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Loading... Ghostly Ruins: America's Forgotten Architectureby Harry Skrdla
   None No current Talk conversations about this book.   archidose | Dec 16, 2023 |   ) coolmama | Oct 21, 2010 |  ) phoenixcomet | Aug 31, 2009 | 1  smfmpls | Dec 10, 2006 |
In the days before the Wall Street crash, the West Baden Springs Hotel in West Baden Springs, IN, was enjoying a banner year. Its 200-ft.-dia. domed atrium (the largest in the world until 1962) and giant Art Nouveau fireplace kept its 700 rooms in constant demand and embodied the early-20th-century belief that things would keep getting bigger and better. Yet just four days after the crash filtered from the trading floor to the world, the West Baden was all but empty, and the Roaring Twenties had given way to the Great Depression. (click on link below to read the full review) At first glance, Harry Skrdla's Ghostly Ruins seems to be nothing more or less than an art book. Which can be enough. Beautifully reproduced black and white photos against sparse but salient prose. And, on certain levels, this first impression is never proven to be untrue. But rather than being a one-noted representation of the work of a single photograher, Ghostly Ruins isn't the result of one artist's work. Rather, it is a collection -- and in a sense a recollection -- of a preservationist and the book's title -- and mandate -- seems all the more pure for this realization. (click on link below to read the full review)
"With Ghostly Ruins, author Harry Skrdla guides your tour of thirty abandoned locations from around the country - homes and hotels, power plants and prisons, whole neighborhoods and even entire towns. These are the happy memories of your grandparents' and great-grandparents' childhoods, such as the United Artists movie palace in Detroit, the rollercoasters at Chippewa Lake Park in Medina, Ohio, and the Palace of Fine Arts from the Chicago World's Fair." "And then there are the structures that were massive and forbidding even at their peaks, before falling to disrepair: the Bethlehem Steel Mill and Eastern State Penitentiary in Pennsylvania and Bannerman's Castle, a munitions depot stranded on a lonely island in upstate New York. Even the works of some of our nation's most revered architects are not impervious to decay. Witness Albert Kahn's Packard Plant and Philip Johnson's New York State Pavilion." "Perhaps eeriest of all are the ghost towns of Bodie, California and Centralia, Pennsylvania, where a trash fire in a nearby mine exploded into an underground inferno in 1962. The fire still blazes today. Skrdla shows you all this and more, telling the tale of each place in its prime and the story behind its fall, accompanied by more than two hundred photographs depicting these locations at both yesterday's historic heights and today's decrepit depths."--BOOK JACKET. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)779.092The arts Photography, computer art, cinematography, videography Photographic images Photographs by origin of artist Collections by individual photographersLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (4.1)
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