(Images: Kenta Mabuchi, cc-sa-3.0; András Gyõrfi (inset), cc-3.0)
Have you ever envisioned a publishing company dedicated to the reinvention of abandoned buildings? The concept is the brainchild of Gregory Crawford, who recently launched a Kickstarter project in a bid to fund his book, Fall Apart Park, and a publishing company called The Afterwords Archive. The project will offer creative transformation proposals for abandoned buildings and places, through a combination of fiction, non-fiction, journalism and photo-essays, while adopting repurposed materials.
Fall Apart Park
(Image: Jordy Theiller, cc-3.0)
Fall Apart Park stems from the dichotomy of failure and opportunity that symbolise abandoned places. Blending fiction and non-fiction, the book takes place inside an abandoned city which has been repurposed as an educational and entertainment park themed on decay, transformation and rebirth.
(Image: shibakouen hamutaro, reproduced with permission))
“As visitors to Fall Apart Park, the city is seen as a complex organism undergoing deep change,” Crawford explained. “Subtle and overt, playing with paradoxes, it’s complex and clean, it’s colourful and stark, it’s beautiful and revolting.” The book is at once a critique of modern design and an exploration of the psychological implication of built spaces on the human psyche.
(Image: András Gyõrfi, cc-3.0)
Approaching design and sustainability in radical new ways, and adopting what Crawford describes as “creative wordsmithery”, Fall Apart Park suggests alternative forms of design including startling ways to interact with the built environment. Projects referenced range from ecocities and eco cathedrals to seasteading, open-source ecology and death of the coral reefs.
(Image: Ari Moore, cc-nc-sa-3.0)
The electronic version of the book, to be downloadable under a Creative Commons license, will include hyperlinks to embedded projects, people and places, allowing readers to tap into real life communities and experiments.
The Afterwords Archive
(Image: NOAA’s National Ocean Service, cc-sa-3.0)
In addition to Fall Apart Park, Crawford intends to launch The Afterwords Archive, a publishing company under which future books about abandoned building reinvention will be released. In the spirit of adaptive reuse, the books themselves will also be crafted from repurposed materials, while the ink and tapioca glue for bindings will be home-made.
Gregory Crawford needs to raise $4,000 by June 5th in order to fund the projects, and supporters are welcome to make donations on his Kickstarter page. At the time of writing, more than $2,600 have been pledged. Sample chapters of Fall Apart Park are available at DoYouBreakGrids.com. You can also find the “how-to transform abandoned buildings” manual at Appropedia.
