That's a beautiful photo of an extraordinary building OH.

In fact, MicShazam and me talked about it some time ago. Surely, before you posted, you read the previous 376 posts in this thread ? :confused:

I don’t have my source at the ready but I remember reading or hearing the stat that it’s 70% empty and I know that’s sometimes cited against Romania’s abandonment of communism. And in Ceausescu’s defense it was completed years after his assassination execution murder. I know that most people will think it’s ridiculous to believe it would double as a homeless shelter under Ceausescu’s form of communism but he’s a very enigmatic historic figure.

“ We will resort to Capitalism when pigs fly. Don't be quick to applaud... modern genetics have made considerable progress” -Nicolae Ceausescu

That’s a real quote.

This may not fit perfectly in the thread, but I thought it to be close enough - there's definitely architecture in the video.

Wuppertal is a city in Germany that is well known for its suspension monorail, called the Schwebebahn. It was built in 1901. In 1902, someone recorded footage of their monorail trip on 70mm film. Of course, it was originally in black and white. The film was made public by the Museum of Modern Art recently, and someone took it upon themselves to scale it to 4k, stabilize it at 60fps, and add colorization to it. Check it out, really cool stuff.



Hard to believe the film was recorded 118 years ago. Almost seems like a different world. To put it in perspective, this monorail was built 30 years after the carbon arc light was invented. 30 years after the first practical electrical light, Germany was building flying trains (in an age without computers, laser-measurements, and drones to scout terrain). Just incredible.

For comparative purposes, here's a side-by-side video where you can see the footage above, compared with what taking a trip around on the same monorail looks like today

Wow, incredible stuff. That definitely fits in here. Some solid structural engineering to say the least. Looking at how they tied those footings into the buildings and the use of webbed beams I thought how amazing that it's all still there, then I checked the wiki and it looks like they've done some major reconstruction in the early 00's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuppertal_Schwebebahn

Yeah, I'm not sure about the monorail itself, but much of Wuppertal was damaged in the allied bombing raids of WW2.

That's all they mention of it besides being closed during the war, but I'm sure if one were to dig further they could find more.

Your video clips are fascinating, Soundgarden, especially this one that shows how the system is still in use today, a fact which surely vindicates the design of a very unusual method of urban transport:-

For comparison, here are some pics of more conventional elevated inner-city railway lines:-

London: sometimes the brick railway arches are put to good use, but that's more the exception than the rule.


New York: what was once an intrusive solution to city traffic has redeemed itself in part since the development of the Highline Walkway:

https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/c...11187_orig.jpg

https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/l.../22/101188.jpg....https://untappedcities-wpengine.netd...lsea-NYC-2.jpg

Bottom Line: Rather humdrum scenes after Soundgarden's Wuppertal video, I'm afraid :(

https://i.postimg.cc/tgbm8XMR/0-D157...EAD4-BA1-A.jpg

https://i.postimg.cc/B6XyBmz2/E35911...-A26785-CD.jpg

I hiked up there once many moons ago.

That's a very neat piece of construction: I'm assuming it's modern and built as a viewpoint, not what the used to do in the Meteora region of Greece, which was to overcome construction challenges to build religious retreats:-

Speaking of monorails:
(if the whole thing requires too much patience, skip to 2:30)