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Formal Structures is a minimalist project that shows the ephemeral nature of the plant as opposed to minerals without the presence of these.
Awaji Yumebutai Park, Botanical Gardens, Cultural Complex, Hotel and Conference Center, Awaji Island, Hyogo Prefecture, Japan.
Awaji Yumebutai International Conference Center
Architect: Tadao Ando, 2000
The Awaji Yumebutai complex deserves a few accompanying words, as I found it both highly fascinating (and photogenic), yet at the same time profoundly strange. The development originated in the massive excavation pit left behind from the construction of several artificial islands in the Osaka Bay, including Kansai Airport. The resulting scar in the Awaji hills (which incidentally became the epicentre of the deadly Hanshin Kobe earthquake in 1995) was to be replaced foremost by “new nature”, with the assignment given to architect Tadao Ando, who designed every part of the complex (including some major amendments after the earthquake).
The result is unlike any modern architecture I have seen – a fully abstracted, totally artificial representation of nature, but almost entirely devoid of the real thing. Instead, the vision realized in Yumebutai is best described as a mash-up of the Acropolis, the Alhambra, the Forum Romanum and similar monumental and hyper-geometric sites, combined with elements of cascaded renaissance water gardens such as the Villa d’Este. Nature itself is mostly present in name, such as “Sky Garden” or “Water Garden”, both made entirely of Ando’s signature tie-holed concrete, or “Shell Beach” for the tens of thousands of meticulously arranged and inlaid seashells that line the concrete bottoms of pools and cascades.
But most strange of all is the feeling that all this only exists for architecture’s sake – while the site contains several large functions such as a conference centre, grand hotel, wedding chapel and cultural and gastronomy spaces, all of these don’t even make up 50% of the constructed area, and it seems that first and foremost the expansive concrete structures that fill the hillsides are there because of Ando’s vision, rather than for any functional needs – a quite unique and at the same time unsettling perspective.
Halos being those little mandarin oranges that are making such a big splash in the supermarket because they're incredibly easy to peel. I cut one in half this evening just to see what it looked like, and voila, a beautiful sunburst shape presented itself. Something you don't see if you're just doing the peel n' eat routine.
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Testing a replacement copy of Horizon Perfekt & Superia X-TRA 400. Scanned with Pakon F135+. Still has right-end blur and scratches. The consolation is no light-banding on the left end now.
Expedition 50 Earth observation composite of the Richat Structure, also known as the Eye of Sahara and Guelb er Richat, in the Sahara near Ouadane in west-central Mauritania, western Africa.
Zoomable version here: www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2021/05/Richat_reassembled
Composite created wtih iss050e070090-iss050e070110.
jsc2017e064007
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The galaxy featured in this image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has a shape unlike many of the galaxies familiar to Hubble. Its thousands of bright stars evoke a spiral galaxy, but it lacks the characteristic ‘winding’ structure. The shining red blossoms stand out as well, twisted by clouds of dust – these are the locations of intense star formation. The galaxy also radiates a diffuse glow, much like an elliptical galaxy and its core of older, redder stars. This galactic marvel is known to astronomers as NGC 1156.
NGC 1156 is located around 25 million light-years from Earth, in the constellation Aries. It has a variety of different features that are of interest to astronomers. A dwarf irregular galaxy, it’s also classified as isolated, meaning no other galaxies are nearby enough to influence its odd shape and continuing star formation. The extreme energy of freshly formed young stars gives color to the galaxy, against the red glow of ionized hydrogen gas, while its center is densely packed with older generations of stars.
Hubble has captured NGC 1156 before. This new image features data from a galactic gap-filling program simply titled “Every Known Nearby Galaxy.” Astronomers noticed that Hubble had observed only three quarters of the galaxies within just over 30 million light-years of Earth in sufficient detail to study the makeup of the stars within them. They proposed that in between larger projects, Hubble could take snapshots of the remaining quarter, including NGC 1156. Gap-filling programs like this ensure the best use of Hubble’s valuable observing time.
Text credit: European Space Agency (ESA)
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. B. Tully, R. Jansen, R. Windhorst
For more information: www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2022/hubble-views-a-ga...