The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed
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The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed
Ruins have inspired similar kinds of objectification for millennia. For many, they’re visual objects, things to romanticize, fetishize and look at from afar. It’s a simplified way of seeing that lends itself to extraction more than engagement, a kind “over-aestheticization of past eras." Henri Lefebvre explored the phenomenon in 1968, writing ... See more
Johanna Hoffman • Futures From Ruins
Cities are amalgams of buildings and people. They are inhabited settings from which daily rituals — the mundane and the extraordinary, the random and the staged — derive their validity. In the urban artifact and its mutations are condensed continuities of time and place. The city is the ultimate memorial of our struggles and glories: it is where th
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