Interview: Dan Barasch on Ruin and Redemption in Architecture

An extensive survey of buildings lost, forgotten, reimagined and transformed

Dan Barasch, co-founder of New York City‘s Lowline (a football field-sized abandoned plot of underground land in the Lower East Side) argues in his newest book, Ruin and Redemption in Architecture, that there are four status updates for old buildings: lost, forgotten, reimagined and transformed. Barasch documents buildings all over the world in these various states in the book—through photographs, essays and more. Whether it …

Spy Planes Spot Ancient Archaeological Sites

Using images taken by American U-2 spy planes between 1959 and 1972, researchers and archaeologists have been able to uncover archaeological sites in the Middle East that have since been developed over. Though only the final five years worth of photographs are of a high enough resolution to decipher, pre-urban sprawl imagery presented scenes of 5,000 to 8,000 stone structures with clarity. Read more about the …

Link About It: This Week’s Picks

The first-ever photo of a black hole, artwork-adorned Japanese currency, inspiration from Milan Design week and more

First-Ever Photo of a Supermassive Black Hole Truly a quantum leap, astronomers have “seen the unseeable” and captured an image of a supermassive black hole—a “smoke ring framing a one-way portal to eternity,” Dennis Overbye writes for the New York Times. A planet-sized network of eight radio telescopes—called the Event Horizon Telescope—peered through interstellar dust and gas to reveal the black hole, located in a …