Yesterday's Observer published some incredible photos by two French photographers, Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, from their book, The Ruins of Detroit. Their observation was that in Europe, generally old buildings are picked over for their antique fittings so nothing much remains; in Detroit, the original 1920s art deco chandeliers in the Vanity Ballroom, where Duke Ellington and Tommy Dorsey one played, remain in place, the ballroom crumbling around them.
I took some photos at Sydney's State Theatre in November. Marchand and Meffre's picture of the United Artists Theater, closed since 1974, is in terrible synchronicity with the State Theatre's gleaming auditorium, of which Sydney is justifiably proud.
Third image ©Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre, 2010
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5 comments:
WOW!
I went to live on the Baltic Coast of East Germany not long after the wall came down. Me and my student buddies used to spend Saturdays plundering long derelict buildings for all manner of fixtures and fittings and even stuff that had just been left behind or abandoned. A lot of the buildings had not been inhabited since the war, so most of the f&fs were original art deco or art nouveau! I lost a lot on my travels but still have some amazing old advertisements pressed on metal and a beautiful lamp shade.
It always made me very sad though to see how these once beautiful buildings (some dating back to the middle ages) had been allowed to fester and rot under successive dictatorships. Many have since been restored but a lot had to be pulled down because they were beyond repair. I can't believe anyone would let such a historic building go to such ruin in America where there really is no excuse for it!
They're amazing, aren't they. Detroit's glory days are long ago and the city may never recover. It turns out there's a huge sub-genre of photographs of decaying buildings there: this guy's are particularly interesting.
It seems so wasteful; it started me thinking, probably naively, about giving homeless people these derelict homes to restore...
That's striking about the plundering that tends to go on in Europe...you'd have thought that Americans would be more likely to exploit the commercial possibilities of architectural salvage.
A journalist friend of mine bought up a decaying house in Detroit and completely restored it. He bought the house for a song and got a city grant to do it up. I seem to remember that part of the deal was that the house had to be restored within a certain period of time. He ended up with an amazing building just a short walk from downtime Detroit, that became a beautiful family home for his wife and kids.
Let's all go and commandeer old houses in Detroit!
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