flexiblefullpage
billboard
interstitial1
catfish1
Currently Reading

Decaying city: Exhibit demonstrates the fragility of the man-made world

Decaying city: Exhibit demonstrates the fragility of the man-made world

Theater set designer Johanna Mårtensson built a model cityscape out of bread only to watch it decay.


By BD+C Staff | April 26, 2013
Photos by Johanna Mrtensson http://johannamartensson.se/

The Architizer blog (via Fast Company) brings us a fascinating exhibit by theater set designer Johanna Mårtensson. To demonstrate the fragility of the man-made world, she constructed a city out of bread and then snapped a photo every day for six months to document the decay (warning: if you haven't eaten breakfast yet you may want to skip the last two photos).

For her efforts, Mårtensson recently won a Platinum A' Design Award. In her submission, she described her inspiration for the project:

"I was inspired by an article about how well the earth would do without us. Within 500 years all buildings would be half-fallen or fallen, perfect homes for animals and plants. The forrest would soon grow in cities. Buildings as well as pollutions would be taken care of by bacterias and micro-organisms. If a UFO came here in a couple of hundred thousand years, they would not see many signs of that gang of primates that once thought they were the lords of the planet."

Check out Mårtensson's decaying city:

Related Stories

| Mar 14, 2012

Plans for San Francisco's tallest building revamped

The glassy white high-rise would be 60 stories and 1,070 feet tall with an entrance at First and Mission streets.

| Mar 14, 2012

Hyatt joins Thornton Tomasetti as VP in Chicago

A forensic specialist, Hyatt has more than 10 years of experience performing investigations of structural failures throughout the U.S.

| Mar 14, 2012

Tsoi/Kobus and Centerbrook to design Jackson Laboratory facility in Farmington, Conn.

Building will house research into personalized, gene-based cancer screening and treatment.

| Mar 13, 2012

China's high-speed building boom

A 30-story hotel in Changsha went up in two weeks. Some question the safety in that, but the builder defends its methods.

| Mar 13, 2012

Commercial glazer Harmon expanding into Texas

Company expanding into the Texas market with a new office in Dallas and a satellite facility in Austin.

| Mar 13, 2012

Worker office space to drop below 100-sf in five years

The average for all companies for square feet per worker in 2017 will be 151 sf, compared to 176 sf, and 225 sf in 2010.

| Mar 12, 2012

Improving the performance of existing commercial buildings: the chemistry of sustainable construction

Retrofitting our existing commercial buildings is one of the key steps to overcoming the economic and environmental challenges we face.

| Mar 9, 2012

2012 Giants 300 survey due Friday, April 13

See how your firm ranks among the AEC industry leaders. 

boombox1
boombox2
native1

More In Category




halfpage1

Most Popular Content

  1. 2021 Giants 400 Report
  2. Top 150 Architecture Firms for 2019
  3. 13 projects that represent the future of affordable housing
  4. Sagrada Familia completion date pushed back due to coronavirus
  5. Top 160 Architecture Firms 2021