I’ve picked the most interesting selection I could find from the worlds largest gatherings. The largest anti war protest was in Rome in 2003, against the Iraq war, where more people gathered than for the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, the Haj. In fact, Sao Paulo’s Gay Pride festival is roughly the same size as the Haj, with 2.5 million attending in 2006 and the Haj isn’t even necessarily the largest gathering in Islam, with 14 million people attending the Shiite Arab’een in Iraq. Religious ceremonies dominate, with a Papal mass in Ireland in 1979 resulting in a third of the population (1.25M) gathering in a single field, but paling in comparison with religious gatherings in India, including the Kumbh Mela which drew an unbelievable 60-70 million people over 45 days in 2007, making it the largest gathering in history.
A new Oobject chart almost every day, below are the most recent
Almost everything there is to know about modernism is contained in a single room slice of a curtain wall tower dropped into the Illinois countryside. The Farnsworth house was a project designed and built by Mies van der Rohe 60 years ago, undeserving of its patron’s name, who wrongfully sued and which still seems to win prizes and be declared as innovative when architects consciously or unconsciously copy it today. Here are a dozen examples to demonstrate it.
Old shoes doesn’t sound interesting but I managed to find some fine examples, from the incredibly short and tall Venetian Chopines which had 2 foot soles for courtesans to wade through sewage lined streets to the opposite shaped long skinny medieval Poulaines which had toes stuffed with moss. Interestingly the worlds oldest shoes come from the New World, or Oregon to be exact.<p /><p />My personal favorite are the Roman shoes from the time of Constantine, whose style show just show eastern or to our eyes, Arabic, the Empire would have felt at that time.
<p />There are some design classics here, from the John Russell Barlow, French Opinel and Laguiole, Japanese Higo no Kami and of course the Swiss Army knife, where we show the original 19th C version and the one actually issued to Swiss soldiers today. We have included a couple of multi-tool curiosities such as a surgeons knife with gruesome implements such as an abscess lance and a Veterinary blood letting pocket knife which we found in our attic. To demonstrate the history of pocket knives which go back to 500BC we have selected a modern looking Viking pocket knife and an amazing Roman Soldiers multi-tool which predates the Swiss Army by nearly 2000 years.
The Wienermobile is quintessentially American: pure, whimsical, 4-wheeled fun in the name of capitalism. It’s history goes rather like most design classics form Apple computers to the Coke bottle: 2 custom built homebrew prototypes (1936-40), a defining form (1958), a refinement of this to produce a classic, by a famous designer (1958, Brooks Stevens), variations on the same theme till now, with a novelty version in 2008.
Yesterday we managed to get into CERN and do some exploring. Our mission? Not to go to the Giant LHC experiments, such as Atlas, but to root around the campus itself, find the exact place where Tim Berners Lee invented the web, marked by a small plaque, and photograph it, license-free, since there seem to be no images of it that we could find. We went through several doors marked ‘radiation’, were told to leave one place, because ‘the beam was on’, saw the Grid data center and rooms with blackboards covered in equations – but we found it.
The history of photography starts at the human scale, with the first picture of a face in 1838 and moves in both directions, culminating in the WMAP cosmic background radiation image in 2003 and the first complete image of a molecule in 2009.
The Olympics is to the World Cup as the Eurovision Song Contest is to Saturday Night at the Apollo. An event created by top down bureaucracy rather than grass roots passion. This is sometimes reflected in its architecture, which has a far worse track record in terms of long term use. Many Olympic sites fail to live up to their aims at sustainability or regeneration and instead lie in ruin or have since been demolished.<p /><p />After the recent scandal about the horrendous state of the recent Athens Olympics’ facilities we decided to look for more examples. Here is what we found. Some are the products of politics and war rather than over-ambitious folly, but it seems that about half of the Olympic sites are gone or wrecked.
There’s not much information about helter skelters on Wikipedia, so we decided to find out more:<p /><p />Despite becoming a recent fixture at Victorian themed winter fairs and a perennial one at summer funfairs, the helter skelter is clearly modeled on a Victorian lighthouse, and so is originally and end of pier attraction. We found a picture from 1907 where the helter skelter is clearly labeled as a one and we even found one labeled a helter skelter at Coney Island, so perhaps its a term that did carry to the US. The architectural style is even referenced in a spire at Disneyland, the capital of the funfair world.<p /><p />An almost exclusively British term for a spiral fairground slide, helter skelter is known in the US from songs by the Beatles, Oasis and Genesis, and from the association with Charles Manson. In the UK its one of those things that every child can recognize, but which when you really look at, becomes strangely unfamiliar and weird – an architectural naked lunch. The taste of this naked lunch combines hints of jousting, medieval pageants and overtones of Paganesque Englishness, from Morris Dancing to the Wicker Man. Its principal flavor, however, is of the English seaside: damp and Victorian.
Kowloon Walled City (KWC) was a 10-16 storey monolithic 6.5 acre city block in the flight path of the old Hong Kong airport, that housed somewhere between 35,000 and 50,000 people when it was finally demolished in 1993. 30 times the density of Manhattan with no streets and little daylight, it was a rat infested, cockroach ridden filthy labyrinth. KWC was a no-man’s land that fell neither under British Jurisdiction nor Chinese, where Hong Kong’s appetites for the 3 vices: prostitution drugs and gambling could be satiated, but where ordinary families lived alongside nearly 800 factories and shops. It had 161 unregulated doctors and dentists along with food producers from whole pig roasters to the suppliers of most of Hong Kong’s fish balls. Most of the people that lived in KWC never left.<p />Dozens of sites have covered KWC before (as have we), but its such a strange and unusual Oobject that we’ve trawled through hundreds of sites to try a pull together a list of our favorite images and links which succinctly describe it.
Terry Gilliam was perhaps first to notice the architectural qualities of power station cooling towers, setting the torture scene from Brazil inside the base of one in South London. Their sheer size, monolithic masonry walls and gentle curves make them like enormous castle towers. Particularly special are the ones that have open structures at the base, making them appear to float impossibly, and the view from the inside is what we have focused on in this list. Accidental architectural masterpieces indeed.
It seems that for maximum impact, upside down houses need to be cartoon versions of what a building should be, pitched roof, symmetric, central door.
The fact that if a nuke is used to extinguish the Deepwater Horizon leak, it will be the 6th time this has been done speaks volumes of how extreme the technological requirements of our fossil fuel dependence.<p /><p />Oil and gas require a gargantuan infrastructure of superlative technology that permeates every level from extraction to dispatch, from hellish looking oil drill bits, drilling rigs that are the size of cities, storage tanks the size of cathedrals and pipelines that rival the Great Wall of China.<p />The extreme environments that this technology operates in require unsinkable boats, skyscraper sized structures in some of the world’s least inhabited places and firefighting tools that include large bombs and fighter jet engines.<p />Pause for a moment and reflect on just how unusual these objects are.
Skyscrapers produce great charts because they are long and skinny like the columns in a bar graph. They combine the nerdy attraction of big buildings with infographics and therefore at Oobject we are obsessed with them. Here we have collected a bunch of skyscraper style size comparisons, and not just of buildings, so that you can compare the empire state building with the Titanic, a deep salt mine, space rockets and a neutrino telescope under the antarctic ice.
<p />Whenever you see a picture of the ancient pyramids of Giza the view behind is of endless sweeping sands rather than the smog heavy skyline of downtown Cairo. Here we’ve collected some of the least flattering and depressing views of famous monuments or places, from the Stonhenge car park to the Starbucks in the Louvre. There are a couple of unlikely ones such as the Acropolis which in some ways is depressing from every angle, having been destroyed while used as a munitions dump, or the more preserved version of Trajan’s column which is hidden away in a London museum, with a janitor’s closet in its base. Vote for the worst.
Incredibly, automatic car parks have been around since the 30s culminating in the incredibly futuristic VW Autostadt. Here are some of our favorites.
From Tampa to Dublin to Alicante and Dubai empty condos and villas that were never home to anyone, litter the landscape as a sterile reminder of a party that never was. But perhaps the biggest housing bubble of them all has just been popped – deliberately by the Chinese government who saw that Shanghai and Beijing real estate increases were unsustainable. Over the last month, Beijing housing prices have fallen at a unbelievable 377% annualized rate, possibly heralding part III of the Great recession following the US banking collapse and European sovereign debt crisis.<p />The most dramatic pictures in this collection are of the empty Chinese city of Ordos, which is a piece of government led, speculative development on a scale unimaginable elsewhere. An entire city waiting to be occupied. Ordos is not a failure yet, but if it is, it will be emblematic.
Teasmades possibly represent the nadir of industrial design, combining Rube Goldberg, or more appropriately, Heath Robinsonesque unnecessary mechanic complexity with technological denialist styling and often capped off with horrid little lampshades.<p /><p />Appropriately enough, these diabolical devices were pioneered by a brand called Goblin, and were rendered obsolete after unfashionable UK Prime Minister, John Major’s wife Norma confessed to having one in Downing St. Sadly, someone is making them again.
It seems like oil cleanup includes some of the most basic and advanced technologies, from literally hoovering it up, to skimming it and burning it, using oil eating bacteria and swarms of Roomba style oil cleanup bots.
The same week that former underdog, Apple became larger than Microsoft, the company that it infamously portrayed as Orwellian in commercials for the launch of the Macintosh, Jon Stewart suggested that it behaved like Big Brother towards Gizmodo, with police searches and assorted high drama. All over a leaked iPhone prototype.<p /><p />This roundup of a dozen examples shows that gadget leaks are commonplace, except for Apple (although even the iPhone prototype that is causing such brouhaha appears to have been leaked in Shenzhen). This secrecy is partly understandable as few companies innovate in terms of design the way Apple does. Most of the example below are either highly derivative of Apple designs (Dell tablet, Motorola Tao etc.) or non-groundbreaking (Lenovo T400s, Blavkberry Pearl 9110).<p /><p />Perhaps Apple should take a leaf out of Microsoft’s book, going forward. Instead of trying to keep things secret, Microsoft are rumored to have a strategy of creating multiple fake decoys, leaving it impossible to know whether a leak is the final version.
The image of former Rodeo performer Slim Pickens riding a nuclear bomb as he would a wild horse in the 1964 movie, Dr Strangelove, is a cinema classic, but it has a long history.<p /><p />For decades, people have posed, sitting astride dangerous bombs. It’s a strange thing to do, but extends, sense-of-irony free to kids toys, like the image shown here of a hobby horse bomb.<p /><p />Most people think that the image of Pickens riding the bomb comes from WWII pinup straddled bombs on airplane nose cone art, however, the Comiccoverage blog has put together a great list of comic book covers, showing that they were using this iconic image before the US entered WWII, most notably with Captain Marvel in 1940.
The idea of uniform is that you all look the same, yet there is an ornathological variety of ceremonial military parade outfits, with as many brightly colored feathers. The images chosen here range from the Italian Carabinieri who are allowed to wear aftershave and sport outfits designed by Valentino, the French Foreign Legion’s sappers who have to have long beards and wear leather aprons and carry axes, 7 Dwarves style, Iranian police who look like criminals, Russian women soldiers who wear mini skirts, now that Putin has reinstated the infamous May Day parades and Greek soldiers whose traditional unfrms are similarly feminine. We added the UK Queen’s husband at the trooping of the color. Wearing a 3 foot high bearskin hat may be a familiar image, but its’ no less weird.
American monuments hit the sweet spot between being young enough to have been photographed while being built, but old enough that few people can remember them not being there. Because of this an entire legacy can be viewed as it was while it was being created. From the D.C Capitol building, which ironically, slaves helped to build during the Civil War, to the Statue of Liberty, which was built in France, the forgotten train Grand Central train shed, the Empire State building when it was two storeys high or the Hollywood sign before it read Hollywood, here are our picks of America’s most famous monuments while they were being built.
Something went very wrong in the 18th century. A 100 year long attempt to wear the most ridiculous artificial hair involved dandies sporting macaroni and culminated in Marie Antoinette’s utterly mad ship wig. The last vestige of this is the bizarre tradition of British and colonial judges who continue to don 300 year old clothing in a profession which is supposed to be rational.
New York, a city which is defined by its skyline, existed as a metropolis well before skyscrapers and has gone through several distinct architectural phases.<p />I’ve picked this collection to demonstrate these, from the earliest known photograph of New York in the 1840s which shows the Upper West side as rural, to the Brooklyn Bridge dominated skyline of the mid nineteenth century.<p />A postcard from 1904 is labeled ‘New York Skyscrapers’ but shows very few of what we would call skyscrapers today, consisting of the early steel framed buildings epitomized by the flatiron.<p />Between the 1920’s and 1930’s the machine age skyscraper city of masonry-clad, art deco splendor grows at breakneck speed and remains similar in texture until the emergence of curtain wall, glass and steel buildings in the 1950s, after the completion of the Seagram in 1958.<p />The 1973 opening of the iconic World Trade Center coincides the building of other inferior block like buildings along the periphery of lower Manhattan, notably at Water St., which destroy the hill like collection of spires.
Since Le Corbusier, celebrity architects realized that they needed to get a look, to be an icon. But being anal retentive this often resulted in the slightly reticent gesture of sculptural eyewear, like a miniature building hanging on your nose. Philip Johnson had Cartier make a copy of Corbusier’s glasses for himself in 1934, thus cementing the trend for architects in architect glasses.<p /><p />Here are a dozen famous architects and their specs, with a description below of what their glasses say about them.
Many of today’s most notable collections, such as the British Museum started off as wunderkammer, or cabinets of curiosities. These started in the 16th century are were somewhere between Ripley’s Believe it or Not and the Smithsonian, eclectic collections of man-made and natural objects of wonder. These were either rooms or spectacular intricate cabinets.<p /><p />Today there are deliberate attempts to re-create the very particular feel of these collections, such as at the museum of Jurassic Technology in L.A, which combines the real and fake or the British Museum’s Enlightenment Gallery.
Collectors are my favorite type of people, so when I started this list I missed the obvious by focusing on finding pictures of strange collections. It became clear that the most interesting images were where the collectors themselves were showing off what they collected. The items here range from what would be an unremarkable subject – stamps, were it not for the fact that the wold’s top bond trader collects them to an army general’s collection of tattooed, severed heads.
Being slightly anally retentive about this list, I’ve limited it to pictures of the actual typewriters that were used by 9 famous writers, not just examples of the same model. Included are James Bond creator Ian Flemming’s gold plated portable that would have been worthy of Goldfinger himself, and the typewriter used by Apple Mac user, Douglas Adams, to write the Hitchhikers Guide, before there were such things as Apple Macs.
As technology companies oozed slowly from San Jose to San Francisco, the architecture morphed from purely university campus, to a hybrid between this and a South of Market warehouse, complete with loft living accoutrements such as foosball tables. The new Facebook HQ is a perfect example of this, looking something like a Wholefoods, whereas Google looks more like the place full of plastic balls that you leave your kids when shopping at IKEA.
Ever since the strapline ‘Nicholas Parsons is the neo-opiate of the People’ graced a concrete roundabout in Harrow in the 1970s, I’ve been a fan of sardonic or facetious textual graffiti. Sadly, my all-time favorite, the simultaneously mindless and profound spaying of the word ‘wanker’ above a bronze statue of Freud in London’s Swiss cottage, couldn’t be found, however here are 15 choice favorites from the many collections of these around the web.
Unlike the obvious candidates, such as the Flatiron or various svelte skyscrapers, these buildings aren’t famous pieces of architecture, but accidental vernacular gems which seemingly defy gravity.
The view straight down from a bridge tower, a skyscraper creates a perspective which we looks surprising. Cars look like models and the base of something like the Eiffel tower looks tiny and distorted. That and the fact that these views are absolutely terrifying. Here are a dozen of our favorites.
A three year challenge to recreate the equipment used by Mallory and Irvine in their ill fated attempt to climb Everest in the 1920s revealed that they were adequately clothed, wearing an unbelievable number of layers, as shown in this list. Today, the number of layers has changed as have nearly all the materials used for Everest kit, with high tech, breathable yet waterproof fabrics and lightweight alloys. The extreme requirements of Everest are a good way to demonstrate technology and design innovation through history.
Nothing dates like the future and nothing is more symbolic of gadgety futurism than a modern kitchen. Included here is a design lab from a trendy Michelin starred restaurant that makes endless courses of microscopic over-engineered food, a trend which we feel is now obsolete.
Creating the illusion that a staircase is floating in mid air has become a recent design trend. It can be achieved using a glass balustrade and hidden bolts, hanging the treads from above, cantilevering the stairs from a concealed beam or by using the structure of a spiral shape to make the entire staircase self supporting. Here are some of our favorites.
Just other industries from computer software to houses, ship building has been modularized with giant prefabricated modules being constructed and then assembled like Lego. The end result is that shipping is entirely modularized from construction to containerization of cargo. Our favorite example here shows how an existing cruise liner can be cut in half and a new module inserted, to make a stretch version (for proms and bachelorette parties, perhaps?)
Trainspotting declared the worst toilet in Scotland, something which presumably takes some beating. Here are some of the worst toilets, kitchens, living rooms and bedrooms.
Just like the Empire State building the Burj Dubai is opening after a crash, only it is twice the height. Here are our picks for a visual record of the construction of the world’s tallest structure, from its 200 foot deep foundation to a video from the crows nest at the top of it’s spire.
They don't make cheesy electronic board games like they used to. You might remember playing Clue with your friends in your adolescence, but these 12 retro electronic board games are under the radar and long forgotten. Whether it's racing against the clock to overcome the Omega Virus or shopping in the clearance section in Mall Madness, these games are sure to bring back some fond memories.
Perhaps not just a video game cliche but a movie, TV series and theme park one too. Ever since WWII’s pacific theater included remote jungle areas in the tropics, the image of a crashed plane, rotting in the jungle, covered in vines and terrifying critters has become an archetypal image of remoteness and abandonment.<p /><p />Anyway – we’ve dug out a list of real life planes hidden in jungles, including one fake one for good measure.
In the niche world of extreme car hi-fi, which seems to straddle both red neck and hip hop, various measures of audio insanity are used: how much the roof flexes or the windshield warps, to the point of shattering; or how much water can be thrown into the air from containers on the roof.<p /><p />My personal favorite, however, is the drive up Seven-11 remote window shake.
Despite the appearance of permanence that historic buildings create, many if not most of the worlds famous cities have been almost entirely destroyed either by war, property speculation or Ayn Randian architects. They have been rebuilt, either as replicas (Warsaw) or even in the image of the culture that destroyed them (Hiroshima). Here are images where either we or others have matched up locations for incredible before and after shots.
Architect of the Lego House built for Top Gear presenter James May, Barnaby Gunning, has sent us pictures of the construction progress so far. We’ll post more as we get them.
Some people take paintball very seriously, and the boundary between harmless fun, unintentional irony and plain creepy is blurred. Here are paintball teams that look like outright militia, and some are. They include a church team in full combat gear a German group that re-enacts LAPD swat team offensives, and three very disturbing teams: a Japanese paintball re-enactment of the Yugoslav civil war complete with Serbian militia uniforms; an US vs Iraq shoot em up in Jordan and a sinister third Reich Team with Eagle T-shirts. Vote them down.
The Saturn V rocket was something the size of a skyscraper could survive being thrown into orbit, undamaged. 40 years after the Saturn V powered trip to the moon, nothing as powerful exists today.<p /><p />Years ago Airfix made a model of a Saturn V which I lusted after as a kid and Revell have now re-released their original 1:96 version and a 1:144 one which is the same size as the old Airfix. We tracked down the best Saturn V models that you can buy or have been built, culminating in auto repair man, Steve Eves’ completely insane home built 40 foot high, 1600 pound monster which he actually launched, in April.
Being tall and thin means that one of the common but nevertheless unusual uses of old silos is to house climbing walls. Old silo structures, from underground missile silos to towering grain stores are often interesting pieces of industrial archaeology and make unconventional architectural conversions.
The interior design of Sweden’s giant nuclear bunker.<p /><p />In the mid seventies, when ABBA topped the music charts, Sweden was just putting the finishing touches on its giant civil defense nuclear bunker outside Stockholm, called the Elephant.<p /><p />Traditionally neutral Sweden made this a priority due to its close proximity with Russia, but the Elephant is unlike any other cold war bunker – because it looks rather like an underground IKEA.<p /><p />In order to prevent claustrophobia, fake horizons were painted on the walls of recreation areas, with green below and blue above, representing sky and grass. Even lamps were painted yellow to represent the sun. In the business parts of the bunker, such as briefing rooms and control rooms, shades of gray relieved by red were used.<p /><p />Unlike other bunkers which used the same tactics, with murals of mountain or countryside scenes the obsessive schematic nature of the Swedish bunker is like a children’s bedroom in hell.<p /><p />Urban explorers have visited and documented the Elephant bunker. Here are our picks from a wonderful set by Bill_R on Flickr. Click through any of the pictures for more.
A perfect example of nothing dating like the future, the garbage can robot is a retro-futuristic cultural icon. Some of these were cheap props for cheap movies, but others were serious visions of the future. If nothing else they demonstrate quite how imaginative the Metropolis robot that stands the test of time was.
The original British Secret Service headquarters was just that, secret. But the increase in importance of electronics meant that it was more important for a building to be invisible to electronic eavesdropping. as such the current M16 HQ in London is about as obvious a giant sign saying ’secret building here’, yet it is enclosed in a giant Faraday cage to protect its communications.<p /><p />Not all Intelligence agencies have had a discrete architectural past, Franco’s House of Screams, or the Soviet Lubyanka are demonstrably terrifying. Mossad’s HQ, until the 60s or the current Australian Secret Intelligence Service look quite modest compared to the hardly known Ministry of National Security of Azerbaijan, which houses its intelligence service, in a large and monolithic building of dramatic proportions.
