Preservation

Water Slides, Preservation, Ebola: What’s Ruining Our Cities This Week

Los Angeles ponders the ethics of slip-and-sliding in a drought. UNESCO is being blamed for killing the cities it protects. Ebola is slowly decimating village by village in Africa. It’s this week’s look at What’s Ruining Our Cities. A (proposed) water slide is ruining Los Angeles Urban water slides are super fun (we’ve written about…

How Long Will CDs Actually Last?

Once upon a time, CDs were a shiny new technology with a promise of lasting (nearly) forever. In those halcyon days of the 1990s, museums and symphonies began transferring their archives to CDs—a decision that in retrospect may not have been so wise. The catch is that some CDs are durable and others are not;…

The Lifespan Of A CD Is Shorter Than We Thought

It probably seemed like a good idea at the time: Instead of fragile paper or clunky disks, why not save your data to a shiny, secure CD? Fast forward a few decades and those CDs (and the data they hold) are suffering from something called “CD rot” — and researchers aren’t quite sure why. Laura…

NYC’s 3,500-Year-Old Monument Is Being Cleaned With Freaking Lasers

Cleopatra’s Needle is New York City’s oldest outdoor monument; it’s been around for a whopping 3,500 (!) years, and has spent the past 133 of those in Central Park. This spring, it’s getting gently blasted with laser beams—all in the name of conservation. The Central Park Conservancy has teamed up with the Metropolitan Museum of…

My Accidental Pilgrimage to the 1964 World’s Fair Site

When I woke up on Tuesday morning, I expected another normal day. Work. Lunch. Work. Happy hour. Home. Heck, maybe I’d even treat myself to an iced coffee at some point. I did not expect to end up shivering, staring at rust, and dreaming about the America we’d lost. I did not expect to go…

Will the shift to digital destroy movies as we know them?

Digital movies are becoming more and more popular, but some people are saying the move could destroy movies as we know them. But it’s not issues of film quality that have them worried — it’s film preservation. In response to this post on the remake of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea that almost was, a…

How Can Houston Preserve Its Aging Astrodome?

Imagine a football stadium that was so technologically game-changing that it became the model for all future sporting venues ever built. Until it was suddenly abandoned 15 years ago. As part of our series Preservation Battle, we look at significant buildings on the brink of demise—where you’ve been able to find Houston’s Astrodome for quite…

An emerging maker culture building Cincinnati, a “Green Line” making a Mexican city healthier, and a car-free festival changing L.A.—all that, plus preserving post offices in an age of email and three plans to save San Francisco from a housing crisis, in this week’s Urban Reads. “In America, nearly every city and town has, or…

Should Queens Tear Down the 1964 World’s Fair Pavilion?

Last month, officials in New York determined that it would cost $53 million to fix and restore the New York State Pavilion, the series of hulking space-age structures built in Flushing Meadows Corona Park during the 1964-65 World’s Fair. Should these deteriorating ruins be preserved? In our series Preservation Battle, we look at significant buildings…

The Architectural Trickery Used to Disguise D.C. Monument Renovations

Washington D.C. is getting old. To other countries, our nation’s capital might seem like a spring chicken, but it’s actually aging rapidly—a fact proven by the scaffolding that’s draped around some of its most important monuments this year. Smithsonian Mag’s Jimmy Stamp points us in the fascinating direction of the unique art of scaffolding, which…

The Internet Archive’s Scanning Center Has Been Destroyed by Fire

Yesterday, a huge fire destroyed the Internet Archive’s San Francisco scanning center, which digitally preserves all manner of books, films and microfilms for future use. Most importantly, nobody was harmed. And, while the Archive lost some physical materials which were in the process of being digitized, the bulk were in a separate physical archive. There…

6 Cities and Towns That Were Relocated Completely

Why is it so hard for us humans to let go? We’re obsessed with preserving the things we love—even when logic tells us it’s time to move on. One large scale example of this irrational behavior: The billions of dollars spent to move entire towns out of harm’s way. Humans have moved since they had…

Costa Rica Is Actually Closing All Of Its Zoos

Beginning in March 2014, the two government-owned zoos in Costa Rica will be closed. The country is known for prioritizing environmental conservation, and zoo closures are a major step that animal rights and environmental advocates have been supporting worldwide for years. And Costa Rica really doesn’t need artificial diversity given that the country houses 500,000…

Homeland Security Is Moving Into an Abandoned Insane Asylum

Did you know that the US government’s third-largest agency is ramping up a 20-year, $4.5 billion construction project that will turn the grounds of a former mental hospital into an “elaborate” headquarters for its sprawling network of agencies? It’s already a decade behind schedule and $1 billion over budget. In Bloomberg Businessweek, Devin Leonard describes…

These psychedelic animal specimens are unlike anything you’ve ever seen

Say hello to the technicolor dream cadavers of Iori Tomita. By combining classical specimen preservation techniques with meticulous staining methods, the Japanese artists transforms fish, squid, turtles and even chameleons into a menagerie of multi-colored hell beasts. Go ahead and take a peek — you’ve never seen taxidermy like this. The examples featured here all…

Interactive, Musical “Kendall Band” Sculpture Reborn at Cambridge’s Kendall/MIT Station

Kendall Station, the MIT stop here in Massachusetts, was once home to this musical, interactive art piece called the “Kendall Band.” Now, thanks to students at MIT, the music rings again as part of the university’s 150th anniversary. Over the past few months, members of the MIT Kendall Band Preservation Society actually disassembled the sculpture…

The Blueprint To All Our Data Is Hidden Inside This Mountain Fortress

In the snowy Swiss Alps, behind a three and a half ton door that could withstand a nuclear attack and beyond a maze of passageways, scientists are depositing a capsule containing everything future generations will need to decipher our data. The facility is the Swiss Fort Knox (really, that’s what it’s called) and the researchers…