Unheimliche

I've been meaning to mention this for a while. More decay and dereliction, this time from wealthy East Hampton. Grey Gardens - a large timber clad mansion - was the subject of a 1970's documentary by Albert and David Maysles, directors of the Stones at Altamont film Gimme Shelter. The film followed the house's staggeringly eccentric owners - a mother and daughter, both called Edith Beales - and the self-induced squalor in which they lived.

The two Ediths (known as "Big Edie" and "Little Edie") let the house and gardens fall into a compellingly abject state of disrepair. Filthy, full to bursting with rubbish and home to semi-tame raccoons, it appeared in the film to be in the advanced stages of being re-claimed by nature. The Edie's themselves spent much of their time in a single room, mostly - in Big Eddie's case - in bed wearing an enormous hat.



Like the Mole Man of Hackney, the house became the subject of local authority inspections, and required extensive repairs and stabilisation. Even more bizarrely the work was paid for by Big Edie's niece Jacqueline Onassis. Little Edie's strangely stylish dress sense and odd terminology ("This is the only outfit for today") turned her into a cult figure, especially for fashion designers such as Mark Jacobs. Rufus Wainwright wrote a song about it and the whole story has recently been made into a film series starring Drew Barrymore.

What's most interesting about Grey Gardens from an architectural perspective is how it represents everything we fear most in buildings: structural instability, dirt, rottenness and the dissolution of boundaries. At Grey Gardens, nature has come creeping in over the threshold - literally in the case of raccoons - and started to overlay the carefully delineated domestic realm. The squalor here may be self-induced but that actually adds to its nightmarish quality. Grey Gardens represents a staple of horror films, the house gone to seed, a source of fear rather than comfort.

There is another more pragmatic sense in which Grey Gardens scares us and that is in the way it negates the literal value placed on houses. The insane speculative value that they generate means that their wilful neglect is an affront, an attack on our duty to carefully manage our assets and investments.

Today Grey Gardens has been restored back to its original luxury.

Village of the Damned

This is fabulously strange and creepy. More underwater wreckage, this time of the lost village of Llanwddyn in wales, flooded by Liverpool Council in 1965. The recentness of the flooding makes the images far stranger and more disturbing for me, as if the inhabitants have only just turned off an episode of Z Cars before packing their bags and leaving. The preserved cemetery suggests perhaps that they didn't make it, or refused to go.

Nevertheless the images are eerily beautiful, reminiscent of Mariele Neudecker's vitrines in their mysterious vividness. Like Neudecker's miniature landscapes submerged in water they have an air of unreality about them suggestive of some macabre model built to frighten children. In this case though the images are of a real place.



The pictures are taken from the BBC Wales website (where there is also a video), found, fabulously enough, via the Springfield School in Sheffield who seem to be doing a project on flooding and drowned villages. Don't ask me how I came across the school's website. I think it has a link back to a post I did on Ladybower reservoir but I can't find it.

Un-Titanic

Whilst lurking around on YouTube looking for suitably gruesome excerpts from Raise the Titanic (see post below) I came across this, a meticulous model of the model used in the film. This, ahem, raises a number of interesting questions about the nature of fakes, copies and models and the way that they inevitably transform the objects they depict. Models usually miss bits out, fudge the details, change materials and make mistakes. Their wrongness is actually what makes them interesting.

As a fictionalised representation of the ship following its accident the model seen above is completely inaccurate. As Murphy makes clear in the comments to the post below, the Titanic turned completely on end as it sank before breaking clean in two. The two ends of Titanic were found some distance away from each other on the sea bed. None of this was known at the time Raise The Titanic was made so the model depicted here appears - apart from its single discreetly snapped off funnel - improbably intact.

There are other extraneous details of the video too; the TV screen in the background, the white sofa and the odd bareness of the room that testify to a life spent making too many models maybe. Anyway, that is probably enough Titanic related trivia except to add that given the combination of the spectacular nature of the tragedy, its endless repetition through film and books and its cold war connections, the name of the ship's discoverer seems perfectly appropriate.