@kevbob@xoxo.zone You weren’t that far off - the public safety tower is on the same hill.

With a few exceptions (mostly towers atop downtown switching offices in populated areas), no one was trying to make any of this utilitarian communications infrastructure beautiful. It was form strictly following function, built to be reliable and rugged.

But there was, I think, quite a bit of beauty to find in it. I wonder if we’ll look at our current neighborhood cellular towers, now often regarded as a visual blight, the same way decades after they’re (inevitably) also gone.

The San Jose Oak Hill Tower is unique in a number of ways. The concrete brutalist design appears not to have been replicated anywhere else; it seems to have been site-specific. It sits atop an underground switching center (that was partly used for a military contract), which explains the relatively hardened design.

Today the underground switch is still there, owned by AT&T, but the tower space is leased to land mobile and cellular providers. The old horn antennas at top are disconnected.

For much of the 20th century, the backbone of the AT&T “Long Lines” long distance telephone network consisted primarily of terrestrial microwave links (rather than copper or fiber cables). Towers with distinctive KS-15676 “horn” antennas could be seen on hilltops and atop switching center buildings across the US; they were simply part of the American landscape.

Most of the relay towers were simple steel structures. This brutalist concrete platform in San Jose was, I believe, of a unique design.

Captured with the Rodenstock 50mm/4.0 HR Digaron-W lens (@ f/4.5) on a Cambo WRS-1600 camera (with about 15mm of vertical shift to preserve the geometry), the Phase One IQ4-150 back (@ ISO 50) in dual exposure mode (which preserves a couple stops of additional dynamic range into the shadows).

The tower’s shape is irregular; it tapers slightly.

The wide angle and panoramic orientation give a bit of context, alone on a hill (which is being rapidly encroached by adjacent residential development).

@Lyle@cville.online Central Park is truly a gem.

Captured with a small full frame mirrorless camera and 21mm lens.

A six second exposure created a motion study; we can see how people move around the plaza. Or perhaps they’re ghosts.

Compositionally, this is mostly a study of circles and rings, with an imaginary diagonal radiating from the fountain to the man with the camera in the lower right.

The skyscrapers along Park Avenue in the 40’s and lower 50’s are all minor engineering marvels. They’re built atop the rail yard for Grand Central Terminal (an early adopter of the modern real estate concept of “air rights”). Many of the newer buildings are much taller than was anticipated when the terminal was constructed more than a century ago. This heavily constrains their foundations and anchor points, leading to unusual load-bearing designs such as the steelwork shown in the photo.

Captured with the Phase One IQ4-150 Achromatic back and the Rodenstock 138mm/6.5 HR Digaron-SW lens, which, unusually for large format lenses, employs a floating element integrated into the focusing helical.

This photo is a literal image of a construction site (to become the new JP Morgan building), but also an exercise in abstract precisionism and cubism. We see the new skyscraper, and the buildings in the background, essentially as a Mondrian-esq deconstructed tangle of lines and rectangles.

I have mixed feelings about Le Corbusier’s architecture (to say nothing of his urban planning philosophy - he clearly influenced Robert Moses), but I think the UN Secretariat building was one of his successes.

An aside: If you look at the full resolution version (downloadable on flickr), you can see the HF amateur radio antenna on the roof. Nerds are everywhere, even/especially at the UN. There’s also a family taking a group picture on the street in front.

The UN Secretariat building was designed by an international team of architects (most notably Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer) and completed in 1950. It was the first important “International Style” modernist skyscraper in New York - exemplified here here by a simple, unadorned rectangle with reflective glass curtain walls on either side.

Glass box office buildings became almost cliche in mid-century NYC, but the UN remains unusual in being set apart in the skyline, uncrowded by neighbors.

Love them or hate them, mid-century rectangular glass curtain buildings like this are easy to dismiss as being “boring”, but I think that misses something.

Reflections of the surroundings become part of the facade, which changes at different angles and throughout the day. I visited several times and made dozens of photos, all quite different, before I settled on this one, and there are infinitely many photos others could make, all unique. (Similar to the new World Trade Center in this regard).

Captured with the Phase One Achromatic back and the Rodenstock 32mm/4.0 HR-Digaron lens, with the back shifted down 8.5mm to maintain the building’s geometry. I brought out contrast in the sky with a polarizer, but otherwise used no color contrast filtration. The camera was positioned across the avenue about 10 meters up from the plaza level (at the bottom of the “canyon” of the skyline reflected in the bottom center of the building).

Captured with a DSLR and a 24mm shifting lens, shifted vertically to preserve geometry.

The tiny ghost town of Harvard, one of a series of often extravagantly named, largely abandoned communities along the Union Pacific Railroad and former Route 66 in the Mojave, was perhaps a victim of an Interstate highway system that passed it by.

I think the couch is still there.

“The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.”

- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.

Officially the “Ed Koch Queensborough Bridge” but more generally simply the “59th Street Bridge”, the view from Sutton Place at 58th Street on the Manhattan side is probably as flattering and uncluttered a perspective as you’ll find for this piece of NYC infrastructure.

Immortalized in song by Simon and Garfunkel, in literature by Fitzgerald, and in cinema by Woody Allen, something about this bridge exemplifies the glamor and bustle of 20th century New York in a way that still holds up.

This was captured with the Phase One IQ3-100 back, Phase One XF DSLR camera, and the Schneider 80mm/2.8 “Blue Ring” lens. I had planned to use a technical camera and Rodenstock 70mm, providing movements, but a cable was missing from the kit I had with me in the city that night. Fortunately, the 80mm was just wide enough to not require movements, though the Schneider lens renders highlights (as prominent starbursts) a bit idiosyncratically for my taste.

@stacey_campbell@aus.social yeah, the Duga site has long been on my list to visit, but that’s definitely impractical these days.

@ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org Yep. They removed that right after it was decomissioned.

I have mixed feelings about these cold war relics. On the one hand, they’re artifacts of what was perhaps humanity’s most dangerous folly to date, locking the world in a deadly game where the stakes only went up with each round. This doesn’t seem like something to commemorate or celebrate.

On the other hand, these objects, many now destroyed or decayed, serve as visible evidence of just how close to oblivion we are willing to go. And looked at from the right angle, they have stories to tell.