simulation

Photos by James Rawlings

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In his photo series Architecture of Conflict, photographer James Rawlings got a rare chance to photograph the daily life of an eerily active ghost town. England’s county of Kent is home to a collection of faux building fronts and avenues, like something from a film set, built to sharpen the response of London’s metro police in quelling an urban uprising:

Before I actually went there, the main thing that interested me was just the place itself, the fact that there was a whole town just purely built for this reason. I like the idea of it being a kind of contrived, built-up thing — an architecture meant just for conflict.

What you get is thus a kind of generalized façadism, almost out of a Hollywood Western, explicitly for the purpose of simulated urban warfare and riot suppression.

Click any of the images below to enlarge.

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IMAGE: Thomas Jeffrey’s 1762 map
of “Russia, or Muscovy in Europe”
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Larry Wolff’s Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment and Richard Wortman’s Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy from Peter the Great to the Abdication of Nicholas II can be seen as approaching the same problem from two different angles. The problem is what exactly constitutes Europe, and the position of what came to be known as Eastern Europe in relation to Europe proper. Both studies are concerned with the peculiar case of a political and geographic entity that either appeared to foreigners as “European, but not quite,” or self-consciously conceived of itself that way. In the most general terms, Wolff approaches this problem from the angle of Eastern Europe by showing how it was envisioned (and indeed “invented”) by visitors from the West. Oppositely, Wortman is interested in how Europe was understood and represented by the tsarist regime in Russia. Continue reading →