January 26, 2010

CRAZATION

BLDG BLOG tells the amazing tale and shows the pictures: "One of the inmates who particularly stood out was Dwight York. York is "an author, black supremacist leader, musician, and convicted child molester," Wikipedia tells us, who built a colorful, Ancient Egyptian-themed instant city on several hundred acres of forest land in the U.S. state of Georgia."

He built a crazy compound and preached white people were mutants and inferior to blacks, the good ol boy sheriff came and tore it down. The entry goes on to make some really interesting points, including:

"These are sites built such that their every spatial detail is not justified by some historically rigorous academic architectural code, but because they function, psychologically, as a piece-by-piece tuning of the built environment. Add enough ornamental references together, these spaces say, and some weird new Messiah might yet someday return. It is functional ornament."

Posted by jessica hopper at January 26, 2010 10:02 PM | TrackBack