Architecture The Dead Island
posted by December 20 at 12:34 PM
onLet us for a moment leave the city of your living…
…and journey to the city that begins at the of end of your life.
Over the wall and you are in place that is so dead…
…that even ghosts have abandoned it.
Nothing walks down those crumbling steps…
…nothing lives in that cage.
To be alive and trapped is better than being dead and gone.
The story of Gunkanjima:
Off the westernmost coast of Japan, is an island called “Gunkanjima” that is hardly known even to the Japanese. Long ago, the island was nothing more than a small reef. Then in 1810, the chance discovery of coal drastically changed the fate of this reef. As reclamation began, people came to live here, and through coal mining the reef started to expand continuously. Befor long, the reef had grown into an artificial island of one kilometer (three quarters of a mile) in perimeter, with a population of 5300. Looming above the ocean, it appeared a concrete labyrinth of many-storied apartment houses and mining structures built closely together. Seen from the ocean, the silhouette of the island closely resembled a battleship - so, the island came to be called Gunkanjima, or Battleship island.Eventually, the mines faced an end, and in 1974 the world’s once most densely populated island become totally deserted. The island, after all its inhabitants departed leaving behind their belongings, became an empty shell of a city where all its peopl disappeared overnight, as if by some mysterious act of God.
Comments
Sweet.
Awesome.
Beautiful
Rad.
i expected more vines.
and dinosaurs.
post of the week
-ethereal
I want to go there so bad right now.
wow. This is the best Slog post I've seen in ages! Breathtaking.
Charles,
You are the Ritchie Sexson of the stranger writing staff. You hit many grounders to second, but when you get ahold of one you really knock it out of the park. Great job on this post, it haunts me.
Charles is still my boy, even after that "I Am Legend" review!
GREAT PHOTO OF SEATTLE. Isle de Morte rocked too.
neat-O
Gorgeous. Reminds me of the pictures taken a few years ago of Chernobyl.
Amazing.
I have wanted to go there for years, unfortunetly they closed it to visitors.... I just want to sit down in the street. Just sit, look around, and take it in.
Truly a marvel, and possibly foreshadowing of the industrial age and it's demise.
Most. Perfect. Zombie. Film. Setting. Ever!
I wonder if this has ever been used as a film set? If it hasn't, it should be.
totally.
@ 11
The picture of Seattle was taken by slightlynorth .
http://www.flickr.com/photos/slightlynorth/
Uhhh, nice post, but when you take pictures from Flickr for use on a site like this, it is proper to CREDIT the SOURCE and link the image back to the source image on Flickr.
I mean, I'm just saying....
http://www.flickr.com/photos/slightlynorth/2121261690/
Slog, if you won't play nice, I'll have to stop putting my pictures in your pool.
these pictures are haunting me; they're like something out of a Miyazaki movie. And the other pictures on the website are beautiful, too.
I've emailed my friend Masaki to try and find out if he knows anything about this place, or if it's a secret in Japan, too.
I'm hoping someone has, or will, do a documentary about this place.
Very cool. I'm gonna go read up on that place.
@17: Battle Royale II
Thank you, Charles, for this great non-boob related post.
20: Photo linked, writer chastised.
Ah yes, Battle Royale with the lovely Chiaki Kuriyama, the gorgeous Go Go from Kill Bill 1. Didnt see part 2, but the first one was great. Students fighting to the death!
I think we need our own battleship island. Couldn't Seattle pass some kind of ordinance that Vulcan has to build us one out in Puget Sound if they want to raise height limits?
Stunning.
OK,
That was pretty cool Chuckers. Much better than the black marxist nationalism shit.
A truly amazing post!
i don't know, i kinda thought it was marxist nationalism shit.
This is great Charles, thank you.
Just read the book "The World Without Us" which is about what would eventually happen to all manmade creations if humans were erased from the Earth. The author takes the reader to mostly inhabited places like Chernobyl and the DMZ. I'm surprised he didn't mentioned this place. Pretty cool.
wonderful! reminds me of the abandoned army Buckner Building, the "city under one roof", in Whittier, Alaska, which I visited several years ago.. the abandoned theater was an especially creepy room.
Ah, reminds me of Böcklin's Island of the Dead:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0b/Arnold_Boecklin_-_Island_of_the_Dead,_Third_Version.JPG/800px-Arnold_Boecklin_-_Island_of_the_Dead,_Third_Version.JPG
Nothing human walks down those steps, but I'm sure many living things call it home.
Really excellent words accompanying some breathtaking photos. Even Ecce Homo admits it.
Pretty sure this was a Metafilter post from about a year ago.
...searches...
Yep, it was.
I think you can see Will Smith driving around in his hot car in the corner of that third pic-
Also, for a more local example of this phenomenon, take a look at Forgotten Detroit.
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