Endangered Machinery

I spent six years of my life in Maastricht, a beautiful medieval city in the south of Holland and spent the first year gawking at all the beautiful sites everytime I rode my bike towards school. The other five years however were spent wishing something would happen, for example a faulty delivery putting me in possession of a sniper rifle.

These five years in a cultural vortex, however beautiful it may be, taught me to appreciate the ugly, the industrial, the urban and all architecture devoid of sentimentility. Somehow these places seem more lived in, no matter how desolate they may seem now. Like that greasy pair of jeans I've been wearing for two weeks, that has shaped itself perfectly to my legs, instead of the beautiful tuxedo I've got hanging in my closet, wrapped in plastic.

Moving towards the edges of the city of Maastricht, you can find its real beauty, for example in its old porcelain factories. Or in the old mining factories on your way to Liege, that other beautiful medieval town, some 20 km away from Maastricht.

I remember as a kid I was fascinated by a large factory building close to Liege. We drove passed it on our way to France and back. It looked like a villian's lair in a super hero comic, towering from the hills next to the freeway. It was named S.C.A.R.; it doesn't get more fitting, does it?
It was so much more interesting than the boring bridges in the sterile cities we were taught to enjoy by our parents.

Remembering this gothic industrial building I started looking on the internet for photographs. None have been found yet, but I did stumble on a great photographer's blog called Endangered Machinery. It has some great photographs of barren industrial wastelands, forgotten factories and buildings disproportoniate to their surroundings.