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Gibellina, known as "Sicily’s Marfa", is looking for a revival
- n4r9 3y agoThis sounds like it was an interesting residential experiment. I find myself wondering at the use of "utopia". There's no mention of any radical changes to (self-)government, economics, social structures or cultural norms. Nor is any of that mentioned in the city's Wikipedia page [0]. It seems to be more about exploiting tourism to fund an artistic and architectural vision. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibellina https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibellina
- chaostheory 3y agoI feel that Disney was the most successful when it came to failed utopia projects. Epcot Center is still going strong to this day.
- WorldMaker 3y agoThough Epcot Center the park is nothing like EPCOT the experimental prototype for the city of tomorrow. Seaside, FL; Celebration, FL; Cotino near Palm Springs, CA, and other "Storyliving by Disney" projects present and future are all much closer to the EPCOT vision than the Epcot Center itself is, despite the name intended to evoke the imagination towards the original EPCOT plan and Walt's masterful but failed attempt at selling it on national television.
- GeoAtreides 3y agoOh man, Cretto di Burri is amazing: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7874044,12.9707702,444m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7874044,12.9707702,444m/data... check some of the photospheres to see how it looks at ground level There's something magical to concrete mega monuments (the Balkans have quite a collection, btw), like massive ruins-that-are-not-quite-ruins.
- Aurornis 3y agoWow. I thought it was a glitch in the map at first because it’s a grayscale square, but then I looked closer.
- Tronno 3y agoI find it grotesque. It could have been a park, a farm, a forest. It could have been left as an interesting ruin for humans to explore and nature to reclaim. But in the name of some selfish artistic vision, this person built a vast concrete wasteland. Good art triggers strong emotions, I suppose. I feel horror and revulsion.
- zemvpferreira 3y agoI mean, you're entitled to your emotional response, but let's not pretend that's an impactful amount of concrete or land. Might as well be outraged about a supermarket. I find it irrelevant myself.
- Tronno 3y agoThere's lots I find objectionable about our built environment, but at least it has a purpose. Between butchering an animal for food, vs doing it for fun, this artwork is the latter.
- zemvpferreira 3y agoFair enough, that's a good analogy. I find both morally equal but that's my own problem of course.
- zoeysmithe 3y ago200 people died there, 1000+ were injured, and 100k left homeless. This art is a monument and tombstone. This is perfectly respectful. I think most communities wouldn't build a supermarket or park over a recent human disaster site like this. Its really a memorial, not modern art: "I told him immediately, ‘let’s go see the old town’. It was almost 20 km away and I was just shocked. I almost felt like crying and then this idea came to me: here I could do something… This is what I would do: we compact the ruins — which are a problem for everyone — we reinforce them well, and with concrete, we create an immense white crack as a permanent symbol of what happened here,” Burri described on first seeing the ruins of Gibellina.
- nicolas_t 3y agoThis remind me of Naoshima an island in Japan full of art projects that's absolutely worth a visit.
- diggan 3y agoAlso Freetown Christiania, located in the center of Copenhagen - https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/freetown-christiania https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/freetown-christiania - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freetown_Christiania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freetown_Christiania Very unique place, located in the center of a busy metropolitan city. Great feeling when you enter it, going from noisy cars, people and city life to something like a tranquil garden filled with art.
- euroderf 3y agoThere's a similar area in Vilnius called Užupis. Any HN'ers visited there and can comment ? Oh and fwiw per wikipedia since 1997 it's an independent republic, the Republic of Užupis.
- tsunamifury 3y agoFeels similar to Columbus, Indiana in that it is a place that has tons of amazing expressions of space but little practicality for people to inhabit them. It’s the grand utopian disappointment to realize beauty isn’t enough. Brunello Cucinelli is doing the same thing in Solomeo Umbria, but this time trying to use classical architecture and fund it all privately with his billion dollar fashion label. I visited and it’s impressive, but still quiet.
- NikkiA 3y ago> They eventually settled on the “garden city,” a design popularized in the 1960s by English urban planner Ebenezer Howard. That's your problem right there! The 'garden city' concept had already failed by the 1960s (both of the true garden cities were built by Howard in 1903 (Letchworth) and 1920 (Welwyn GC) - he died in 1928, so he wasn't popular in the 1960s). What they were probably getting confused over, was the new town concept of the post-WW2 era, when towns such as Slough and Milton Keynes, which, as brutalist horrors, were already roundly panned by everyone except fashionista architects at the time they were built, and predictably sank into deprivation and decay by the 1980s. Neither Garden Cities nor New Towns took into account any of the organic usage patterns that developed in organic towns, and thus ended up producing cultural wastelands for different reasons - Garden Cities because howard was a Quaker and had unpopular religious motivations resulting in stepford style living. And new towns because brutalism is depressing as fuck unless you're a fashionista, and encourages antisocial behaviour in normal people.
- NikkiA 3y agoFor reference on how desolate the place is, Letchworth is the only place I've been casually offered heroin while minding my own business walking through the city centre during broad daylight.
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- circlefavshape 3y agoI've been offered heroin on the street in daylight in Dublin (Ireland), which is hardly desolate
- jrflowers 3y agoLos Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Denver, Miami, Salt Lake City, Seattle, and Portland are similarly desolate in this way
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- VoodooJuJu 3y agoThis style of architecture deserves a more descriptive term than simply "postermodern". I think this style should be called "malevolent". Because you have to actually be malevolent to entertain even the slightest notion that any of these designs could ever possibly be a good idea. They're insults. No, worse than insults - they are violence. These grotesques do violence to the landscape. They assault the eyes. They rape beauty. >What can you do with a failed postmodern utopia? Destroy the abominations and reuse the stone to build prisons for everyone who had a hand in designing and green-lighting these experiments.
- toyg 3y agoYes, destroy that infidel idolatry! Burn down the buddhas! Death to false prophets!!1!1! /s Or, you know, find new ways to use these things. Brutalist architecture is absolutely fantastic for street-art, for example, or to shoot sci-fi films. Beauty is everywhere, when one has eyes open to beauty.
- ganzuul 3y agoSo I asked SD to generate a modernist monument. It was abstract concrete shapes with a set of stairs leading to nowhere. Then I asked it to generate a postmodern monument and it was also abstract concrete shapes but some were painted red and the stairs were removed. I did feel it got it exactly right.
- bsimpson 3y agoIt's wild how easy it is to not know that something exists. One of my pandemic trips was touring Italy by Vespa, from the Alps to Sicily. I rode right past Gibellina without knowing it was worth a stop. That was actually one of the challenges of the trip. If you're touring California, there's often only one road to get where you're going. In my case, I just took PCH the whole way north. Italy has thousands of years of villages and paths between them. Their road grid is a spiderweb. Even figuring out what route to take on any particular day needed a lot of research and some random luck.
- epivosism 3y agoI often wish I could tell Gemini or some other ai my general preferences & interests (unique parks, board games, bonsai, pickleball courts etc) and while I was driving, google maps would occasionally pop up a silent notice saying "did you know, just 1 mile ahead is an exit leading to a nearby world-famous bonsai exhibit that is open now) They could do this really really easily, and it would be EPIC and offer you the chance to discover things you basically NEVER would know about otherwise...
- toyg 3y agoOn one side, yes, great. On the other side: more notifications while driving? No, thanks - bad for safety, likely to be very annoying, and extremely likely to be coopted by adsense ("did you know? Just 1 mile ahead you'll find the newest McDonald's in the city...")
- epivosism 3y agoIt would be opt in, obviously. I don't agree with these kind of moral hazard arguments which attempt to prove progress is impossible. It's not my problem that google may screw something up - they can do that if they want, and we can react. I do not accept any responsibility to "not think of ideas which would help me, because some other group may do something bad with them". How could you even go through the day, if you hold yourself responsible for potentially bad things other people could do? Invent new medicine? Oh that's bad, maybe an evil army would use it to keep their soldiers alive. The entire point of life is to fight bad things and support good ones; I'm not going to just stop trying to progress. My point is more that google's chokehold on mapping has meant nearly ZERO product innovation has happened in this space for 10+ years.
- pessimizer 3y agoWhat's the point of a town without any industry, filled with inhumanly scaled sculptures? It's like a tomb, only dead people would want to live there. They seemed to think that it would be populated by the a segment of the independently wealthy that they're referring to as "artists," but those people don't want to live in the middle of nowhere without adequate luxury services and servants. And then the income of the town was meant to come from tourists wanting to stare at the "artist's" work. For free. There's no door charge, and there's no luxury infrastructure for the visitors to spend money on during their bicycle trips between massive concrete paperweights. Pretty sure the goal of this project was to funnel somebody's, probably the state's, funds into the contractors who covered an acre of ground in a thick concrete slab, and similar, admittedly stunning, feats. I wonder if the concrete in those sculptures is of the same quality as the concrete of Genoese bridges.
- toyg 3y agoYou're being cynical. We used to have ambitions and utopias, as societies; we used to think the future can be whatever we want it to be, that work would be done by machines, that we would live free in our flying cars, that nobody would go hungry, etc etc. Obviously, it didn't happen; partially because some of these ambitions were unrealistic, but partially because we simply stopped believing it was possible to live without an incessant capitalist-driven commercialization of every inch of our existence.
- op00to 3y agoI hope I’m not the only person who read this as “Sicily’s Mafia”.