Urbex
March 11, 2013 3:55 PM   Subscribe

Excuse Us While We Kiss The Sky. [Single page view] "By day they work as computer programmers and stock boys and academics. But at night they are known as urban explorers. The Brooklyn Bridge, London's Shard, Notre Dame—each structure is an expedition waiting to happen. Each sewer, each scaffold, each off-limits site is a puzzle to solve. No wonder the cops are after them. Matthew Power embeds with the space invaders and sees a world—above- and belowground—that the rest of us never knew existed." [Via]
posted by homunculus (17 comments total) 30 users marked this as a favorite
 
A few more sites of interest:

Place Hacking / Bradley L. Garrett

Ejectable (Marc Explo)

The Eye of Silence (Urban Fox)

Silent UK (Otter)

Matthew Power
posted by homunculus at 3:56 PM on March 11, 2013 [2 favorites]


And a few more that have inspired me for good measure:

Scott Haefner

Joseph Carnevale

There are also a ton of flickr groups about exploring, and a few very active forums for those interested in this sort of thing.
posted by stilldavid at 4:19 PM on March 11, 2013


London has got to be a trippy place to be a piece of architecture. It's got a shard, a gherkin, and an eye. I don't think any American city has as interesting a skyline, from a strictly nominal point of view.
posted by hwestiii at 5:00 PM on March 11, 2013 [3 favorites]


Somebody I follow on Instagram just posted some amazing photos this weekend of her exploration of an abandoned mental hospital in upstate New York. I don't know where this is (though I expect it's known in urban exploration circles) but damn would I love to look around in here.
posted by Flashman at 5:26 PM on March 11, 2013


I'm actually sad that instagram has become "the place" to post photos of excursions like this. for a few summers i was very in to urbex and went to a number of different spots, including an abandoned mental hospital and attached bizarre farm.

I put all my photos on flickr(which for some reason, are now gone) and loved browsing through other peoples high res photos on there.

Now it's all low-res stuff with some filter applied on instagram.

I seriously think both the people who took them, and others simply browsing in a few years will be disappointed with that choice, once the unaltered originals have long since disappeared.
posted by emptythought at 5:41 PM on March 11, 2013 [3 favorites]


I put all my photos on flickr(which for some reason, are now gone)

if you don't have a paid account, flickr will store all of your images but only allow you to see the latest 200. If you sign up for a paid account you can access and download all of them for backup then go back to free if you want.
posted by jacalata at 5:59 PM on March 11, 2013 [2 favorites]


"Garrett is a proponent of infiltrating "live sites"."

Next time he's down in the sewers, I'm thinking of "infiltrating" his abode and wandering around it for a while, messing with his stuff.
posted by HuronBob at 5:59 PM on March 11, 2013 [1 favorite]


We used to do some minor Urbex when I was a student. Nothing as cool as the catacombs though. I can understand the attraction of exploring areas where access is limited.
posted by arcticseal at 6:00 PM on March 11, 2013


I work in construction and have worked in heritage buildings, museums and galleries, which are the types of places that people into urbex like to explore. I get the desire to see what you don't normally have access to, and I often get into this myself, but it is kind of weird to see people post photos of construction sites and the insides of buildings that just look like my work. It stops feeling very exciting when you spend five or six days a week there.

Having said that, some of these are just cool.
posted by deadwax at 6:21 PM on March 11, 2013


It stops feeling very exciting when you spend five or six days a week there.

Yep. But it's also good that the n00bs learn what we do, because most people have no fucking idea where their stuff comes from.
posted by localroger at 6:58 PM on March 11, 2013


Inside the Hell Gate Bridge.
posted by adamg at 7:33 PM on March 11, 2013


I was really into this sort of thing -- well, enthusiastically following it, anyway - around the early oughts when Dark Passage was becoming very active. It wasn't the scaling heights thing that interested me but simply the visiting and "discovering" of closed-off/defunct urban space. I'd still really like to find a way to do more of it myself, but it's one of those things that's quite a project - research, planning, documentation, followup. A very, very cool approach to urbanism though.
posted by Miko at 7:44 PM on March 11, 2013


"Garrett is a proponent of infiltrating "live sites"."

Next time he's down in the sewers, I'm thinking of "infiltrating" his abode and wandering around it for a while, messing with his stuff.


There was an old Something Awful thread where somebody wrote about breaking into a house in the style of an urbex trip report.

In Australia people go 'draining' - exploring storm drains and tunnels. You can see some interesting stuff but if you go at the wrong time you can die. The Cave Clan is the most famous/notorious draining group.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 1:00 AM on March 12, 2013


Next time he's down in the sewers, I'm thinking of "infiltrating" his abode and wandering around it for a while, messing with his stuff.

There was an old Something Awful thread where somebody wrote about breaking into a house in the style of an urbex trip report.
i've been running this around over and over in my head and i've come to the conclusion that the only way it makes sense is if people from something awful live in sewers
posted by This, of course, alludes to you at 6:12 AM on March 12, 2013 [1 favorite]


Ugh, i wish i could find that SA thread. i was just thinking about classic SA threads like that, and i can never find them when i think of them.
posted by emptythought at 1:05 PM on March 12, 2013 [1 favorite]






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