360Photography

Tag: Bustling

Gritty City: Dark Oils Capture Essence of Bustling Urbanity

[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Drawing & Digital. ]

Buy shipyards, city streets, rain-streaked skyscrapers and other iconic staples of cities come alive in this portfolio of shadowy oil paintings.

Valerio D’Ospina captures movement in the strokes of his brush, but the blurred results also take on that uncanny real-yet-indistinct character of a dream or memory, a little like the work of Alexandra Pacura.

Born in Italy, Valerio studied in Florence, painted in Paris and eventually moved to Pennsylvania – his range of industrial subjects reflects studies of historic Europe as well as the infrastructure of the United States.

He was trained to teach, but has since turned toward full-time creation. From his bio: “After this teaching experience he decided to focus exclusively on painting, receiving positive feedback from private collectors and galleries from around the world.”

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Dark City: Giant Mirrors Aim to Illuminate Town in Shadows

A lovely little settlement in a lush valley of Norway sounds like a slice of paradise – except that the surrounding hills keep it out of sunlight for …
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Sodom & Gomorrah: Dark Digital Art by Alessandro Bavari

Artist Alessandro Bavari vividly imagines a dark and depraved Sodom and Gomorrah in this Bosch-like, biblical digital art series.
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1 Trillion Frames-per-Second Photos Capture Light in Motion

Nothing moves faster than light, right? True as that may be, a team at MIT has developed a method for visualizing its propagation to amazing effect.
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[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Drawing & Digital. ]

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WebUrbanist

June 19, 2014
Shanghai Bomb Shelter Becomes Bustling Underground Night Club

[ By Steph in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

With a population of nearly 13.5 million packed into just 2,448 square miles and a large network of disused bomb shelters, it’s no surprise that some Shanghai businesses are going underground. The Shelter is a new nightclub that makes use of one of the roughly 2,000 bomb shelters that can be found beneath the Xuhui district alone, leaving many of the original elements intact.

To get to the club, you’ll have to make your way down a long, narrow stairway and through a dark, cave-like cement tunnel that twists and winds beneath street level. For The Shelter, the rawness and darkness of the setting is part of the appeal.

There are hundreds of thousands of bomb shelters all over China, built in the ’60s and ’70s to prepare for possible air raids from the Soviet Union. “Some projects remain as secrets,” said Tong Songyan, an official at the Xuhui district government, in an interview with Reuters.

Other businesses that have made their home in these underground passages range from the appropriate to the incongruous including a wine shop, a men’s gay bar and a men’s underwear store. The location currently inhabited by The Shelter was formerly a vegetable market, ice storage facility, massage parlor and public bath house.

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Underground Rooms: Waiting for the End of the World

Is the end near? These stark but beautiful photos of underground bomb shelters give us a taste of what life may be like if we had to go underground to survive.
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Down Towns: 6 Unbelievable Underground Spaces

The above-ground world is far from being the whole story. There’s another world beneath our feet – one that many of us never see – like these 6 amazing spaces.
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[ By Steph in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

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WebUrbanist

October 23, 2012