[Image: Composite photograph by Andrew Evans].
Andrew Evans, previously featured on BLDGBLOG way back in 2007, recently got in touch with some composite photographs taken of demolition sites in Philadelphia.
If you look closely through the layers, you can see remnant images of wrecked interiors.
[Image: Composite photograph by Andrew Evans].
And, on the edge of the city, ruined buildings stand like ghosts guarding an urban perimeter that keeps expanding, the city always flinging more pieces of itself further into what used to be woods and streams in a spectral ballet of cranes and skyhooks.
[Images: Composite photographs by Andrew Evans].
So we could roam the streets and suburbs holding cameras, like architectural PKE meters, tracking the profiles of erased buildings, earlier roads, forgotten districts, even entire islands entombed beneath airports, scanning sites for lost towers and halls that once stood there, twisted interiors still hovering somewhere in memory and broken rebar.
See a few more demolition composites over at Andrew’s Flickr page.
Well, I am grateful for these Philadelphia photographs because they remind me of the humour we as children derived from imagining William Penn's prospecting finger, atop City Hall, as his youknowwhat urinating over the grid, depending on what angle you were observing. I live far away but was telling my little boy about this the other day. Memories in and of a cityscape.
Seems reminiscent of Michael Wesely's 'Open Shutter' series for MOMA…