...suddenly the number of pageviews on my blog has become dominated by Chinese spambots. To which I say, a bot audience is better than no audience at all! So.
A very long time ago (self-hyperlink), I told you about a random geographer that I follow on twitter, in the context of describing the seemingly-now-defunct Z World Detroit. The same geographer is at it again, today passing along a link to this article entitled, "We are surrounded by zombie architecture."
A more recent tidbit from this blog, which you're sure to recall, was my description of the Elkhart County Fair, and how Miss Gokey said that if she were going to die on a ride, it should be the one invented for the 1893 World's Fair. As we were boarding the wheel, I commented that ticket booths from the fair still occasionally pop up in Chicago. You can read about where to see the fair's remnants in this old Tribune article.
"We are surrounded by zombie architecture" discusses the fact that a Chinese gazillionaire wants to reconstruct London's Crystal Palace, which was constructed for the Great Exhibition of 1851 and is now as defunct as Detroit (by which I mean, of course, Z World Detroit. Ahem.). The article's writer is a professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He states, "The building's absence...is ever present." He questions the wisdom of the reconstruction, contending that, "Reanimation can't bring back the original but rather invents a new form of the present."
This reminds me of a lesson we already learned when we read Stephen King's Pet Sematary back in middle school.
He refers to the proposed rebuilding as a "cartooning of history."
It is an extremely interesting editorial and well worth the read if you have time.
Are there any spaces in your life that have been "cartooned" as they have been restored?
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