No one quite seems to know what to do with Battersea Power Station — well, not everyone, it seems. The landmark decommissioned power plant presides over Southwest London like a monumental sculpture and some kind of historic relic — a notion emboldened by the building’s use in futurist/sci-fi graphic books and films — exerting a visual power that few, if any, of the city’s contemporary buildings match. So it’s easy to see why architects and developers have continuously tried to revamp the site since the station’s closure in the early ’80s. In that time, there have been a surplus of imaginative redevelopment projects, many of which, including Rafael Vinoly’s various “eco” schemes for the site, incorporated a combination of office and residential structures plus A LOT of green roofs. None of the projects was particularly appealing, nor did they do any justice to Battersea’s architecture and history.

This conceptual scheme from French designers Atelier Zündel Cristea is definitely not more of the same. The project envisions wrapping a massive roller coaster around the whole of the iconic building. We wholeheartedly approve. Click for more!

more

The architect Aldo Rossi was known as much for his artwork as for his built work, leaving behind an extensive body of beautiful drawings, etchings, and paintings wherein an array of coffee ware–coffee pots, cups, kettles–is serially aggrandized to the level of the urban forum, situated in the midst of a city of radio towers, brick office buildings, and marble monuments. Through this procedural enlargement, Rossi attempted to convey time and again architecture’s intrinsic powers of representation, and how it comes to impact our lives.

Similarly, the photography of artists Bernd and Hiller Becher takes as its subjects the obsolescent forms of industry that, despite their functional inertia, continue to pervade the cultural lexicon. This collection of porcelain vases, much like Rossi’s Alessi coffee pots, scale down these familiar typologies from urban to domestic artifacts. Designed by Michael Breschi of Gentle Giants studio, the vases are an endearing tribute to the Becher work, composed of the platonic forms of water tanks and smokestacks held aloft by tiny gold-plated armatures. All that’s missing are the clouds of smoke.

more

These photographs by Anatoly Morozov capture the twilight of the Soviet project through digitally-manipulated images of battered industry, made fragile by years of neglect and abandonment. They stand solitary in vast landscapes of nothingness against the murky skies of apocalyptic doom–specters of a now lost and irrecoverable utopia, or as Reyner Banham put it [speaking of the decline and failure of megastructures as vehicles for social transformation], “a whitening skeleton on the dark horizons of our [not-so-] recent past.” More after the jump!

more

Pipe Plant from Sasha Aleksandrov on Vimeo.

It took 2 months of shooting for Moscow-based filmmaker Sasha Aleksandrov to capture the re-painting of the exteriors of an expansive Cold War-era industrial factory. It all unfolds in dramatic time-lapse in less than 4 minutes. To make the video, Aleksandrov shot by hand and on foot, using just a typical Nikon and a tripod. This meant that Aleksandrov, who calls himself an “operator”, had to set up a shot, take it, move the tripod over a foot (or precisely 29 cm, he maintains), before repeating the process thousands of times. He then used an off-the-shelf software to stabilize the shots in post-production.

The result of this intensive labor is a combination of stop-motion and time-lapse photography, otherwise known as hyper-lapse sequences, whereby the footage is made dynamic through the introduction of rotations and pans. So when the camera begins to move, that’s Aleksandrov following along the ground at 11-inch intervals over the course of an afternoon. As for the paint job itself, it’s a kind of Suprematist pastiche with typeface meant for Bolshevik slogans. But any excuse to photograph more decommissioned factories, right?

more

Photos courtesy of the artist

Dan Bergeron is a Canadian artist known for his photo-based street interventions. His work often focuses on subjects ignored by mass media, seeking to expose the exclusions embedded in architecture and urban geography. In one of his latest projects Gaspesia: Les portraits en papier, the artist has created large-scale portraits of former workers of a pulp and paper mill whose closure in 1999 devastated the town of Chandler, Quebec. These somber black and white images climb up to 30-feet high pressed against the industrial remains of the mill. Click to see more.

more

Magnetic Void from James Miller on Vimeo.

Filmmaker James Miller captured the demolition of the British United Shoe Machinery Company in Leicester, England, then reversed the playback to create this moody video. According to Wikipedia, the BUSM was the largest manufacturer of footwear machinery and materials throughout most of the twentieth century and was once, naturally, the largest employer of jobs in Leicester. Things went awry after the company changed hands in the mid-1990′s and numerous lawsuits ensued. Following years of this bureaucratic standoff, the original BUSM  factory was set for demolition to make room for new housing developments.

Miller’s photography surveys the disparate natures between the construction of the decaying factory’s brick and mortar walls and the large hydraulic arms of machinery, which tear into the former with great effortlessness. However you read into the images, one thing is certain: neither the old machinery to which BUSM owed their prosperity, nor their contemporary counterparts can escape entropy’s reach.

more