Explore Burj Al Babas, Turkey’s Abandoned Town of 587 Disney-Style Castles

in Architecture, Travel | November 14th, 2024

Burj Al Babas might have been constructed expressly to attract the attention of the internet. “Sitting near the Black Sea, the town is full of half-finished, fully abandoned mini castles — 587 of them to be exact,” write Architectural Digest’s Katherine McLaughlin and Jessica Cherner. Originally “planned as a luxurious, stately urban development offering the look of royal living for anyone willing to shell out anywhere from $370,000 to $500,000 for their own little palace,” it now stands as an unfinished ghost town. And though the project only broke ground a decade ago, it’s already settled into a veritably eerie — and highly photographable — state of decay.

This, of course, more than suits the sensibilities of an adventure-oriented YouTube channel like Fearless & Far. Its exploration of Burj Al Babas — one of several such videos currently available — offers on-the-ground views of what we can only call the town’s ruins. “This fantasy paradise land didn’t sell,” says its host. “Some blame the Turkish real estate crisis; some blame the kitschiness of it all. It’s all so strange. It’s all so fake.”

Indeed, write McLaughlin and Cherner, “as building the town got underway, locals became enraged with both the aesthetic of the homes and the business practices of the developers,” who subsequently declared bankruptcy, leaving the development in limbo.

Those who know their Middle Eastern languages will recognize the very name Burj Al Babas as a “nonsensical mashup of Arabic and Turkish,” as Ruth Michaelson and Beril Eski put it in an in-depth Guardian piece last month. Though located in Turkey, with an intent to take advantage of local hot springs, it was financed with money from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. Since its construction “abruptly stopped in 2016, the project has become a bizarre white elephant,” causing scandal, lawsuits, an attempted suicide, “and even a minor diplomatic incident between Turkey and Kuwait.” Anyone who’s seen Burj Al Babas up-close will have their doubts about its prospects for completion — but if they’ve got a YouTube channel of their own, they’ll hardly want demolition to start before they can pay it a visit themselves.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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How Designing Buildings Upside-Down Revolutionized Architecture, Making Possible St. Paul’s Cathedral, Sagrada Família & More

in Architecture, History, Physics | November 12th, 2024

For 142 years now, Sagrada Família has been growing toward the sky. Or at least that’s what it seems to be doing, as its ongoing construction realizes ever more fully a host of forms that look and feel not quite of this earth. It makes a kind of sense to learn that, in designing the cathedral that would remain a work in progress nearly a century after his death, Antoni Gaudí built a model upside-down, making use of gravity in the opposite way to which we normally think of it as acting on a building. But as architecture YouTuber Stewart Hicks explains in the video above, Gaudí was hardly the first to use that technique.

Take St. Paul’s Cathedral, which Christopher Wren decided to make the tallest building in London in 1685. It included what would be the highest dome ever built, at 365 feet off the ground. “For a traditional dome design to reach this height, it would have to span an opening that’s 160 feet or 49 meters wide, but this made it much too heavy for the walls below,” says Hicks. “Existing techniques for building this just couldn’t work.” Enter scientist-engineer Robert Hooke, who’d already been figuring out ways to model forces like this by hanging chains from the ceiling.

“Hooke’s genius was that he realized that the chain in his experiments was calculating the perfect shape for it to remain in tension, since that’s all it can do.” He explained domes as, physically, “the exact opposite of the chains. His famous line was, ‘As hangs the flexile line, so but inverted will stand the rigid arch.’ ” In other words, “if you flip the shape of Hooke’s chain experiments upside down, the forces flip, and this shape is the perfect compression system.” Hence the distinctively elongated-looking shape of the dome on the completed St. Paul’s Cathedral, a departure from all architectural precedent.

The shape upon which Wren and Hooke settled turned out to be very similar to what architecture now knows as a catenary curve, a concept important indeed to Gaudí, who was “famously enamored with what some call organic forms.” He made detailed models to guide the construction of his projects, but after those he’d left behind for Sagrada Família were destroyed by anarchists in 1936, the builders had nothing to go on. Only in 1979 did the young architect Mark Burry “imagine the models upside-down,” which brought about a new understanding of the building’s complex, landscape-like forms. It was a similar physical insight that made possible such dramatic mid-century buildings as Annibale Vitellozzi and Pier Nervi’s Palazzetto dello Sport and Eero Saarinen’s TWA Flight Center: pure Space Age, but rooted in the Enlightenment.

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An Architectural Tour of Sagrada Família, Antoni Gaudí’s Audacious Church That’s Been Under Construction for 142 Years

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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The Fake Buildings of New York: What Happens Inside Their Mysterious Walls

in Architecture, History | October 16th, 2024

You can’t go on a walk with a serious enthusiast of New York history without hearing the stories behind at least a few notable, beautiful, or downright strange buildings. Yet most longtime New Yorkers, famed for tuning out their surroundings to better strive for their goals of the day, tend not even to acknowledge the structures liable to catch the attention of out-of-towners. Take 58 Joralemon Street in Brooklyn Heights: “From the outside, it looks like your typical townhouse,” says urban explorer Cash Jordan in his video above — but then you notice its blacked-out windows, bunker-like metal cladding, and apparently un-openable door.

Though it was indeed a townhouse when first built in 1847, 58 Joralemon Street was hollowed out and converted into one subway-system vent back in 1907. But the buildings right on either side remain residences, one of which, as Jordan finds, sold not long ago for $6 million.

In a completely different, more isolated context stands the Strecker Memorial Laboratory on Roosevelt Island. Built in 1892 as a laboratory for City Hospital, it opened as “the first institution in the nation for pathological and bacteriological research,” an activity it makes sense to keep apart from a dense urban environment. Abandoned in the nineteen-fifties, it later became another subway facility, specifically a power conversion substation.

Jordan also visits a fake building well out on Pier 34, and one that also provides a function essential to New York transit: ventilating the smoke and exhaust out of the Holland Tunnel. Owned and operated by public agencies, these structures perform well-documented and entirely non-secret functions. The same can’t be said of the last and most striking fake building Jordan introduces, a windowless Brutalist tower constructed in 1969 at 33 Thomas Street in Lower Manhattan. Owned by AT&T, it seems once to have been a telephone switching station, but has lately been rumored to be a “huge doomsday bunker.” That’s one theory, anyway, and the building’s sinister appearance could inspire countless others. Not that many locals are imagining them, obeying as they do one of the central commandments of Manhattan: don’t look up.

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The Oldest House in New York City: Meet the Wyckoff House (1652)

Architect Breaks Down Five of the Most Iconic New York City Apartments

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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Take a Tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House, the Mansion That Has Appeared in Blade Runner, Twin Peaks & Countless Hollywood Films

in Architecture, Film | October 15th, 2024

There are more than a few of us who’d enjoy the opportunity to live in a house that appears in Blade Runner; there are rather few of us who would value that opportunity at $23 million, the asking price given in the 2019 Architectural Digest video on Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1924 Ennis House above. Yet even beyond the Wright pedigree and the Blade Runner prestige, the house has also appeared in a host of other films, a screen résumé that begins nine years after its construction, when it made its screen debut as the mansion of a lady auto tycoon in Michael Curtiz’s Female.

In the decades that followed, it went on to provide settings for pictures — usually genre pictures — like The House on Haunted Hill, The Day of the Locust, The Replacement Killers, and Rush Hour. “The Ennis house apparently transcends space and time,” says the narration of Thom Andersen’s documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself. ” It could be fictionally located in Washington or Osaka. It could play an ancient villa, a nineteenth-century haunted house, a contemporary mansion, a twenty-first-century apartment building, or a twenty-sixth-century science lab where Klaus Kinski invents time travel.”

The Ennis House soon became visual shorthand for the home of wealthy, flamboyantly sinister B‑movie villains. That makes all the more notable its use in Blade Runner (a film that made several clichéd Los Angeles locations fresh again), which turns it into the tower where Deckard lives. Even the set-built interior of his apartment uses the same Mayan-motif tiles as the house’s famous concrete-block exterior. But the real rooms of the Ennis House have also received plenty of screen time, not just in the movies but also on television — and even television-within-television, in the case of Twin Peaks’ fictional soap opera Invitation to Love.

As the last of Wright’s Mayan Revival houses, the Ennis House marks the end of his attempt to break into southern California. The architect himself later admitted that it had exceeded reasonable scale: “That’s what you do, you know, after you get going, and get going so far, that you get out of bounds,” he said. “I think the Ennis House was out of bounds for a concrete-block house.” Like much of Wright’s work, it also proved better to photograph than inhabit; despite its most recent and ambitious renovation being completed just a few years earlier, it ended up selling for $5 million below asking price. I appreciate Blade Runner as much as anyone, but $18 million is still more than I’d pay for a 40-minute walk to the subway.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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Frank Lloyd Wright Thought About Making the Guggenheim Museum Pink

in Architecture, History, Museums | August 28th, 2024

Image via The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives

Seen today, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, seems to occupy several time periods at once, looking both modern and somehow ancient. The latter quality surely has to do with its bright white color, which we associate (especially in such an institutional context) with Greek and Roman statues. But just like those statues, the Guggenheim wasn’t actually white to begin with. “Fewer and fewer New Yorkers may recall that the museum, in a then-grimier city, used to be beige,” writes the New York Times’ Michael Kimmelman. “Robert Moses thought it looked like ‘jaundiced skin.’ ” Hence, presumably, the decision during a 1992 expansion to paint over the earthen hue of Wright’s choice.

Not that beige was the only contender in the design phase. Look at the archival drawings, Kimmelman writes, and you’ll find “a reminder that Wright had contemplated some pretty far-out colors — Cherokee red, orange, pink.”

The very thought of that last “leads down a rabbit hole of alternative New York history,” and if you’re curious to see what a pink Guggenheim might have looked like from the street, David Romero at Hooked on the Past has created a few digitally modified photos. The result hardly comes off as being in taste quite as poor as one might expect; in fact, it could have fit quite well into the Memphis-embracing nineteen-eighties, and even the postmodern nineties. The image above, showing the Guggenheim imagined in pink, comes from The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives.

But as it is, “closed off to the city around it, the building’s antiseptic, spanking-white facade, today is in keeping with the neighborhood.” That itself is in keeping with Wright’s ideas for transforming the American city, which he kept on putting forth until the end of his life. Attempting to solve “the problem of the inner city,” he conceived “fantastical megastructures for places like downtown Pittsburgh, Baghdad, and Madison, Wisconsin,” all of them “city-based but anti-urban projects, divorced from the streets.” Even working in the United States’ densest metropolis, Wright expressed a longing for the splendid isolation of the American countryside, where a man — at least as the lore has it — can paint his house any color he pleases.

via Messy Nessy/Hooked on the Past

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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An Architect Breaks Down the 5 Most Common Styles of College Campus

in Architecture, History | August 19th, 2024

Every now and again on social media, the observation circulates that Americans look back so fondly on their college years because never again do they get to live in a well-designed walkable community. The organization of college campuses does much to shape that experience, but so do the buildings themselves. “People often say that college is the best four years of your life,” says architect Michael Wyetzner in the new Architectural Digest video above, “but it was also likely that it was some of the best architecture you’ve been around as well.” He goes on to identify, explain, and contextualize the five building styles most commonly seen on American college campuses: colonial, Collegiate Gothic, modernism, brutalism, and postmodernism.

For examples of colonial campus architecture, look no further than the Ivy League, only one of whose schools was built after the Declaration of Independence — whose author, Thomas Jefferson, later designed the University of Virginia, drawing much inspiration (if not always first-hand) from ancient Greece and Rome. “Ironically, after the US declared independence, newer schools wanted to look older,” says Wyetzner, a desire that spawned the enduring Collegiate Gothic style. Constructed out of masonry and brick, its earliest buildings tend to pick and choose features of genuine Gothic architecture while mixing and matching them with the design languages of other times and places. More recent examples have been strenuously faithful by comparison, incorporating gargoyles and all.

When they arise, architectural styles tend to align themselves with the old or the new, and it was the latter that overtook college campuses after the Second World War. Take the Illinois Institute of Technology, which was designed whole by no less a Bauhaus-credentialed modernist than Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Modular, flat-roofed, and built with plenty of exposed brick, glass, and steel, its buildings proved influential enough that “nearly every high school in the United States that was built in the fifties and sixties” was designed in more or less the same way — albeit without the early utopian modernist spirit, which by that point had devolved into an industrial emphasis on “rationalism, functionality, and hygiene.”

After modernism came brutalism, the style of the least-beloved buildings on many a campus today. Coined by Le Corbusier, the style’s name comes from béton brut, or raw concrete, vast quantities of which were used to shape its hulking and, depending on how you feel about them, either dreary or awe-inspiring structures. The aesthetically promiscuous postmodernist buildings that began appearing in the sixties and multiplied in the seventies and eighties were more playful and historically aware — or all too playful and historically aware, as their detractors would put it. If you think back to your own college days, you can probably remember spending time in, or around, at least one example of each of these styles, because large US college campuses have, over time, become rich anthologies of architectural history. Would that most Americans could say the same about the places they live after graduation.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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Ancient Egyptian Pyramids May Have Been Built with Water: A New Study Explore the Use of Hydraulic Lifts

in Architecture, History, Technology | August 9th, 2024

Image by Charles Sharp, via Wikimedia Commons

The compelling but less-than-straightforward question of how the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids has inspired all manner of theory and speculation, grounded to varying degrees in physical reality. Sheer manpower must have played a large part, and it’s certainly not beyond the realm of possibility that various simple machines were involved. But in certain cases, could the machines have been less simple than we imagine today? Such is the proposal advanced in a paper recently published in PLOS ONE, “On the Possible Use of Hydraulic Force to Assist with Building the Step Pyramid of Saqqara.”

“The Step Pyramid was built around 2680 BCE, part of a funerary complex for the Third Dynasty pharaoh Djoser,” writes Ars Technica’s Jennifer Ouellette. “It’s located in the Saqqara necropolis and was the first pyramid to be built, almost a ‘proto-pyramid’ that originally stood some 205 feet high,” as against the more widely known Great Pyramid of Giza, which reached 481 feet.

According to the paper’s first author Xavier Landreau, head of the French research institute Paleotechnic, his team’s intensive research on “the watersheds to the west of the Saqqara plateau” led to “the discovery of “structures they believe constituted a dam, a water treatment facility, and a possible internal hydraulic lift system within the pyramid,” which could have been used to move heavy limestone.

Not every Egypt expert is convinced. As the University of Cambridge’s Judith Bunbury puts it to Ouellette, “there is evidence that Egyptians used other kinds of hydraulic technologies around that time, but there is no evidence of any kind of hydraulic lift system.” At Smithsonian.com, Will Sullivan rounds up other skeptical reactions, including that of University of Toronto archaeologist Oren Siegel, who “tells Science News that the proposed dam could not have held enough water from occasional rain to maintain a hydraulic system.” Clearly, the view of the Step Pyramid taken by Landreau and his researchers will require more concrete support, as it were, before being accepted into the mainstream. But it’s still a good deal more plausible than, say, the somehow persistent notion that members of an advanced spacefaring civilization came to give the ancient Egyptians a hand.

How Did They Build the Great Pyramid of Giza?: An Animated Introduction

What the Great Pyramids of Giza Originally Looked Like

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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Buckminster Fuller Tells the World “Everything He Knows” in a 42-Hour Lecture Series (1975)

in Architecture, Design, Science, Technology | July 23rd, 2024

History seems to have settled Buckminster Fuller’s reputation as a man ahead of his time. He inspires short, witty popular videos like YouTuber Joe Scott’s “The Man Who Saw The Future,” and the ongoing legacy of the Buckminster Fuller Institute (BFI), who note that “Fuller’s ideas and work continue to influence new generations of designers, architects, scientists and artists working to create a sustainable planet.”

Brilliant futurist though he was, Fuller might also be called the man who saw the present and the past—as much as a single individual could seemingly hold in their mind at once. He was “a man who is intensely interested in almost everything,” wrote Calvin Tomkins at The New Yorker in 1965, the year of Fuller’s 70th birthday. Fuller was as eager to pass on as much knowledge as he could collect in his long, productive career, spanning his early epiphanies in the 1920s to his final public talks in the early 80s.

“The somewhat overwhelming effect of a Fuller monologue,” wrote Tomkins, “is well known today in many parts of the world.” His lectures leapt from subject to subject, incorporating ancient and modern history, mathematics, linguistics, architecture, archaeology, philosophy, religion, and—in the example Tomkins gives—“irrefutable data on tides, prevailing winds,” and “boat design.” His discourses issue forth in wave after wave of information.

Fuller could talk at length and with authority about virtually anything—especially about himself and his own work, in his own special jargon of “unique Bucky-isms: special phrases, terminology, unusual sentence structures, etc.,” writes BFI. He may not always have been particularly humble, yet he spoke and wrote with a lack of prejudice and an open curiosity and that is the opposite of arrogance. Such is the impression we get of Fuller in the series of talks he recorded ten years after Tomkin’s New Yorker portrait.

Made in January of 1975, Buckminster Fuller: Everything I Know captured Fuller’s “entire life’s work” in 42 hours of “thinking out loud lectures [that examine] in depth all of Fuller’s major inventions and discoveries from the 1927 Dymaxion car, house, car and bathroom, through the Wichita House, geodesic domes, and tensegrity structures, as well as the contents of Synergetics. Autobiographical in parts, Fuller recounts his own personal history in the context of the history of science and industrialization.”

He begins, however, in his first lecture at the top, not with himself, but with his primary subject of concern: “all humanity,” a species that begins always in nakedness and ignorance and manages to figure it out “entirely by trial and error,” he says. Fuller marvels at the advances of “early Hindu and Chinese” civilizations—as he had at the Maori in Tomkin’s anecdote, who “had been among the first peoples to discover the principles of celestial navigation” and “found a way of sailing around the world… at least ten thousand years ago.”

The leap from ancient civilizations to “what is called World War I” is “just a little jump in information,” he says in his first lecture, but when Fuller comes to his own lifetime, he shows how many “little jumps” one human being could witness in a lifetime in the 20th century. “The year I was born Marconi invented the wireless,” says Fuller. “When I was 14 man did get to the North Pole, and when I was 16 he got to the South Pole.”

When Fuller was 7, “the Wright brothers suddenly flew,” he says, “and my memory is vivid enough of seven to remember that for about a year the engineering societies were trying to prove it was a hoax because it was absolutely impossible for man to do that.” What it showed young Bucky Fuller was that “impossibles are happening.” If Fuller was a visionary, he redefined the word—as a term for those with an expansive, infinitely curious vision of a possible world that already exists all around us.

See Fuller’s complete lecture series, Everything I Know, at the Internet Archive, and read edited transcripts of his talks at the Buckminster Fuller Institute.

Everything I Know will be added to our collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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