Aerosolgrafia: Otherworldly Urban Spray Art

Often depicting other-wordly scenes of pyramids silhouetted against planets in other galaxies, moonlit oceans in distant solar systems, comets and futuristic cities, the medium can trace its humble roots back to early 1980s Mexico City following the social and political repression of the 1960s and 1970s.  It has since exploded, like the supernovas in the paintings, into a global genre.

Take a stroll along Las Ramblas in Barcelona, to cite just one example, and watch street artists from across Europe (and beyond) create these sci-fi infused masterpieces, ironically from cheap, everyday materials and clever techniques that look far more simple than they really are!

Aerosolgrafia was devised by Ruben “Sadot” Fernandez in the La Zona Rosa district of Mexico City in 1982.  Fernandez first painted in public as an experiment, but due to the success and attention he received as a result, he soon moved his operation to the street.  His performances were accompanied by backing music which has become an important addition to the genre.  (The artist in the image above is not Sadot.)

Listening to classical music, rock and Aztec beats, Sadot thrilled and shocked audiences with his dramatic artwork, strong political views and metaphysical musings about the human condition.  Sadot died in 1988, unaware that his experimental creation would soon become a worldwide phenomena.

Take a wander through the more artistic areas of many major cities and you’ll soon discoverspray paint art (also known as Aerosolgrafia or Sadotgrafia).  Lurking beneath this relatively generic sounding title, and differing considerably to graffiti which appears on the sides of buildings, Aerosolgrafia takes the viewer on a surreal and mind-bending journey.

A Visual Exploration (and Brief History) of Abandoned Cinemas

Abandoned cinemas can be fascinating places, built to thrill large audiences, but left silent and forgotten.  Many were demolished after the advent of television and some adapted for other uses.  The most fascinating are those that linger on intact behind locked doors, frozen in the margins of existence.

Abandoned cinemas are popular among urban explorers, who are often avid photographers and consider dereliction an art form in itself.  Since many remaining cinemas have been converted for other uses (or even incorporated into more modern buildings), the ones that remain intact are the most coveted.  These picture palaces, frozen in time, were never designed to stand empty and are an ironic reminder of the golden age of Hollywood.  (Above is the former Coronet Cinema in London – full report here.)

Picture palaces (or movie palaces in the U.S.) boomed as places of public entertainment during the early 20th century.  Many were modernised theatres brought into the brave new world, and ranged in size from small local venues to grand city centre playhouses.  Some were unflatteringly known as “flea pits”, as grim social conditions in cities at that time rendered some cinemas rather dirty.

But generally, the term “palace” was used for a reason: large or small, picture palaces offered escapism and a touch of elegance to a public hardened by tough economic and social conditions and, to a large extent, war.  Three main architectural designs included the Classic style picture palace sporting period-revival architecture; the Atmospheric theatre, with an auditorium ceiling resembling the sky; and the famous Art Deco cinemas of the 1930s.

Today, their fading elegance tells the story of a time where, even if conditions were hard, there was pride and style.  Abandoned picture palaces have been spared from the fast-paced world outside, and to venture inside is like passing through a window in time.  Occasionally, an entire town around the cinema is abandoned.  The pictures below (right) show a former cinema in the city of Pripyat, Ukraine, which was evacuated after the Chernobyl disaster.

In some cases, projectors remain intact beneath years of dust and dirt, while film posters detailing the cinema’s final screening still grace the walls.  These buildings, fascinating in their own right, offer a brief glimpse into our social history, to a time when going to the cinema was about far more than simply watching a film.

Unfortunately, this is also a dusty corner of history that has been all too quickly forgotten by many city planners.  Many cinemas have been demolished to make way for modern redevelopment, while others wait in the doldrums, most likely for the wrecking ball.  Some have been imaginatively revamped to serve the demands of the burgeoning independent cinema market.  Others are in such a poor state of disrepair that even visionary developers are repelled by the cost of fixing them up.

Preservation-minded members of the public are often responsible for ensuring that old buildings, including cinemas, avoid demolition.  The Neo Classical Abbeydale Picture House (above) in Sheffield, opened in 1920, is a fine example.  Saved by the Friends of the Abbeydale Picture House, a huge amount of progress has been made in restoring the old picture palace on the long road to one day reopening to cinema audiences.

Beautiful Beach Art: A Brief History of Sand Sculptures

Sand sculpture is an art which dates back thousands of years.  In modern times, it is a popular form of entertainment on beaches across the world, with both children and adults participating.  Examples range from simple sand castles to complex sculptures.  Some schools of thought suggest sand sculpting was the first form of communication used by ancient man before the development of formal language, and may even predate the cave painting as a form of artistic expression.

Sand is a perfect medium for sculptors to create indulgent works of art in a fraction of the time it would take to sculpt stone or marble.  When protected from the elements, sand sculptures may last indefinitely, but a great part of their appeal is their short life span – complex and skillful works of art doomed to be washed away with the next high tide.

According to Sand Castle Central, the first people to make a profit from sand sculpting as an established art form came from Atlantic City in the late nineteenth century.  Spectators treading the boardwalk would throw tips to artists as they moulded the skulpted their sandy creations.  Some believe the first true sand sculpture was produced by Philip McCord in 1897, in the macabre form of a drowned mother and baby.

By the turn of the twentieth century, artists with a degree of business acumen had realised there was money to be made in sand sculpting and the genre began to take off.  It ultimately became so popular that the powers-that-be in Atlantic City labelled artists a nuisance for crowding the beaches with their designs.

A hurricane in 1944, which destroyed the sand dunes and tore up the boardwalk, finally gave them the opportunity they’d been looking for to outlaw sand sculpting along the boardwalk – a law that remains in force to this day!  In the present time, the popularity of the genre means many seaside towns hold competitions (seen in Holger Zscheyge’s pictures above, with sculptures of characters from Han’s Christian Andersen’s fairy tales).  Want to see more?  Check out The Design Mag’s article featuring 20 of the most intricate sand sculpture designs imaginable.

Brutalism: Love It or Hate It

Love them or hate them, brutalist buildings are certainly striking, utilising concrete in gaunt, angular geometry.  The use of concrete is explained by the need to rebuild the war-torn European landscape swiftly after World War Two, at minimal cost to its economically crushed nation states.  But whatever its functional use, brutalism arguably became as much a philosophy as a style.  Furthermore, its representation of socialist utopian ideology was reflected in the left-wing zeal of many who designed and commissioned it.

The need to replace bombed-out homes, government buildings and shopping centres also gave way to the further demolition of many grand buildings from the 1950s onwards that bad been untouched by the war.  This was particularly evident in the more industrialised northern cities, supporting the argument of brutalism as political philosophy as well as architectural discipline.  One important example of “Brutalist Britain” – Park Hill flats – has since been earmarked as ahistoric building.

Initially, these “cities in the sky”, as they were referred to, were a welcomed departure for those who had previously lived in squalid Victorian slums.  Great pains were taken to re-home communities together, with neighbours remaining neighbours and many working folk having hot water and indoor toilets for the first time.  Initially, these huge blocks of flats were well received.

But critics accuse brutalism of disregarding the social, historic, and architectural environment of its surroundings, making the introduction of such structures in existing developed areas appear out of place and alien. The failure of positive communities to form early on in some Brutalist structures led to the combined unpopularity of both the ideology and the architectural style.  In addition, many of the buildings constructed in this style lacked the community-serving features of their forefather’s vision, morphing into claustrophobic, crime-ridden tenements.

But whatever your personal philosophy – be it capitalist, socialist or other – the ability of the powers-that-be to project their own philosophical and idiological tenets onto the architecture of the day is astounding.  From Victorian ego to socialist utopia, the story of our times is written on the buildings we live and work in everyday.

Check out these great picture of brutalist architecture in Perth, Australia.  (All images on this page link to their sources.)

Brutalist architecture gained momentum in the United Kingdom from 1950s to the mid 1970s, emerging from the modernist architectural movement. The English architects Alison and Peter Smithson coined the term in 1954, from the French béton brut, or “raw concrete”.  The term established itself in the public lexicon after British architectural critic Reyner Banham used it in the title of his 1966 book, “The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic?”, following which, it became an umbrella term for a variety of architectural disciplines.  (Click photos for image sources.)

Titanic Yard: The World’s Most Famous (Abandoned) Slipway

The Harland and Wolff shipyard where Titanic was built remains active in a reduced capacity.  When the Olympic class liners – Olympic, Titanic and Britannic – were built for the White Star Line, the dream was to rival Cunard’s great liners of the day (Lusitania and Mauretania, the latter holding the Blue Ribband for 22 years from 1907).  While the Cunarders pushed for speed, White Star went for unrivaled luxury, never more so that with Titanic.

Titanic and Olympic were built side-by-side adjacent to the former Drawing Office, which, along with the old Harland and Wolff offices, are the only buildings left from 1912.  Though rundown, the Drawing Office remains a beautiful building which reflects the industrial pride of the age.  It has changed little since the Titanic’s day, and it’s even rumoured that priceless blueprints of the famous ships might have been stored in the otherwise abandoned building until recently.

Several decades ago, the shipyard’s main operations were moved to the east side of Queen’s Island in central Belfast, which was deemed more suited to the needs of modern ship building.  As a result, the famous slipways, alongside the Drawing Office, now stand on an abandoned and largely empty strip of land – a far cry from the days when 30,000 men worked at the yard.

But like other cities gripped by modern redevelopment, this lonely corner of Belfast is set to house an exciting new district known as the Titanic Quarter.  The fully restored slipways and former Drawing Office will form the centre of the scheme, with RMS Nomadic – the last vessel built for White Star Line – preserved alongside.  When it’s complete, the eponymous Titanic Quarter will be a fitting tribute to the iconic liner and the men that built her.

RMS Titanic is without doubt the most famous ocean liner in history and most of us know how the story ended in 1912 – at the bottom of the North Atlantic, several hundred nautical miles southeast of Newfoundland.  But the story of the Olympic class liner’s birth is less well known, with Titanic‘s life starting out on a now sorry-looking concrete slipway in a Belfast shipyard.

Oxford Malmaison: From Dingy Medieval Prison to Luxury Hotel

This former prison must be one of the most imaginative British hotel conversions – and certainly the first to be developed from Her Majesty’s Pleasure!  Oxford Castle, now a Malmaison, was originally built as a Norman fortress in 1071 during the reign of William the Conqueror.  It was later extended during the Victorian Gothic period and served as HM Prison Oxford from 1888 until 1996.

During and after that time, Oxford Castle featured in the Italian Job, starring Michael Caine and Noel Coward, and later Spy Game with Robert Redford and Brad Pitt.  That it stood-in for a sinister Chinese penitentiary in Spy Game shows what a miserable, dark and hopeless place it was.  With its castellated features and towers adorned with arrow slits, this building was designed as the antithesis of luxury.  But in a visionary move, it has been transformed into the Oxford Malmaison, a luxury hotel which skillfully embraces the atmosphere of its past life.

Suffering has given way to recreation in the old cell block (A Wing), which has been fully converted into hotel rooms, complete with a deep red carpet along the old walkways.  Beyond the original cell doors are stylish bedrooms and bathrooms.  With three cells knocked into one (two forming the bedroom and one the bathroom) and decorated in deep hues of crimson and purple, it’s safe to say these rooms are a lot more comfortable than their former guests could ever have imagined.

The 94 bedrooms are distributed across A Wing, C Wing (former hospital, and probably the last place prisoners wanted to end up), the Governor’s House, New Road Wing and the Houses of Corrections.  The latter two are by far the most polarised of all, with New Road Wing offering newly built, traditional accomodation, while the Houses of Corrections offers visitors the chance to sleep in the silent solitary confinement cells – with a splash of luxury added of course.

The once dank chambers and passages deep in the bowels of the prison are now home to a state of the art gymnasium.  The Visitors Room upstairs is a atmospheric exhibition of dark velvet sofas, Black Watch carpet, a black billiard table, iron-barred windows and a whisky/cognac bar. With hundreds of candles on every surface, the gothic-styling makes it easily the most fun room in the building, and more akin to a vampire flick than a luxury hotel.

The photos below illustrate a more sinister side of the Oxford Malmaison, which had changed little since the days of Oxford Castle, torture and terror.  Despite its new found luxury, these shadowy areas of the building still exist today…

Oxford Castle is supposedly one of the most haunted buildings in Britain.  Folklore says it was cursed following the Black Assize of 1577, when hundreds perished within weeks.  For the more “spirited” among you, there will be a ghost hunt night at the Malmaison on Saturday, 10 October –check it out!

Deserted Wartime Airfields and Bases of the UK

The UK is littered with deserted air bases, lonely yet poignant reminders of a time when Europe was torn apart by war.  Most surviving airfields were heavy bomber bases hurriedly constructed amid the quiet British countryside during World War Two, often utilising three large runways in an “A-frame” layout.  Many were returned to agricultural use after the war.  But even today their giant forms can still be seen from the air, hiding in the long grass and adopting a far more serene atmosphere than was ever present in their active days.

Hundreds of airfields were built across Britain before and after the outbreak of war.  The latest generation of heavy bombers required extensive runways, hangars, dispersal facilities and support buildings.  Many abandoned airfields are visible on Google Earth, especially in southern and eastern counties.  Brunton Airfield (above) in Northumberland, a former wartime training base, had no large hangars but the runways and hard standings are well preserved, in addition to bomb shelters and several abandoned buildings.

Some former bases – like the Great West Aerodrome (now Heathrow) grew into massive international airports.  Others remain military bases, light airfields or industrial estates, with companies taking advantage of vast empty hangars.  RAF Winthorpe (above right) is now part of the Newark Showground and retains a private air museum.  Syerston airfield (above), is especially well preserved.

For the vast majority, however, 1945 saw wartime airfields returned to the farmers and landowners they were purchased from.  The images above reveal only runway outlines, while dispersal areas are slowly reclaimed.  Despite their slow disappearance, these modern ruins remain a treasure trove of recent history, with crumbling control towers and other abandoned buildings betraying their former purpose.