Tag Archives | Architecture

Secrets in Plain Site: Burning Man

By on October 21, 2012 in News 21

via Scott Onstott at SecretsInPlainSight.com

I was invited to go to Burning Man when it was at Baker Beach in San Francisco in 1989. At the time I remember wondering what would

Burning Man Black Rock City

inspire people to ritually burn an effigy of a man on the beach, and thinking it particularly chthonic (which didn’t appeal to my Apollonian nature) I didn’t go. After being hassled by the “authorities” in San Francisco, Burning Man moved to the Black Rock Desert in Northern Nevada in 1990 and has been hosted there ever since. 51,515 people attended burning man in 2010 and attendance was capped at 50,000 thereafter. The maximum attendance reminds me of the Great Pyramid slope angle of 51 deg 51 min but maybe that’s “just a coincidence.”

The reason I’m writing about Burning Man is because I looked at it in Google Earth and was amazed that this annual pilgrimage site in a remote desert occurs within a temporary urban design called Black Rock City (BRC) that appears to be a magical diagram.

… Read the rest

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Archaeologists Discover Subterranean Pyramids Attributed to Etruscans

By on September 24, 2012 in News 2

Picture: Fraaxe (PD)

Via Discover.com:

A team of American and Italian archaeologists have uncovered a most unusual find: a series of underground Etruscan pyramids buried beneath a wine cellar. Cue the Indiana Jones theme…or drink some nice Pinot Grigio. Or both.

Carved into the rock of the tufa plateau –a sedimentary area that is a result of volcanic activity — on which the city stands, the subterranean structures were largely filled. Only the top-most modern layer was visible.

“Within this upper section, which had been modified in modern times and was used as a wine cellar, we noticed a series of ancient stairs carved into the wall. They were clearly of Etruscan construction,” David B. George of the Department of Classics at Saint Anselm, told Discovery News.

As they started digging, George and co-director of the excavation Claudio Bizzarri of the Parco Archeologico Ambientale dell’Orvietano noted that the cave’s walls were tapered up in a pyramidal fashion.

… Read the rest

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The Architecture Of Power And Authority

By on September 24, 2012 in News 7

In this clip from his 1980 television series “The Shock of the New,” now being re-shown by the BBC, Robert Hughes peels apart how design is wielded as a tool by those in power to tell a story without words. The iconic buildings of post-World War II America (e.g. New York City’s Lincoln Center and Washington D.C.’s Kennedy Center) mirror the aesthetic of Mussolini’s Italy, a style combining “the myth of ancient Rome and vision of a technocratic future”:

All the ingredients of an architecture of state power as imagined by the totalitarians of the twentieth century are also present in what used to in the fifties be called the architecture of democracy…[expressing] the centralization of power. What comes out is not the difference between America and Russia, but the similarities between the corporate and the bureaucratic states of mind.

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A New Panopticon For The Age Of Prison Labor

By on September 8, 2012 in News 11

Post London riots last year, conservative commentators worried that England’s jails resembled a “holiday camp” with too much leisure and not enough unpaid work. Architect Alexis Kalli’s HMPark Life is a set of blueprints and renderings for a hypothetical, fantastical new prison complex, based in part on Dante’s Inferno, to fulfill the needs of today’s society:

With a Government forcing inmates to work a full week for virtually no pay in order to earn their keep, ‘HMPark Life’ is a new prison located in Brockwell Park, South London. It questions this drive to turn a prison population into a cheap labour force, one that works not just to provide skills in the name of ‘rehabilitation’ but forces offenders to be visibly productive and punished to quench the public’s ever present blood thirst for justice.

A public viewing platform perched on the prison’s main circulation core provides an ideal point from which to survey the throng of productive inmates, leaving the public with that sense of satisfaction.

… Read the rest

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Secrets In Plain Sight: An Interview with Scott Onstott

By on August 7, 2012 in News 12

Via SacredGeometryInternational.com

Scott Onstott is an unexpected alchemist.  A soft spoken architect and autocad teacher by trade, Onstott has found himself called to continue in the footsteps of modern alternative historians such as Graham Hancock & Robert Bauval, in pursuit of a greater Mystery, encoded in myth and mystical architecture, hidden in plain sight throughout the ages.  The revelations provided are truly biblical in their ‘proportions’ and denote a hidden history and lost science which informs the very foundations of our modern world.

SGI:  You are best known for your documentary film, “Secrets in Plain Sight” which demonstrates the deliberate encoding of occulted numerology and symbology in the design of city grids, government institutions, corporate headquarters and temple structures throughout the planet.  For those unfamiliar with your work, please describe the purpose behind the film.

Secrets In Plain Sight is a series of films about art, architecture, and cities specifically designed to embody ancient wisdom.… Read the rest

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Googie: Architecture Of The Future That Never Was

By on June 25, 2012 in News 2

Paleofuture on the mid-twentieth century school of design in which apartment buildings, restaurants, stores, banks, and hotels were built in a style heralding the rise of the space age. If only we still lived in a Googie world:

Before I moved to Los Angeles (almost 2 years ago now) I had never heard the word Googie. I didn’t know the word, but I definitely knew the style. And I suspect you might too.

Googie is a modern (ultramodern, even) architectural style that helps us understand post-WWII American futurism — an era thought of as a “golden age” of futurist design for many here in the year 2012. It’s a style built on exaggeration; on dramatic angles; on plastic and steel and neon and wide-eyed technological optimism. It draws inspiration from Space Age ideals and rocketship dreams. We find Googie at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, the Space Needle in Seattle, the mid-century design of Disneyland’s Tomorrowland, in Arthur Radebaugh‘s postwar illustrations, and in countless coffee shops and motels across the U.S.

… Read the rest

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Radioactive Time Capsules Of The Southwest

By on June 11, 2012 in News 7

The Center for Land Use Interpretation in Los Angeles examines what they term “perpetual architecture” — several dozen cell structures scattered across the desert of the U.S. southwest holding radioactive hazards. These edifices are designed to exist forever — thousands of years from now, in a vastly different world, these may be the only remnant of our civilization. Below is the Green River Disposal Cell in Utah:

More than 30 of these disposal cells have been constructed over the last 25 years, primarily to contain radioactive contamination from decommissioned uranium mills and processing sites. They are time capsules, of sorts, designed to take their toxic contents, undisturbed, as far into the future as possible.

… Read the rest

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The American Geography Of Incarceration

By on May 30, 2012 in News 5

We may peruse neighborhoods on Google Maps, read about suburban sprawl and new city developments, but millions of Americans exist in a different, ignored geography. Via the The Funambulist:

Prison Map is a project developed by Josh Begley, a graduate student at NYU. Let’s recall that 2.5 millions people are living in prison in this country. Such a project illustrates therefore a sort of hidden urbanism in which 0.8% of the American population live for a given time.

They illustrate a geography of exclusion [and] often ironically appear similar to European palaces with well-ordered classical plans.

prison… Read the rest

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How Hollywood Killed The Las Vegas Starship Enterprise

By on April 13, 2012 in News 7

Gary Goddard, CEO of entertainment design firm The Goddard Group tells the story of how a full scale Starship Enterprise very nearly came to Las Vegas in 1992, only for Paramount Pictures’ CEO Stanley Jaffe to ruin every Trekkie’s wet dream:

…We learned everything we could about the Starship — its actually size and dimensions, how it would exist in “dry dock” on the planet if indeed such a situation had been possible. We imagined what it could be, and how we might achieve it. We got Ken Ball (former head of engineering at Disney’s MAPO) involved to figure out how to engineer and support it. (Ultimately we realized we would need to add some supports on the outer edge of the “disc” section due to the extremely high wind conditions in Vegas. For this we created a high tech “scaffolding structure” that gave the ship more of the appearance of being in an open-air dry dock. I have not yet located that sketch, but I’ll try to find it.)

Source: The Goddard Group

The “big idea” was building the ship itself at full-scale. That was the main attraction. That being said, we also knew we would have to have some kind of “show” on board…

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