cool buildings (very tall)

originally created:12/01/2023
last updated:21/12/2023
Update: [5 new pictures!] (Only Season Three from now on! Read about it here.) Added sections "The decadent rich", "A host of great memories" and "Where the dead go to die" to the bottom of the page.

For some reason, since I was a little kid, tall apartment buildings have been a high object of interest for me. Not in an innate prodigy architect kinda way, but more like a truthful admiration kinda way, and to understand that, it's important to know how my likeness for things work.

I like lots and lots of things, like I said back in "flowers", but between "like" and "truthfully admire" there's a pretty big gap. In the "fondness scale", liking is a 1/10 while truthfully admiring is a 11/10, with "loving" and "caring about" and "adoring" and "having feelings for", and even "being fond of" filling up the rest of the ranks. Usually, what's between 1/10 and 10/10 are things I actively choose to like, like a certain kind of movie, or a book, or a sport, or a website on Neocities, or a person, or a Youtube channel and so on. Liking these things is purely my choice, and I'm free to stop liking them whenever, as well as add new things to the pile. I can become bored of things I like (1/10) — or have feelings for (4/10), or adore (7/10) — or forget them, or abandon them altogether with that also being an active choice. I'm a free individual, with freedom of mind (kinda) and body (like not at all), and this freedom allows me to control most aspects of my life. But, just like it happens with any other human, higher powers mess with my spiritual stability from time to time, when I lose control of my mechanisms and am obliged to follow the "natural" course of things. That usually inflicts upon me the "truthful admiration" state.

I remember like it was yesterday, when my mom put my chair facing the bedroom window back in grandpa's house, and I created my first memory of a really cool, tall apartment building. I was still very much a baby, and probably did not understand the concept of buildings, or the vertigo in looking at something super tall, but there was magnificence inherent to that construction, and it became the object of my first known instance of truthful admiration. I didn't like that like I liked the Barsa encyclopedia collection on the living room, I wasn't actively seeking that feeling, it was never my choice to discover or to admire that tall building, but it happened, and the experience shaped my inner being like a struck of chisel and hammer. From that point forward, looking at that thing outside my window became a way to find comfort in times of need, a kind of comfort I came to subconsciously seek in my "desire for the urban". Because of how truthfully I admired that building, I came to love big cities and, even more, its big and tall and cramped urban areas. Even in the moments when I did not live in these urban areas, my favorite passtime would be to visit them and experience that comforting feeling of belonging, even if just as a visitor.

The first hip-hop album I've ever listened to was Tribe's "The Low End Theory". My aunt, and former music teacher, brought it to class one time and was all like "hey, look what I got", and put it on for us to listen. That sound was so mind-boggling for the 5-6 year old me, with that loud, upright bass protagonizing the beats, and the concrete, concise and rhythmical spoken word of rap verses, that my idea of music completely changed in just a matter of seconds. Because I truthfully admired the low end, listening to that was like uncovering a treasure inside of myself. Having only had experienced the piano up to that point, now I wanted to know more about the bass, and today I am a pretty decent bass player because of that, and I consider it my absolute favorite instrument. I'm an advocate of all types of bass playing, and when I teach music, the supportive and the low end are my go-tos.

You see now what I mean by "truthful admiration"? It's like something that permanently shapes my person, to which I have no control over whatsoever, and that the choice of liking or not is completely out of my hand. I truthfully admire cool buildings that are very tall, and below are a few instances of this admiration through the medium of photo capturing.

"The isolated individual phenomenon"

Something I very frequently notice when walking around urban areas after midnight, is the "Isolated individual phenomenon". That consists basically in this one or two windows being lit up in a whole apartment building, or even of TV sounds and lights coming out of a single house in a whole block. It's an isolated individual, one that is disassociated from the rest for whatever reason, and its unique presence amongst the group makes for a much interesting visual phenomenon. These pictures show exactly that.

tall building with one balcony decorated for Christmas

The single balcony decorated for Christmas

The one with the weird fake-looking tree

The city's only Freemason church

big imponent building

Scary things are surprisingly easy to make look scary in pictures

guitar bod

This building looks surprisingly good, despite being actually strangely curvy when you stop and think about what you're looking at. I like looking at this building in person, and the more I do the stranger it gets. Unfortunately that doesn't translate well to the "one or two" pictures, and their lack of freedom in angles.

Voyeur impressions

I feel like a strange voyeur with these ones. And don't get me wrong, I am a strange voyeur (Barbusse 4L frfr), but doesn't this curiosity and fascination of mine taste a little sour when it looks like I am invading the privacy of people I don't even know? Maybe I am excused for being an "artist", but still, should I stop myself from creating what I believe is beautiful?