips96.

Namibia's northern coast has been called many names. Portuguese sailors who happened upon the foggy, super arid shore called it the "Gates of Hell." The coastal area is extremely dry since winds come out of the East and not from the ocean. If that weren't enough the heavy surf makes it nearly impossible to launch a dinghy from the beach. Beached survivors faced an unforgiving march through one of the driest places on earth.

Those unlucky sailors soon learned why the native people of Namibia called this "The Land God Made in Anger." Now it is known as the Skeleton Coast after the bones left behind from hundreds of shipwrecks caused by this treacherous sea.

Ecologists study the area for two reasons: it's inhospitality to life, and the enormous seal colony that comes ashore at Cape Cross.

Our Three Dimensional History

We've all thought at one time or another, "what would it be like to walk around in London in 1616?" Thanks to CANOMA and SketchUp, now you can!



The effect is more pop-up book than true visualization. But imagine what we might learn about ancient civilizations,


military history,


and cities buried under new development.


Via Digital Urban.

Virtual Landmark, II

An automated email replied to the Royal College of Art's suggesting that Google Maps add a temporary marker for their 150th anniversary exhibition at the Kensington Gardens. After a week and a half of apparent inaction the college took matters into their own hands.

They decided to install their own marker in the appropriate location.


See the original Virtual Landmark.

Incarceration Postcard

cell_block_no_11_new_prison_1_27_07, originally uploaded by jacksonista.

Before Uncle Jimmy tires to bust out of the clink he might try to get in touch. If he's in the Michigan State Prison at Jackson he can do just that with this handy postcard. (He could even circle his cell in red marker!)

As I understand it, Jacksoners refer to the prison by its address on Cooper Street. Of all of Michigan's prisons, the Jackson facility is located in the most urbanized area (it is also likely the largest concentration of correctional facilities in the state, followed by Ionia).

The political implications of prison location are somewhat interesting. It seems that prisons tend to be placed in rural areas where they artificially boost the population. This website shows examples in Michigan, New York, Ohio, and lots of other states. Furthermore, it looks like the number of prisons (and prisoners) has escalated dramatically in the past 20 or so years. Investigating further into New York I discovered that the state has a maximum security facility solely for women.

*Old News: San Pedro in La Paz, Bolivia; where inmates pay to rent their cells with money they earn in the prison's economy

Ramblin' Man

Last.fm has made my workday fly by. Splicing together thousands upon thousands of people's musical tastes it quickly picks out songs I (usually) enjoy like some kind of personalized DJ. For instance, here is a selection of songs labeled Ambient, where I discovered the Ramblin' Man.

After I heard Lemon Jelly's Ramblin' Man I rushed to find a freebie download of the song to post here. But, as far as Google knows, there is no free version of the song. The lyrics list out 67 places where the singer has visited. The only Continent that isn't included is Antarctica.

You can listen to a few other Lemon Jelly songs online such as, 76 (Stay With You), Nice Weather for Ducks, and Sim Time.

*I had toyed with posting this annoying video as an example of Toponyms in popular media, but I couldn't bring myself to watch it for more than 10 seconds.

Late Addition: The songs don't work. So in their place have a look at the rivers and lakes hiding under Antarctica.

We are Tuna

Tsukiji Fish Market, originally uploaded by x-girl.

And we're all just waiting around at the Tsukiji Fish Market in Tokyo. Around 1972 Japanese fish wholesalers discovered the delectable taste of the Bluefin Tuna when caught in the seas near New England. American fisherman didn't have a market for the giant fish so they were happy to put them on transcontinental flights to Japan.

The Tsukiji Fish Market is the largest market for seafood in the world (by area and tonnage of product). It moves around 4.4 million pounds of seafood daily. There is practically no limit to the diversity of sea creatures that are sold at Tsukiji: eel, lobster, oyster, barnacles, sea pineapples, octopuses, squid, puffer fish, sweet shrimp, and flying fish can all be found at wholesale prices.

Tuna, however, are the main event. Buyers for large distributors and single restaurants all gather at Tsukiji for the daily auction of Tuna. The stakes are high. According to Vanity Fair the buyers can lose control:

The tuna weighed 200 kilos. At ¥100,000 per kilo, the possessed bidder had paid ¥20 million—the equivalent of more than $170,000—for a fish whose parceled meat could never recoup that amount.

The tricky part about this auction is that the buyers cannot truly know the quality of the fish until it has been cut open. Clues about the texture and taste of the fish are derived from the fins.

The official name of the Tsukiji Fish Market is the Tokyo Metropolitan Central Wholesale Market. It is owned and operated by the municipal government through a law dating back to 1923. Officials in Tokyo are debating the practicalities of moving the public market to a new, larger site. Vendors and buyers seem to be adamantly opposed to the proposal since the former Tokyo Gas site has severe ground pollution.

One would imagine that a place as crowded with live and recently decesed sea creatures would posses a certian smell (putrid or gut-turning, for instance). However, according to at least two visitors it doesn't stink.

Via Vanity Fair, If You Knew Sushi, and CHOW, Sushi Scribes.

The Bridge on the River Kwai

Last night I watched The Bridge on the River Kwai. I had vague memories of the film from childhood but I couldn't remember the plot.

It's rare that a piece of infrastructure takes the spotlight as singlehandedly as this bridge does. The British Colonel (Alec Guinness), through his stubbornness experiences a sort of stockholm syndrome. His crippled pride leads him to identify with his Japanese captors. His reversal is so strong that he wants to build a bridge that will stand as a monument to British ingenuity and craftsmanship. Once it's finished he sees it as the only sure thing he has accomplished in his 29 year military career.

Another topological curiosity in this film is the Japanese Colonel's initial proclamation that the labor camp was on an island. Because of this he said that escape was impossible, that this was the reason no barbed wire had been erected around the POW camp. Toward the middle of the movie a British officer reveals that this is patently false. The infamous railway is entirely in Southeast Asia, the Kwai river is in Western Thailand.

The natural landscape takes on an interesting bit part as well. The Kwai river's diminished flow; the hazards of the dense, tropical jungle; and the constant threat of heat exhaustion all pressure the non-native characters in this movie. (While the Thai women appear able to carry munitions through all kinds of terrain without breaking a sweat!)

In any event the movie is excellent. I was probably too young to appreciate it the last time I saw it.

Cluj-Napoca

Our Neighbourhood, originally uploaded by sonykus.

From the photographer's description:

The oldest rows of these blocks were built in the '50s and '60s. Then, legend has it that former dictator Ceausescu once came to visit the (Atomic Physics and) Chemistry Research Institute nearby. He noticed that the whole place looked too relaxed, almost like a Spa, with decent conditions, lots of parks and green spaces between all those blocks.

He was outraged of this terrible waste of living space, and ordered a second wave of construction, starting immediately. So there came this second wave in the 70s, filling in the gaps between the older buildings with new rows of 5-story blocks, killing out most of the parks and the green lanes left. And thus, the whole thing got as crammed as you can see it today. ...

This picture was taken in a city named Cluj-Napoca in Romania. The city of 300,000 holds the title as the historical capital of Transylvania. There is some controversy about the etymology of the region that seems to fracture down lines of Latin and Hungarian interpretations. Literally translated from Latin, Transylvania means "beyond the forest."

*The city's wikipedia article lists Cluj as a sister city to East Lansing, Michigan, but I can't find any other confirmation on that.*

Abandonment Enthusiasm

Brown Sugar, originally uploaded by Ride My Pony.

Although I was familiar with the idea of Urban Spelunking, I had no idea it's presence was so strong on Flickr. I've listed out a few of the pools where Flickrites can add their pictures of abandonment.

• Abandoned Places and Things
• Urbex :: Urban Exploration
• The End of Industry
• Urban Decay
• Industrial Archeology

The Graffiti Project on Kelburn Castle

More on the Graffiti Project and Kelburn Castle.

Infamous Address

Nazi Germany's General Foundation for Welfare and Institutional Care was located at Tiergartenstraße 4. It was the bureau responsible for the deaths of physically and mentally handicapped people in the years just before the holocaust. Germans who knew about the program as simply the T4 Action.

The building is no longer there but a plaque in the sidewalk commemorates the horrors that were mandated at the site. Hospitals throughout the nation were ordered to perform euthanasia on patients who were considered incurable. That meant the“criminally insane,” schizophrenics, epileptics, people with Huntington’s, chorea, advanced syphilis, senile dementia, paralysis, encephalitis and “terminal neurological conditions generally” (and of course "non-Aryan" patients were always welcomed by T4).

The instigators and participating physicians of the T4 action were charged in the "Doctors' Trial," one of the several trials following the major war crimes trial. 20 of the 23 defendants were medical doctors, seven were hanged.

Istanbul, not Constantinople

Istanbul, Turkey, originally uploaded by balavenise.

Turkey's largest city has gone by many names. The Roman-derived name was officially dropped in 1930 by Atatürk's national reforms.

Currently, the sprawling, dual-continental city is building a rail tunnel to connect the two sides of the Bosphorus Strait. Early in the construction, however, an ancient seaport was unearthed. According to the BBC:

Just a few metres below ground, they found an ancient port of Constantinople - named in historical records as the Eleutherios harbour, one of the busiest of Byzantium.

Like Boston's Big Dig, the discovery of historical artifacts is likely to slow down the project. The tunnel is projected to open in 4 years at a cost of $2.5 billion.

Baikonur Cosmodrome

Energia Launch Site Panorama, originally uploaded by galexian.

In the vast and dry nation of Kazakhstan the Baikonur Cosmodrome remains an operational testament to the Space Race. Baikonur is the world's oldest and largest operational space launch facility. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 it continued operation in partnership with the Commonwealth of Independent States.

The Baikonur Cosmodrome is home to a tremendous amount of space exploration history. The first human spaceflight (Vostok 1) launched here as well as the first unmanned satellite (Sputnik 1). The facility was crutial for the International Space Station construction after the 2003 Columbia disaster.

Now, like so much else, the old Cosmodrome is a tourist attraction. RusAdventures offers a six day tour that departs from Moscow with your choice of English, French or German tour gides.

See an illustrated map of the facility.

Destination

., originally uploaded by Tresselboard.

This airport island is located someplace in the Maldives. Even at a low altitude the photographer could capture the entire runway and habitation of this island. Without more detail it's impossible to know if it is a secret military installation or an exotic resort. The capital of the Maldives has a similar sort of picture on Wikipedia.

I used to be a missile silo

And not just any missile silo, but an intercontinental ballistic missile silo.

This old ICBM silo in Albiene Texas has been decommissioned and turned into a pool for scuba diving. It was mentioned on an episode of Geo Quiz as perhaps the deepest pool on earth. (The show focuses most of its attention on the intentional pool Nemo33 in Brussels, an indoor pool 33 meters deep and 33 degrees celcius.) It's a fascinating example of adaptive reuse and demilitarization.

Listen to the MP3 Audio of the GeoQuiz.

Honey Barge

Nile, near Aswan, Egypt, originally uploaded by Zinnie.

The world's longest river flows supplies much of the life in arid Egypt. Besides transportation, water, and fish the Nile was important for beekeeping.

Migratory beekeeping began during this period [5000 years ago] as hives (in mud pots) were put on boats or rafts which sailed up and down the Nile following the honey flows, much as beekeepers in the U.S. do with 18-wheelers today

The anciently named country currently is home to around 82 million people.

[Thanks to MeFi for the inspiration and Zinnie for the image]

Eccentric Spaces

I was excited about reading this book when I first found it on Paperback Swap. It's a strange piece to say the least. Harbison explores fictional and real spaces with emphasis not on materials and history but on the conceptual frameworks that in which we experience spaces.

Eccentric Spaces takes a gnarled journey through European painting, writing, and cities. Harbison's writing is thick and soupy in places where he gets twisted around on various tangential subjects. He succeeds when discussing the various treatments that authors of fiction (and historical fiction) give to settings.

This is truly a mysterious book that belongs in no genre. It would function well as a starting off point for architectural conjecture or urban planning debates. Nevertheless the book feels dated and too deeply European and it too often gets mired in unmanageable comparisons.

*Cross posted from A Single Step*

Strange Maps

I feel the obligation to recommend Strange Maps as an excellent source for eccentric cartography. The recent posts on the Stockholm Metro Map in English and the Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map of the World were really spectacular.

Survivalism

The End of the World

Intensidad... o Lago Fagnano, originally uploaded by Any Manetta.

Ushuaia, Argentina is the southernmost city on the planet. The lonely town on Tierra del Fuego is serviced by the Southern Fuegian Railway, more popularly known as the End of the World Train. The narrow gauge railway was built to service the penal colony of Ushuaia and aid in the construction of a full prison there. The penal colony has since shut down and the train is now a tourist attraction for visitors to Argentina's southernmost lands.