UNDERGROUND CITIES

Their article ‘Underground Cities’ is about what is happening beneath our feet and beneath the surface of everyday life. For decades earth has been scooped out of the undergorund, tunnels were driven, tracks were layed, spaces opened and closeed again, stories were told and forgotten. As Wim Wender said: ‘In a million years when no one will be around anymore to even remember us faintly, some of these places will. Places have memories. They remember everything. It’s engraved in stone…’. With this in mind Dan Barasch and James Ramsey created ‘The Lowline’, a park in the underground of New York. Across the Atlantic, another residual that’s recently surfaced is now London’s hottest venue: The Old Vic Tunnels which is today a centre for theatre, music, dance, and art to meet and collaborate. In Berlin local creatives will recognise MUMA (MUsic and MAchines), the disused East Berlin power station built in the first half of the 60s. Now gutted, the deafening sounds of spinning turbines have been replaced by the bone-shaking reverberations of TRESOR’s techno beats rumbling out of the basement of this monstrous concrete cavern. Doubtlessly there’s a plethora of unseen lairs awaiting conversion for underground creative outfits. Whether we look at spaces for cultural experience or actual living quarters – the answer is clearly not limited to building up, but examining down. Though decades and centuries may have past, these places once felt the touch of human hands and they remember and who knows what breath-taking spatial solutions await us beneath the surfaces of our quotidian treads.

All images © Guilherme Zühlke O’Connor, Raad Studio, Alan Tansey | Via: mb! by Mercedes-Benz