Some stunning images by photographer Catherine Hyland from her China Series and Wonderland. Located outside Bejing, Wonderland was designed to be the largest theme park in Asia. Construction began in 1998, but was halted because its developers and the local farmers could not come to an agreement on the proposed 120 acres of land required to fulfill such a grandiose vision. What’s left is one of those seemingly post apocalyptic landscapes that photograph so well.

Her other photographs from China are equally as impressive, featuring stark, urban lanscapes. The images of giant, towering apartment blocks and crowded alleys, cast in the perpetual daylight of a vast metropolis, have an otherworldly quality to them. You can see more from both series after the jump.

Read the rest of Catherine Hyland’s Images From China

Post tags: Architecture, Art, Photography

When I was a child, I had an ongoing and masochistic addiction to scale models. That is to say, that while I enjoyed miniatures, mostly of the military variety, I mainly enjoyed them in the idealized, finished versions in my head. I did not, however, take much joy in the harsh, time intensive reality of constructing a 1/48th scale German Tiger tank — a reality fraught with frustration and toxic substances. It was a truly volatile combination, I assure you, and usually resulted in my shaking with impotent rage over a pile of badly painted plastic, it’s surfaces ravaged by the effects of Testors Model Cement.

Despite a complete lack of ability (which I have learned to accept) I still find myself fascinated with diminutive, scale reproductions of places and objects. Randy Hage does not work in the area of war that so preoccupied the violent imagination of my youth, but his work is astounding. Focusing on New York City storefronts he recreates everything from the signage and shutters to the graffiti that adorns their facades and various bits of detritus inside and out. The level of detail here requires a patience that I never possessed or, no doubt, ever will.

Read the rest of New York In Miniature

Post tags: Architecture, Art, Sculpture

Rawr.

Waller’s entire Flickr stream is rusty and scrumptious. He also apparently has an extensive personal website launching sometime this month.

Post tags: Architecture, Industrial, Photography, Uber, Ye Olde

“Giai-Miniet is what’d you get if Kafka had designed Barbie dreamhouses.” (via)

Dreamhouses?  Perhaps more like maisons de cauchemars.   Marc Giai-Miniet‘s painstakingly detailed, mixed-media shadow-box installations are  reminiscent of  a vaguely ominous, fading nightmare; a slumbering visitation to a childhood home,  dilapidated and abandoned,  darkened corridors permeated with a surreal atmosphere of dusty déjà-vu.

Ominous,  fantastical, and yet on some level that barely registers  – these ‘boxes’ are familiar and comforting in a way unique to those corners in which we have previously peeked and will explore once more when we are slumbering and our subconscious holds sway.  Again and again we will wind through our own personal, chaotic and connected dreamhouses –  and M. Giai-Miniet appears to know  this full well.

Born in 1946 in Trappes, France, Marc Giai-Miniet studied at the l’Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts, a distinguished national school of Fine Arts in Paris, France. He is currently the Secretary of the Salon de Mai, a gallery founded in Paris with the purpose of encouraging and exhibiting younger abstract artists.

Marc Giai-Miniet, photo by Sylvie Giai-Miniet

According to Giai-Miniet (though run through Google translator) :

“The ‘boxes’ have appeared relatively late in my work as a painter, as a natural and necessary, and have become an inseparable part, a double play. Reminiscent of my teenage desire to do theater, and perhaps even the deepest yet my memories of childhood games pitched battles between miniature electric trains and installed under the table in the family dining room.  These “boxes”, from their manufacture in the years 92 – 93, repeated the themes of my paintings: the brainwashing scene, visit the mummies, stirring transfusions and various larvae.  Small characters were cardboard cut out of the ballet and existential irony of my painting.  Over work, buildings are becoming increasingly large, the characters have disappeared and books, whole libraries have taken place in conjunction with laboratories, storage rooms, waiting or interrogation cells, stairs, corridors, furnaces, sewers or outbound docks … I understand that the books burned, and figured, were painful metaphor of human life, both mind and matter and inexorably doomed to their fate. . For not only the books can be burned but sometimes transmitted through knowledge, they we “burn”, we transform, we accompany or lead us astray … in a vision became ‘existential.’ ”

Grande Boîte Blanche, 130 x 130 x 11

Read the rest of Marc Giai-Miniet’s Existential Dreamhouses

Post tags: Architecture, Art, Design, Vive la France

Flickr user turezure recently snapped this menacing picture of the Humax Pavilion in Shibuya. Doesn’t it look like it’s just sitting there, biding its time, waiting to bust a move, Megatron-style?

The Pavilion was designed in 1991 by Hiroyuki Wakabayashi, who also designed the Nankai 50000 train series, seen above. The design theme for the train was Outdated Future, and indeed, there is a suspicious resemblance to the 1978  Cylon Centurian model.Wakabayashi’s other works include the breathtaking Uji Station and Maruto Bldg. No.17 in Kyoto. [via Battling Pink Robots]

Post tags: Architecture, End of the World, Future, Industrial, Japan, Robots, Sci-fi, Uber

Animaris Geneticus Parvus

Jansen’s kinetic creatures have evolved quite a bit since then, and as of this month, the wonderful 3D printing company Shapeways has made a small version of Animaris Geneticus Parvus, available for purchase through their site.

These wee baby Beests, born from one of Jansen’s original behemoth windwalker designs, are “printed already assembled and [work] right after birth from the machine! No other production method can do this!” (Is 3D printing technology trippy, or what?) Apparently there are more Beests in development as well.

Watch and squee:

Post tags: Architecture, Art, Design, Sculpture, Shopping, Technology