Tag: Decay

Evolution of Decay: Watch American Buildings Fall Into Ruin Over 40+ Years

[ By SA Rogers in Abandoned Places & Architecture. ]

Architecture that was at its prime in the 1970s has slowly fallen into decline and often ruin thanks to decades of neglect, especially in America’s poorest and most racially segregated communities, including Gary, Detroit, Camden and Harlem. Many of these structures were historically significant, built between the late 1880s and the 1920s, but when no budget exists to care for them and entire cities are left behind by economic progress, the forces of nature and decay take over.

In a potent visual representation of poverty in America’s urban centers and the loss of historic architectural character via demolition, Chilean-born photographer Camilo José Vergara has spent the last 40+ years documenting the downfall of dozens of structures and city streets. The resulting series, ‘Tracking Time,’ is a time-lapse in slow motion, photographing the same buildings once every few years.

One old shop in Harlem gets painted several times over, has its stained glass windows knocked out, loses a facade to an ugly garage door and is split up into multiple smaller businesses before finally being boarded over and transformed into a mini-mall-style church in 2014.

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A massive brick building in South Bronx becomes modest row houses, while The Ransom Gillis House in Detroit (top) sinks into the ground, its bricks falling in clumps, the roof caving in, ivy and trees taking over. It’s almost completely obscured by greenery before a restoration brings it back to its former glory.

But other stories aren’t so positive, since people care more about mansions than they do about public housing projects, row houses, and modest residential neighborhoods. Occasionally, Vergara ventures inside to show us that even though the facades still look beautiful, like that of the former Camden Free Public Library, the interiors are utterly destroyed.

It can be a heartbreaking journey but also a fascinating one, watching some of these structures remain the same for many years while the world changes around them before transforming into something new. And some do manage to endure.

Decay in Detroit: Feral House Photos by James Griffioen

The word ‘feral’ has a dark and unsettling connotation: wild, dangerous, likely to turn on you at any moment. The word is most often applied to domesticated animals that have reverted back to a …

400 Years of London’s Skyline: Watch it Evolve in Seconds

A city with a history dating back over 2,000 years, London has transformed dramatically over the last four centuries in particular, rising from the ashes of a 17th century fire that practically …

City Evolution: Watch Urban Growth in 3D Visualizations

Watch Manhattan multiply and San Francisco soar into the sky in a series of growth animation videos that show the expansion of cities over more than a century. Created by Calgary-based real …

[ By SA Rogers in Abandoned Places & Architecture. ]

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WebUrbanist

November 19, 2016
Beauty in Decay: Moody Murals Bring Human Faces Back to Abandoned Places

[ By SA Rogers in Art & Installation & Sound. ]

Abandoned places are often steeped in a mixture of emotional impressions, commingling a sense of loss and a confrontation of our own mortality with slivers of hopefulness for a new future, as nature begins to take over what we’ve left behind. As we move through these deteriorating spaces, strewn with the belongings of former inhabitants who seem to have simply disappeared, we wonder who they were and why the spaces that once sheltered them as they went about their lives have come to this. It’s these emotional qualities that make a new series of murals by Australian street artist Rone all the more poignant and powerful.

Entitled ‘Empty,’ the series places the artist’s signature portraits of women on the walls of abandoned interiors, deepening their emotional weight. Much of the subjects’ glamour is stripped away as their skin takes on the texture of peeling paint, the lines of their faces are interrupted by fallen tiles and their gazes are pointed down at the destruction of their environments.

For the Melbourne-based artist, this series represents a shift from the smooth, clean surfaces of his canvases and even the more clear-cut exterior walls upon which his murals are typically painted. But Rone has always found meaning in the temporary nature of these installations, as the artworks are gradually worn away by the elements or painted over by vandals and other artists.

Rone exhibited ‘Empty’ at the soon-to-be-demolished Star Lyric Theatre building in Melbourne, presenting photographs of the murals in situ along with works on canvas and paper. The artist also painted a new mural directly onto the back wall of the theater, stretching nearly 33 feet from floor to ceiling. It’s a fitting way for the decaying Art Nouveau building to go out, with Rone’s canvases lining its blackened and stained surfaces. See more photos of the installation at Street Art News.

Abandoned Intervention: Sliding Facade Reveals Decay

A brand new brick facade slides off the front of a building in Kent, UK to reveal the derelict mess just beyond. Abandoned for 11 years, the four-story structure that stood as an eyesore along a …

Giants in Living Color: Massive Street Murals by Etam Cru

Polish duo Sainer and Bezt, collectively known as Etam Cru, paint massive-scale murals of people and animals on blank building faces around the world. Their unexpected visuals liven up dreary …

Art in Abandoned Places: 15 Unexpected Urban Installations

Translucent jellyfish put on a serene display in the window of a derelict shop, ghostly images of long-dead patients seem to haunt a disused hospital and surreal oversized spider webs appear in …

[ By SA Rogers in Art & Installation & Sound. ]

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October 25, 2016
Weekly Photography Challenge – Urban Decay

If you live in a city now is your chance to get out and hunt for some run down, dilapidated, crumbling buildings that say urban decay to you.

By Thomas Hawk

Weekly Photography Challenge – Urban Decay

You can handle this challenge and subject however you wish to approach it. Shoot or convert to black and white, try some HDR, how about doing some light painting at night? The choice is yours. Go find a good subject, take a friend along too, and shoot away!

NOTE: As always though – please put your safety and taking the proper precautions to ensure you aren’t trespassing on private property or endangering yourself or anyone else in the process of getting your photos. Safety and getting proper permissions come first!

By Pelle Sten

By Louis du Mont

By Babak Fakhamzadeh

By Toby Bradbury

By Neal Wellons

By David Barnas

Share your images below:

Simply upload your shot into the comment field (look for the little camera icon in the Disqus comments section) and they’ll get embedded for us all to see or if you’d prefer upload them to your favourite photo sharing site and leave the link to them. Show me your best images in this week’s challenge. Sometimes it takes a while for an image to appear so be patient and try not to post the same image twice.

By Julian Lennon

By Freaktography

By David Barnas

By darkday

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The post Weekly Photography Challenge – Urban Decay by Darlene Hildebrandt appeared first on Digital Photography School.

Digital Photography School

April 30, 2016
25 Dilapidated Images of Urban Decay and Grunge

Many photographers are fascinated with old things, the more decayed and falling apart the better. Urban decay and grunge is a popular subject for photographers in cities. Some go out of their way to find abandoned buildings and little known spots.

Perhaps like these images:

By Wayne Stadler

By Vincent Ferron

By RAFFI YOUREDJIAN

By ghalam_DAR

By Anna S.

By Claudia M Eastman

By Nano Anderson

By Simon Samuelsson

By olavXO

By Howard Ignatius

By Freaktography

By Freaktography

By Andre Valente

By Freaktography

By Pietromassimo Pasqui

By Maurizio

By Oreste Messina

By Maurizio

By Mariyan Dimitrov

By Daniel Go

By Kamil Dziedzina

By darkday

By darkday

By Guillaume DELEBARRE (Guigui-Lille)

By Thomas Hawk

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The post 25 Dilapidated Images of Urban Decay and Grunge by Darlene Hildebrandt appeared first on Digital Photography School.

Digital Photography School

April 29, 2016
Beware of Colour: Activists Highlight Decay with Pink Paint

[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Street Art & Graffiti. ]

Splashed with bright buckets of paint from roofs and windows, the colorfully defaced buildings of downtown Johannesburg have evoked different reactions from supports and detractors who variously see this work as an act of protest or crime of vandalism. Before we delve too deep into the sides represented, keep in mind that Beware of Colour employed water-soluble paint in these interventions.

Colombian-American Yazmany Arboleda and the other artists behind the work note that all of the buildings targeted have been abandoned for decades despite a housing crisis – a fifth of the region’s population needs a place to live, currently dwelling in shanties or on the streets. Historic preservationists, meanwhile, decry the defacement and suggest that other methods could be used to raise public awareness of civic problems.

The case is more complicated, though, than either single viewpoint might suggest and the case for preservation is nuanced. As CityLab’s Ryan Lenora Brown points out, “appealing to history in contemporary South Africa is hardly a straightforward matter. Buildings like Shakespeare House were originally built for the exclusive use of whites, back when Johannesburg’s inner city was the center of one of the modern world’s most infamous projects of racial segregation …. The slumped and broken building has become a symbol for a different Johannesburg, one blighted by decades of white flight and municipal neglect.”

Arborleda was eventually caught with a crew of people and arrested for “malicious destruction of property” after being spotted entering one of the buildings on their list. This has, for now, put an end to this particular vintage of urban activism in South Africa.

Most of the structures the 30-some artists threw paint upon are either owned by the city or by Urban Ocean, a development group with a significant number of centrally-located and historical holdings. It remains to be seen whether this project will make a difference in the course of the city’s development, or become just another piece in the area’s persistently puzzling blight.

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Urban Camo: Body Paint Blends Humans into City Backdrops

Human figures blend into iconic New York City scenes, from the Brooklyn Bridge to the Guggenheim Museum, in artist Trina Merry‘s tromp l’eoil urban …
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Blanking Banksy: Artists & City Paint Over Pricey NYC Graffiti

Banksy is an artist with the rare power to make walls more valuable after he has vandalized them, which some then seek to alter or destroy and others fight …
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[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Street Art & Graffiti. ]

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WebUrbanist

January 11, 2015
Dirty Camp 30: Canadian POW Camp Battles Neglect & Decay

[ By Steve in Abandoned Places & Architecture. ]

Camp 30, located east of Toronto, was one of Canada’s main World War II POW camps and although named a National Historic Site, continues to be neglected.

The community of Bowmanville, Ontario, is home to just over 40,000 people, many of whom work in Toronto and commute daily via Highway 401. Only a tenth as many made Bowmanville their home in 1941, however, when the Canadian government ordered the Bowmanville Boys Training School (a “school for unadjusted boys who were not inherently delinquent”) to vacate the site. By the end of the year, the former school and its environs had been converted into Camp 30 and the first German prisoners of war arrived. (credit AlexLuyckx with the above images)

Many of these prisoners were considered “high profile” – the reasoning being, the farther they were from Nazi Germany, the less chance of them returning there after a successful escape. Among the more notable Camp 30 prisoners were U-boat commanders Wolfgang Heyda and Otto Kretschmer, the latter credited with sinking 47 ships (totaling 274,333 tons) between the start of the war and his capture in March of 1941. (credit Courtney McIntosh with the above images)

In stark contrast to the treatment doled out to Allied POWs in German prison camps, those prisoners sent to Camp 30 enjoyed a wealth of freedoms and amenities. As Camp 30 was a former boy’s school, prisoners were allowed to use the indoor pool as well as the soccer and football fields. If that wasn’t enough, authorities approved requests to build a tennis court and a mini zoo! (credit ckocur with the above images)

These perks and much more (read about Camp 30 in detail at the unofficial Camp 30 website) didn’t stop the prisoners from carrying out their duty to escape, and at least a half dozen attempts – some quite elaborate and well-planned – were foiled by guards. (credit Rick Harris with the above images)

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Dirty Camp 30 Canadian Pow Camp Battles Neglect Decay

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Documenting Decay: Urban Atrophy’s Breathtaking New Book

The creator of the website Urban Atrophy has published an incredible picture book complete with the histories of the buildings he explores and documents.
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Decay Down Under: 7 Abandoned Wonders of Australia

Whether covered in colorful graffiti or slowly disappearing under a profusion of moss and vines, Australia’s most intriguing abandoned places share the …
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Decay in Detroit: Feral House Photos by James Griffioen

Photographer James Griffioen captures Detroit’s ‘Feral Houses’, abandoned homes that are overtaken by trees and ivy, enhancing their sense of decay.
Click Here to Read More »»

[ By Steve in Abandoned Places & Architecture. ]

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WebUrbanist

November 17, 2014
Decay Down Under: 7 Abandoned Wonders of Australia

[ By Steph in 7 Wonders Series & Global. ]

Whether covered in colorful graffiti or slowly disappearing under a profusion of moss and vines, Australia’s most intriguing abandoned places share the same sense of mournful decay as landmarks that are nearly lost to the ravages of time. These 7 wonders of abandoned Australia include historic tram stations, theme parks, asylums and factories.

Atlantis Marine Park, Yanchep, Western Australia

(images via: tor lindstrand)

A massive statue of King Neptune still looks out over a marine park that’s been closed for nearly 25 years. Atlantis Marine Park opened in Yanchep, Western Australia in 1981 and hosted the typical array of aquarium wildlife like dolphins, sea lions, penguins and seals. But in the late 1980s, regulations about the size of enclosures for dolphins changed, and accommodating them proved too costly for the owners. All nine dolphins were rehabilitated and released back into the wild, but when three of them failed to thrive, they were relocated to another marine park.

Since then, the property has been in limbo, with much of the ruins retaken by nature. No fences keep out members of the public, so anyone can get in to take photos and enjoy the views of the ocean. Members of the community have petitioned to restore the park, but the property owners plan to develop the space for residential and commercial use.

Aradale Mental Hospital, Ararat, Victoria

(images via: aradale ghost tours)

Built in 1863, Aradale Mental Hospital was an Australian psychiatric hospital built to accommodate the burgeoning population of ‘lunatics’ in Victoria. Designed as a town within a town, it had its own gardens, markets, orchard, vineyards, pig farm and other livestock along with hundreds of staff. The Victorian complex was built high on a hill and held thousands of patients in 18 wards until 1993. It held female prisoners until 2001 during the renovation of a nearby facility, and then closed for good. Companies like Aradale Ghost Tours now take curious visitors through the complex, including the morgue.

And how was it that Victoria was home to so many so-called lunatics? It was common during that time, all over the world, for people with conditions like Down Syndrome, epilepsy or autism to be declared insane. Sometimes, all it took was postpartum depression, homosexuality or ‘promiscuous behavior’ to be institutionalized for life.

Helensburgh Train Station, New South Wales

(image via: robert montgomery)

Sometimes the most striking abandonments are those that are so overgrown, they’re almost entirely hidden. Such is the case with the Helensburgh train station in New South Wales. Left to decay since 1915, when a new station was built about 200 meters to the north, this stone-walled relic is all rust and rotting wood, lush with ferns, moss and ivy. Unsurprisingly, it’s an irresistible attraction for photographers – check out some stunning photos by Tom Jarman at Urban Ghosts Media.

Rozelle Tram Depot, Glebe, New South Wales

(images via: wikimedia commons)

Once the second-largest tram depot servicing Sydney and among the most sophisticated public tramway systems in the world, the Rozelle station in Glebe was open from 1918 until 1958. Six 1930s trams, mostly gutted on the inside, still sit inside the station so many decades later. Though they may have been abandoned inside this massive concrete and steel facility, they’re now practically works of modern urban art, brightly colored and covered in layer upon layer of graffiti. The trams were in near-mint condition prior to 2000, and could have been beautiful historical artifacts if not for the vandalism that began around that time. The whole property has been purchased by a developer, who plans to turn the site into medium density housing.

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Decay Down Under 7 Abandoned Wonders Of Australia

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From South Korea to North Korea, Cambodia to Thailand and Japan to Azerbaijan here are seven oriental and subcontinental abandoned cities and places.
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[ By Steph in 7 Wonders Series & Global. ]

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WebUrbanist

November 27, 2013
Dark Tower: Decay Inside Africa’s Tallest Apartment Complex

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

Before a long descent into darkness, the cylindrical Ponte City Apartments began life as a luxurious tribute to growth and wealth in Johannesburg , filled with envy-worthy units looking out in all directions. But after years of decline and false restarts, what direction is next for the highest residential skyscraper on the continent?

As remarked in the film above by Philip Bloom, the transformation of this iconic 54-story, mixed-use tower in South Africa has been astonishing. “It really was icon of decadence … wealth and exuberance” with three-story units and Jacuzzi tubs – a “premier location in the city” for people “making a lot of cash.” As part of an exodus from the city center, rapid changes took place.

The center of the circular plan looked excellent in theory – a way for light to enter the back side of apartments looking into the core. There were even plans for an indoor ski slope to accompany the various shops and eateries on the lower levels.

In practice, it slowly became a kind of black hole filled with three stories of detritus at the bottom and marked by unwashed walls all the way up. It also developed a reputation for defenestrations – accidents, suicides and otherwise.

Investors just before the global financial crisis began to re-envision and rehabilitate the structure, but the renovations stopped as abruptly as the market crashed, leaving an ambiguous future for this iconic structure.

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Dark Tower Decay Inside Africas Tallest Apartment Complex

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]

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October 30, 2013
Abandoned Intervention: Sliding Facade Reveals Decay

[ By Steph in Abandoned Places & Architecture. ]

A brand new brick facade slides off the front of a building in Kent, UK to reveal the derelict mess just beyond. Abandoned for 11 years, the four-story structure that stood as an eyesore along a residential street of this seaside town is now an intriguing work of art that makes a statement about what may lie behind the superficiality of seemingly perfect appearances.

The crumbling top story remains exposed, giving a glimpse of what is inside only to those who can get high enough to see it. The Cliftonville district of the city, where the installation is located, was once affluent, but struggled as the whims of vacationers turned to other places. With increased crime and poverty came the decay of once-grand architecture.

The Thanet District Council of Kent gave artist Alex Chinneck permission to create the installation, entitled ‘From The Knees of My Nose To The Belly Of My Toes’, which will stand for a year before the building is brought back into public use.

Ten companies donated materials, manufacturing labor and professional surfaces to get the project off (or rather, on) the ground. “I was aware of this idea that people have a choice whether or not they go through the doors of an art gallery, and often they don’t because they feel intimidated, so I think public art is important,” Chinneck told The Daily Mail.

[ By Steph in Abandoned Places & Architecture. ]

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October 3, 2013