Off the shores of Alexandria, the city of Alexander the Great, lies what is believed to be the ruins of the royal quarters of Cleopatra. A team of marine archaeologists led by Frenchman Franck Goddio made excavation on this ancient city from where Cleopatra, the last queen of the Ptolemies, ruled Egypt. Historians believe this site was submerged by earthquakes and tidal waves more than 1,600 years ago.
The excavations concentrated on the submerged island of Antirhodus. Cleopatra is said to have had a palace there. Other discoveries include a well-preserved shipwreck and red granite columns with Greek inscriptions. There were also founded two statues which were lifted out of the harbor. One was a priest of the goddess Isis; the other a sphinx whose face is said to represent Cleopatra’s father, King Ptolemy XII. The artifacts were returned to their silent, because the Egyptian Government says it wants to leave most of them in place to create an underwater museum
Made You Look by Mobstr
Part of Poland’s Katowice Street Art Festival, Mobstr totally made you look. He did, just admit it. If you’re in Katowice, you can find this mural on ul. Lelewela 3.
Artist: Website (via: Street Art News)
These vegetated surfaces don’t just look pretty. They have other benefits as well, including cooling city blocks, reducing loud noises, and improving a building’s energy efficiency.What’s more, a recent modeling study shows that green walls can potentially reduce large amounts of air pollution in what’s called a “street canyon,” or the corridor between tall buildings.
For the study, Thomas Pugh, a biogeochemist at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, and his colleagues created a computer model of a green wall with generic vegetation in a Western European city. Then they recorded chemical reactions based on a variety of factors, such as wind speed and building placement.
The simulation revealed a clear pattern: A green wall in a street canyon trapped or absorbed large amounts of nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter—both pollutants harmful to people, said Pugh. Compared with reducing emissions from cars, little attention has been focused on how to trap or take up more of the pollutants, added Pugh, whose study was published last year in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.
That’s why the green-wall study is “putting forward an alternative solution that might allow [governments] to improve air quality in these problem hot spots,” he said.Compared with reducing emissions from cars, little attention has been focused on how to trap or take up more of the pollutants, added Pugh, whose study was published last year in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.
That’s why the green-wall study is “putting forward an alternative solution that might allow [governments] to improve air quality in these problem hot spots,” he said.
I can’t really explain why, but abandoned places like this have always fascinated me. Maybe it’s the stories they can tell. So much more interesting than the cut and paste type of architecture that has become the norm today….
Sound Architecture IV by Ronald van der Meijs is a different sort of “carol of the bells”. It’s made up of 5,000 bicycle bells installed to sway and interact like reeds. When the wind blows they brush together and make chiming sounds.
Willis Elkins - NYC Lighter Log (2011) - A collection of plastic cigarette lighters found washed ashore on New York City coastlines and beaches over the course of 10 months
Carla Andrade - Paths To Land (2011-2012)
35mm Film Photography
“Roads don’t just drive us to places, they are places”
(John Brinckerhoff)
About roads and landscapes. Cosmology of recognizable and new elements. Roads are shown as new metaphors, as new grounds to conquer. In this ontological research of “way”, I’m interested in the idea of way as “origin”. An element that guides and avoid to go adrift, but we can only control one part of it, its end is always unpredictable. The road shows what is going to be, or what hasn’t still become. It’s a mystery in itself. Like this, path as humans fundamental “ignorance” has a deep symbolic meaning, we all seek to know and also to dream about what isn’t known. Another key idea is the road as a “means” for men to go through the nature. Way of domination of landscape, piercing and cutting it. Men, as a microcosm, need to create artificial pathways to allow them to move through the natural world. Faced with a powerful nature, the human being needs a shelter; they need the artificial to catch the natural.
Norwegian conceptual artist Rune Guneriussen explores a fascinating balance of human culture and nature with his outdoor installations of electric lamps, stacked books, chairs, and phones that appear to have gathered in small herds and swarms as if suddenly sentient. Each work is assembled and photographed on-site without any digital intervention in various rural locations around Norway.
Windswept by Charles Sowers
Art installation fixed outside a gallery’s wall, displaying natural flow and turbulence of the wind - via dezeen:
Hundreds of spinning blades reveal the invisible patterns of the wind in American artist Charles Sowers’ kinetic installation on the facade of the Randall Museum in San Francisco. (via prostheticknowledge)
