7 Ancient Ruins Around The World “Reconstructed” with GIFs
In these GIFs made for Expedia by NeoMam and Thisisrender, seven architectural wonders are reconstructed into their original form, allowing us to see how the ruins visible today developed from the initial structures in all their glory.
Identified from the top:
The Parthenon Athens, Greece / 432 BC
Luxor Temple Luxor, Egypt / 1380 BC
Nohoch Mul Pyramid (Coba) Quintana Roo, Mexico / 100 BC-100 AD
Temple of Jupiter Pompeii, Italy / 200 BC
Milecastle 39 (Part of Hadrian’s Wall) Northumberland, England / 100 AD
The Pyramid of the Sun, Teotihuacán Teotihuacan, Mexico / 200 CE
Area Sacra di Largo Argentina—Temple B Rome, Italy / 101 BC
It totally makes sense how terrible and frightening 1950s cookbooks are if you understand who they’re actually aimed at.
In a nutshell, if you were a married middle-class woman, the social expectation was not only that you’d cook a full three- or four-course dinner every night (never mind where you were supposed to fit several hours of daily dinner prep along with everything else!), but that you’d cook a different three- or four-course dinner ever night. Recycling recipes was a total faux pas, especially if you had company over, which would have been frequently.
Trouble is, people weren’t really different back then, which means that most of them a. hated cooking, and b. weren’t very good at it, and even those who enjoyed it typically didn’t have the time to whip up a meticulously planned feast every singe day, since they were already effectively juggling multiple full-time jobs as child caregivers and household managers.
So the target audience of those cookbooks is basically people who have neither the time nor the inclination for fancy cooking, but are obliged to do it constantly. “Good” isn’t the objective; the objective is achieving maximum novelty with minimum effort. The results actually being edible is more of an optional bonus.
among-the-ivy asked:
Have you seen anything about CopenHill in Copenhagen? Do you know of any other buildings that produce energy and/or are waste management plants but are also aesthetically pleasing at the same time?
CopenHill by BIG (above) combines a waste-to-energy plant with an ski slope but there is a long tradition of energy plants that strive to raise above the industrial aesthetic, check out these projects:
Dong Yugan uses brick to form sculptural surfaces and playful structures at Red Brick Art Museum
This museum in Beijing takes its name from the red brick used by architect Dong Yugan to create spaces that are dramatically illuminated by skylights, perforations and narrow windows incorporated into its homogenous masonry surfaces. Red Brick Art Museum is a folk-based, non-profit art museum showcasing Chinese and world art, which was founded by collectors Yan Shijie and Cao Mei, and opened in 2014. The museum is located in the Chinese capital’s Chaoyang district, northeast of the city centre. It covers a total area of 20,000 square metres, with almost 10,000 square metres of exhibition space.
What I find more intriguing is the proposition that good people who are trying their best can produce bad outcomes, due to systematic flaws that are larger than any one person or institution.
This collector’s album presents Moscow’s architectural icons. With photographic precision, Denis Esakov captures the fifth façade of the largest European metropolis: roofs, domes, and cube-like buildings stacked on top of each other. By gazing through the drone’s eye, the artist fosters a novel visual aesthetic that opens up new vistas, even for Moscow connoisseurs.
Architecture is not just about the need for shelter or the need for a functional building. In some ways, it’s just what exceeds necessity that is architecture. And it’s the opening onto that excess that makes architecture fundamentally a human endeavor. Architecture is a technical answer to a question that’s not technical at all, but rather is historical and social. The study of architecture is the study of human thought and human history. This is about the architectural imagination. It’s how to think about architecture, but it’s also about architecture as a mode of thought. Architecture is one of the most complexly negotiated cultural practices there is. And a single instant involves all of the aesthetic, technological, economic, political issues of social production itself. And indeed, in some ways, architecture, as we’ll see, helps articulate history itself. These are all big claims. And we’ll need big ideas to address these claims. And we’ll also need very specific, concrete examples of architectural projects and events from history.
