I took a trip to Flushing Meadows on Sunday. I decided to go there after lunch at the taco garage. Anyways I biked to Flushing Meadows which was pretty ridiculous, on the way there. Of course I got lost as soon as I got into Queens. Nothing makes sense there, 60th Street is next to 60th Place is next to 60th Ave is next to 60th Lane, and all the numbers to that. Some streets with the same number run perpendicular to one another.
Flushing Meadows/Corona Park is the this huge park in Queens. Shea Stadium, the US Open thing, Queens Museum of Art, some science thing, and remnants of the former worlds fair – which I was especially interested in, are all there. Good ‘ol Karl brought up the topic of ghosts recently, and Flushing Meadows definitely has the aspects of a ghost world. The former worlds fair is littered with these really huge megabuildings, which are in a fairly abandoned and dilapidated state. While around it hundreds of thousands of people are playing in the park, around these hulking monoliths. They seemed strange to me, very ghostlike in that they are urban voids, you can’t enter them but they consume a really large amount of space, are very sculptural in a 3 dimensional sense, and activity happens everywhere until you reach the threshold of the void. The structure above commanded most of my attention, there’s some new building attached next to it, but it was closed, maybe if I got there earlier I could have gone in, but all in all the thing is now a birdhouse. The Mount Olympus for the bird gods of Queens.
A few more pics and thoughts after the cut.
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how come no one ever does cool stuff like this in our country??? damn, we are so f’ing boring.
I want to talk about your post a little more later, but have you seen any other “architecture comics”. I tended to an exhibition at the LA Forum of Wes Jones’ Meet the Nelsons, a rather high brow comic of architecture in the early nineties, referencing derrida et al. in a setting of surreal slice of life suburbia. there’s also some pretty great architecture comic work on archinetc but I couldn’t find it again, and some super random ones here http://www.bigheadpress.com/thearchitect and here http://minisuck.comicgenesis.com/d/20060517.html…
oops
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