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Hollywood at Night (2006).
Alexis Rockman’s paintings of swamped or ruined American landmarks present views which are a novelty in contemporary art galleries whilst being very familiar to science fiction readers. Many of these could well be illustrations for JG Ballard’s 1981 novel, Hello America, which imagined a depopulated United States reclaimed by flora and fauna. [...]

Impossible to avoid thoughts of either JG Ballard or various apocalyptic horror and science fiction scenarios when looking at these photos of Sydney, Australia, taken a few hours ago. A cloud of red dust passed over the city in the early morning and the depopulated views only add to the eerie atmosphere. These are from [...]

Mysterieux retour du Capitaine Nemo.
This week has been incredibly hectic work-wise but I’ve managed to keep these posts going, so here’s the last one devoted to an appreciation of the Cités Obscures of François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters. A week of posts barely scratches the surface of their vast and involved creation of alternate worlds, [...]

L’enfant penchée.

We’re at the penultimate post in this week-long tribute to the Cités Obscures series of François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters, and there isn’t enough space left to cover some of the more recent volumes in detail. What follows is a quick skate through three more major works.

L’enfant penchée.
L’enfant penchée (1996), or The Leaning Child, [...]

The Palace of Justice, Brussels.
Brüsel (1992) by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters follows La route d’Armilia as the next major work concerning the Cités Obscures. As with La Tour, this is a longer story where it isn’t immediately apparent that we’re in the Obscure World at all, although Brüsel is clearly an alternate version [...]

Ferdinand and Hella look down on the skyscrapers of Brüsel.
La route d’Armilia (1988) by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters is the next substantial story in the Cités Obscures series after La Tour; there was also a book about transportation in the Obscure World, L’Encyclopédie des transports présents et à venir, published the same year. La [...]

La Tour (1987) by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters is the third story in the Cités Obscures series, although it’s the fourth volume if you want to be strictly canon about things, L’achivist, a guide to places in the Obscure World, having preceded it.

Carcere Oscura by Piranesi (1750).
This is another book where Schuiten and Peeters’ [...]

La fièvre d’Urbicande (1985) by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters is the second volume in the Cités Obscures series. This was the one which captured my attention the most when I first saw it. The book opens with a foreword by the central character, Robick, chief architect of the city of Urbicande, in which he [...]

The Obscure World.
Les Murailles de Samaris (1983) by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters is the first of the stories which explores the world of Les Cités Obscures, a “counter-Earth” on the opposite side of our Sun with a continent of separate city-states, each with their own distinct architectural style. Having discovered these stories first in [...]

Paris au XXieme Siecle by Jules Verne (1994).
Following a comment I made last week in the post about the Temples of Future Religions by François Garas, I’ve decided it’s time to give some proper attention to one of my favourite comic artists, François Schuiten, a Belgian whose obsession with imaginary architecture resembles the earlier endeavours [...]

You can always rely on expositions and world’s fairs for architectural extravagance. This monster globe was an unrealised proposition for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and would have required potential visitors to be conveyed “by lift to the Equator, and thence by spiral railway to the North Pole.” What Columbus’s ship is doing [...]

Seed (2007).
It was my intention to post something about Peter Randall-Page’s sculptures earlier this year but never got round to it, so the opening of an exhibition of his work at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park this month provides the perfect opportunity. The park’s website has details of the works on view while the artist’s own [...]

More Exposition Universelle fetishism. Archive.org has a small collection of documents from the Paris exposition, not all of them of interest but these two are worth a look for their pictures at least. Exposition universelle, 1900; 32 vues photographiques (above) features various views of the exposition exhibits although they’re made somewhat redundant by the Brooklyn [...]

I thought I might have exhausted this line of pursuit until I decided to search for the Passage des Panoramas, one of the first of the Parisian arcades which so entranced Walter Benjamin. This particular arcade dates from 1799 and was named after the painted panoramas which used to be one of the attractions on [...]

Do you detect a theme here? The 360º Cities site which I linked to yesterday won’t be news to some since its panorama views are now incorporated into Google Earth. I hadn’t fully investigated it before, however, so I wasted some time today wandering the streets of Bruges almost as you would in a computer [...]

Looking at panoramas of Venice yesterday reminded me of this panorama of my own which I pieced together after a trip to Paris two years ago. (See the very long version unsqueezed here.) The location was the small park at the point of the Île de la Cité where the Seine divides in two.
For some [...]

Piazza San Marco.
Gilles Vidal’s 360º panoramas are justly celebrated but some of his photos benefit more from the location than others. The cathedral of St Cecilia is a great example of this, as is the city of Venice in this remarkable series of views. As well as showing a few less obvious locations, Vidal [...]

Poster by Glen C Sheffer (1933).
The image galleries at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library have been garnering justifiable attention recently for the quality of their collection. Among the groupings, the World’s Fairs and the Landscapes of the Modern Metropolis section immediately caught the attention of this exposition and world’s fair fan. [...]

Des Jardins du Trocadéro l’Automne.
Paris again and a suitably autumnal scene from Thirty-Six Views of the Eiffel Tower (1902) by Henri Rivière (1864–1951). Inspired by the celebrated Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, these do for the City of Light what Hokusai and Hiroshige did for Japan.

De la rue Beethoven.

Du Pont d’Austerlitz.
Previously on [...]

Main entrance gate by M. Binet.
I can’t leave the 1900 Paris exposition alone, and with good reason. If further proof were required that this event brought Winsor McCay’s Slumberland to earth for a few weeks, this stunning Brooklyn Museum Flickr set has the evidence. Not only five pages of high-resolution views but they’re all [...]