Dark Days, an urban-social documentary

Some months ago I´ve read The Manhattan Hunt Club (2001), a novel by American writer John Saul. The plot is really entertaining but most of all, I liked his description of the homeless living in the subterranean trains tunnels of New York.

Yesterday, I´ve watched Dark Days (2000), a documentary directed by Marc Singer, that shows the lives of those who dwell in an abandoned New York city railroad tunnel, and it seems to me that John Saul has been highly inspired by this film. Even, the great words that I supposed belonged to him ¨a houseless is not a homeless,¨  or similar, were stated by one of the dwellers, at the beginning.

There is also a woman, crying for her lost child, the cooking, the drugs, comradery, fights and explanations of ways of earning some money.

The film, that has won many festival awards, is sometimes criticized because of the blurry images and the sound, but after all it is a great testimony of the habitat and lives of underground inhabitants who feel they do have a home, a subject that is also present in Saul´s novel. 

Today, I´m sharing some screen shots I´ve taken from my computer. My recommended for architects and sociologists.

Discussions on Huntington Beach AES Generating Station

I have some different feelings about the Huntington Beach AES Generating Station, and it seems I am not the only one. This building is very close to Downtown Huntington Beach, with all its new architectural developments and worst of all it is located next to a park of mobile homes and in front of the beach.

Whoever sees it, could think this is not a nice area and residents from the mobile homes park, complain that the value of the land is diminished by the presence of the industrial building.

Besides, it is pretty impressive to see the white smoke puffing from the chimneys and I must correct myself: it is vapor not smoke, but it looks like smoke and discussions have arisen in consequence: this is pollution (?), while the defenders of the plant say no, or just a little.

But it wasn´t until I have seen the wonderful exhibition on line Form and Landscape that I paid attention again to the beauty of the engineer design of AES Generating Station.

Looking at it as an isolated building, and considering it is a landmark for many surfers, I´ve changed my mind.

And, without knowing it would be demolished in the coming years, I had this feeling of losing it for ever. So, last week, while my husband was driving West in Pacific Coast Highway, I told him to slow down, I had to take some pictures for my archive, even from the car.

Today, I´ve learnt about its replacement. I´m copying an excerpt from OC Register:

HUNTINGTON BEACH – The towering stacks on Pacific Coast Highway that have served as a Huntington Beach landmark for decades are expected to be leveled to make way for what is being touted as a more environmentally friendly power plant.

It will be a bittersweet farewell when the stacks, called electricity generating units, are pulled down more than five years from now as part of a revamp for the AES Huntington Beach Generating Station. On one hand, they are a familiar sight for boaters, surfers and motorists along the coast; on the other, their destruction will mean cleaner energy production in Huntington Beach.

New state requirements have prompted AES Huntington Beach to come up with a plan to reduce the impact on the environment by changing the way it uses natural gas to provide energy to the community.

"We're not changing the fuel, we're changing the technology," said AES project manager Jennifer Didlo.

The Huntington Beach Energy Project will replace the Huntington Beach Generating Station, which has been running on Pacific Coast Highway and Newland Street since 1958. Changes will include using air to cool generators instead of sea water and using new technology that will allow the proposed plant to power up and be shut off quickly, Didlo said.

The plant will also have lower-profile buildings and give up the industrial look the facility has had for decades.

Roger Johnson, deputy director of siting for the California Energy Commission, said AES is the first company to submit an application to build a new facility but several companies across the state have met with state officials and talked about starting work to revamp their power plants.

"This is pretty good news for California to get these new modern projects replacing the older ones," he said. "When I look at (AES's) application those benefits they describe are expected to occur."

But before Surf City can see this new forward-thinking power plant, the plans have to go through the licensing and approval process. AES will also have to secure long-term contracts with an energy company.

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/aes-367959-energy-plants.html

Keep on reading the article with the readers´ comments. You´ll see the different opinions.

What my architect husband and me expect is that the new building will not be ¨more of the same.¨ As I´ve stated many times, Southern California, and specially Huntington Beach planners, defend the same style and design for everything. The pharmacy is like a house, a house like a market, the new complex of houses and shops at Bella Terra is the same as every condominium in Southern CA. Boring, absolutely boring and with lack of creativity.

If the new plant is located on the same land, we really expect that it won´t be ¨to match existing¨ commercial and residential buildings.

What will happen to the mobile home park? Rumor has it that it will be removed. I don´t have any information on it, for now.

The previous pictures are all from my personal archives. Let´s see some old pictures from the Huntington Library:  

http://hdl.huntington.org/cdm/search/collection/p16003coll2/searchterm/Joseph%20Fadler!huntington%20bEACH/field/physia!all/mode/exact!all/conn/and!and/order/call/ad/asc

Who would think the city would grow that much along the years in 1957? Of course, now the urban and environmental conditions are different.

Various designs of landscape benches

A few days ago, Lisa Foderaro posted at The New York Times an article about creative benches design in the parks of New York. 

"There are wooden chaises roomy enough for two. Bar-stool-style perches with river views. Communal work stations for laptop users. Huge granite slabs. Even hammocks. That most prosaic of public furnishings, the New York City park bench, has morphed into a blank canvas on which designers, landscape architects and artists have unleashed their fantasies.

Architects and park officials say the trend has gained momentum as the city has reclaimed its waterfront and turned forgotten public nooks into plazas. The drop in crime and the lower profile of the city’s homeless population were also contributing factors." 

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/02/nyregion/with-new-park-benches-designers-find-room-to-stretch-their-imaginations.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&smid=tw-nytimes

From the article's gallery, I'm sharing the three pictures above, but I also would like to contribute with my own. I personally prefer any bench that is surrounded by nature.

The following pictures belong to my archives and were taken in June and July 2013, in Laguna Beach and Rancho Los Alamitos, California:

This is a great design, a sculpture of three iron men supporting the minimalist wood bench.

A bench in a cactus and succulents garden. Rancho Los Alamitos, Long Beach, CA

A bench with a great cactus behind. Mission of San Juan Capistrano, CA

April 2013

A bench at the Mission of San Juan Capistrano. December 2013

City of Shadows. By Alexey Titarenko

I was reading in Internet that many movies have a recreation of people falling from the Odessa steps in the movie Battleship Potemkin.

Some artists have also felt inspiration by the movie scenes, like painter Francis Bacon, who saw in the expressionist images a catalyst for his work.

Alexey Titarenko has also paid tribute to the Odessa Steps shot in his series "City Of Shadows". Saint Petersburg, 1991

Read more:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleship_Potemkin

Enjoy some screen shots I´ve taken from the movie of the architecture of the harbor of Odessa;

http://myriammahiques.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-architecture-of-battleship-potemkin.html

All pictures were downloaded from Google Images. Copyright Alexey Titarenko

The architecture of Battleship Potemkin

Yesterday I was watching the silent film Battleship Potemkin (1925) and thought the most famous image is the last one, the impressive shot of the ship that seems to be out of the screen.

I´ve enjoyed all the expressionist images, and decided to share in this blog a few ones that show the architecture of the harbor of Odessa.

Pay special attention to the hanging clothes in public places, I´m wondering if this is a dramatic white against black aggregate or if it really was the people´s habit.

The images are screen shots from my computer. As a bonus, the ship in the last scene.

My digital art on archaeology

Ancient sculpture of an angel

A pyramid and a tree

A settlement in the desert

Catacombs with human bones

Petroglyphs under the sun

Eagle rock painting

Ruins in the cliff

My version of Stonehenge, revised

Fractal totems

My digital art on archaeology by Myriam B. Mahiques is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Old street lamp posts in Southern California

Crowd on a city street (near 5th Street and Coast Federal Savings building)     Joseph Fadler  1970

I´ve always said that Southern California, having a young history of a little more than 100 years, invented its own history.

When you have to design for a historical city or zoning, strict design guidelines have to be followed, and everything has to be ¨to match existing;¨  the historical subject of a particular city must be always present.

That´s why you see the stone pillasters in La Verne everywhere, in signs but also in modern gas stations, with no care for the scale, or the Spanish planters with geranios at the public parking in Santa Barbara, or the street lamps we see here, depicting religious crosses, or a bridge!!!

I´ve been through the project called Form and Landscape which I really enjoyed. It is an on line exhibition of the street scape of Los Angeles and surrounding areas, supported by Edison, the electrical company.

I´ve selected these curious lamps from the exhibition and there is much more to see here:

http://pstp-edison.com/loomis/

Street lighting post (Riverside Type) 1916

Mission Bell Streetlights    Art Adams     1966

Rialto Street light post    1916

Lighting, streets    G. Haven Bishop    1912

In the most dazzling displays, some lamp post constellations are crowned with elaborate suns or transformed into starbursts and supernovas.