#obsessed with this architecture

[00l6]

[violent138]

I think Gotham city would be one of the coolest cities in the world for an architect to study. The city has its foundation in a Gothic/Gothic revival-esque style, but the frequent bombings, flooding, fires, explosions of plants, and occasional natural reclamation has led to massive parts of the city being reconstructed, usually retaining the city's classic style, but with more and more experimental and innovative buildings from all the PhDs running around the city, eager to redesign it to be stronger and more cost-effective. Add that to safety codes and zoning being a total mess and Gotham City totally throws up the world's most odd, occasionally aesthetically disastrous (don't worry it gets blown up soon) buildings at record speed. But one way or another, the city always returns to a variant of its original form.

[horrorcitos]

Olivier House Hotel, New Orleans

[nexility-sims]

concepts of a plan / picture me offering @moonwoodhollow a giant bouquet of flowers, in appreciation of this Masterpiece 💐

[philcoulsonismyhero]

I'm doing some rereading, and this bit in Broken Homes always cracks me up. You're both nerds, lads, let's move on

(Transcribed in alt text)

[fatehbaz]

"The most fashionable bathing station in all Europe". British industrialists and American mining investors plotting the colonization of the Congo, while mingling at Ostend's seaside vacation resorts. Extracting African life to build European railways, hotels, palaces, suburbs, and other modern(ist) infrastructure. "Towards infinity!"

---

In 1885, King Leopold II achieved an astonishing and improbable goal: he claimed a vast new realm of his own devising, a conjury on a map called [...] the Congo Free State. [...] [A] fictional state owned by the king, ruled by decree, and run from Brussels from 1885 to 1908. [...] This was [...] a private entrepreneurial venture [for the king]. The abundance of ivory, timber, and wild rubber found in this enormous territory brought sudden and spectacular profits to Belgium, the king, and a web of interlocking concession companies. The frenzy to amass these precious resources unleashed a regime of forced labor, violence [millions of deaths], and unchecked atrocities for Congolese people. These same two and a half decades of contact with the Congo Free State remade Belgium [...] into a global powerhouse, vitalized by an economic boom, architectural burst, and imperial surge.

Congo profits supplied King Leopold II with funds for a series of monumental building projects [...]. Indeed, Belgian Art Nouveau exploded after 1895, created from Congolese raw materials and inspired by Congolese motifs. Contemporaries called it “Style Congo,” [...]. The inventory of this royal architecture is astonishing [...]. [H]istorical research [...] recovers Leopold’s formative ideas of architecture as power, his unrelenting efforts to implement them [...]. King Leopold II harbored lifelong ambitions to “embellish” and beautify the nation [...]. [W]ith his personal treasury flush with Congo revenue, [...] Leopold - now the Roi Batisseur ("Builder King") he long aimed to be - planned renovations explicitly designed to outdo Louis XIV's Versailles. Enormous greenhouses contained flora from every corner of the globe, with a dedicated soaring structure completed specifically to house the oversize palms of the Congolese jungles. [...]

---

The Tervuren Congo palace [...]. Electric tramways were built and a wide swath of avenue emerged. [...] [In and around Brussels] real estate developers began to break up lots [...] for suburban mansions and gardens. Between 1902 and 1910, new neighborhoods with luxury homes appeared along the Avenue [...]. By 1892, Antwerp was not only the port of call for trade but also the headquarters of the most profitable of an interlinking set of banks and Congo investment companies [...]. As Antwerp in the 1890s became once again the “Queen of the Scheldt,” the city was also the home of what was referred to as the “Queen of Congo companies.” This was the ABIR, or Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company, founded in 1892 with funds from British businessman “Colonel” John Thomas North [...].

Set on the seaside coast, Belgium’s Ostend was the third imperial cityscape to be remade by King Leopold [...] [in a] transformation [that] was concentrated between 1899 and 1905 [...]. Ostend encompassed a boomtown not of harbor and trade, like Antwerp, but of beachfront and leisure [...] [developed] as a "British-style" seaside resort. [...] Leopold [...] [w]as said to spend "as much time in Ostend as he did in Brussels," [...]. Ostend underwent a dramatic population expansion in a short period, tripling its inhabitants from 1870–1900. [...] Networks of steamers, trams, and railway lines coordinated to bring seasonal visitors in, and hotels and paved walkways were completed. [...] [A]nd Leopold’s favorite spot, the 1883 state-of-the-art racetracks, the Wellington Hippodrome. Referred to with an eye-wink as “the king incognito” (generating an entire genre of photography), visitors to the seaside could often see Leopold in his top hat and summer suit [...], riding his customized three-wheeled bicycle [...]. By 1900, Ostend’s expansion and enhancement made it known as “the Queen of the Belgian seaside resorts” and “the most fashionable bathing station in all Europe.” Opulence, convenience, and spectacle brought the Shah of Persia, American tycoons, European aristocrats, and Belgian elites, among others, to Ostend.

---

Leopold’s interventions and the Congo Free State personnel and proceeds played three pivotal and understudied roles in this transformation, all of which involved ABIR [British industrialists].

First, it was at Ostend that an early and decisive action was taken to structure the “red rubber” regime and set it in motion. In 1892, jurists such as [E.P.] had ruled, contravening [...] trade laws, that the king was entitled to claim the Congo as his domanial property [...]. Leopold [...] devised one part of that royal domain as a zone for private company concessions [...] to extract and export wild rubber.

Soon after, in 1892, King Leopold happened to meet the British “Colonel” John Thomas North at the Ostend Hippodrome. North, a Leeds-born mechanic [...] had made a fortune speculating on Chilean nitrates in the 1880s. He owned monopoly shares in nitrate mines and quickly expanded to acquire monopolies in Chilean freight railways, water supplies, and iron and coal mines. By 1890 North was a high-society socialite worth millions [...]. Leopold approached North at the Ostend racecourse to provide the initial investments to set up the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company (ABIR). [...]

---

One visible sign of Ostend’s little-known character as Congo boomtown was the Royal Palace Hotel, a lavish property next to the king’s Royal Domain, which opened in 1899. With hundreds of rooms and a broad sweep of acreage along the beachfront, the palace “occupied the largest space of any hotel in Europe.” [...]

King Leopold met American mining magnate Thomas Walsh there, and as with North, the meeting proved beneficial for his Congo enterprise: Leopold enlisted Walsh to provide assessments of some of his own Congo mining prospects. The hotel was part of [...] [a major European association of leisure profiteers] founded in 1894, that began to bundle luxury tourism and dedicated railway travel, and whose major investors were King Leopold, Colonel North [...].

At the height of Congo expansionism, fin-de-siècle Antwerp embodied an exhilarated launch point [...]. Explorers and expeditioners set sail for Matadi after 1887 with the rallying call “Vers l’infini!” (“towards infinity!”) [...].

---

Text above by: Debora Silverman. "Empire as Architecture: Monumental Cities the Congo Built in Belgium". e-flux Architecture (Appropriations series). May 2024. At: e-flux.com/architecture/appropriations/608151/empire-as-architecture-monumental-cities-the-congo-built-in-belgium/ [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Italicized first paragraph/heading in this post was added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism.]

[luciferrswolves]

memes

[cuttledreams-bugs]

quickie question-

Anyone got any blog recommendations that have a focus on posting/writing about neat things like bugs, plants, space, architecture, etc? I'm aiming broadly at science-adjacent topics but tbh I'm always open to curiosity about things unfamiliar as well :v

I'm specifically looking for such accounts that post that sort of stuff, and don't post/reblog a lot of misc, memes or news stuff. Especially the latter, my main goal is to refocus my online experience away from constant doom-news-spam and into a place of rest and learning, while keeping news reading boxed into its specific place and time.

Some examples of the vibe I'm loosely aiming for:

Artifacts and Arthropods, Arsanatomica, Snailfish Enthusiast

Also down for really neat artist suggestions like Plastiboo and Mason Lindroth too :o

[wdomach-zbetonu]

i think that i am in eskew and the gospel of haven are two sides of the alive architecture spectrum - on one end there’re sentient city and buildings in it and on the other there’s architecture made of the literal alive body of a god

[sephs-ghost]

yesterdays walk

[sketchcakes]

old man in this church complimented my drawings and asked if i'd like to join other members of the congregation for an art project

didn't know what to reply since i was actually here for background references for unholyverse frerard fanart but it was nice of him to ask

[margaretcruzemark]

Photographia urbana vintage: DCS Los Angeles, 928.

[photos-by-rv]

Illuminate.

35mm | Gold 200

Toulouse, France | December 8, 2024

[burnerbirdie]

Stained glass

[vaultsixtynine]

yay! i have found a way to turn my not-strahd's not-castle into something akin to a cousin of the house

[persephoneflouwers]