Before it was abandoned in the wake of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, Pripyat was a thriving Ukrainian city with a population of nearly 50,000. The relatively sudden exodus of its inhabitants left behind a physical snapshot of the times, preserved by the absence of humans intervention for fear of fallout.

Despite the dangers of returning, urban explorers have been visiting the place for years. Some photographers use cameras mounted on aerial drones to maintain a safer distance. Other in-person visitors less concerned about safety have gone in and looted old buildings. Most, though, go simply to observe, drawn to the deserted city by those mysterious forces that attract people to derelict places — embodied history, transgressive impulses and human curiosity among them.

Such dangerous or hard-to-reach abandoned places can particularly alluring, especially when their stories are compelling. Take Hashima, just one of many Japanese islands but unusually packed with old buildings. A thriving coal-mining city in times past, “Battleship Island” once had the highest population density on planet — until a drop in coal production led to its desertion. In recent years, more and more photos and videos of the place have proliferated thanks to the internet, in turn raising questions about how much to repair, restore or change it in order to make it more accessible for an increasing number of people visiting by boat.

While some architectural artifacts in remote locations like this have been left largely alone by visitors or modified simply to accommodate tourists, others have gone through generations of much more radical change. Off the coast of Great Britain, army and navy sea forts have been turned into everything from private retreats and luxury resorts to pirate radio stations and rogue micro-nations. Here, a combination of factors, including abandonment by the government and somewhat more accessible (yet still aquatic) locations have conspired to make these structures more appealing for different kinds of adaptive reuse.

Preservation, Restoration & Contention

In central locations with more people (and thus opinions) the fate of historical places has often been the subject of controversy. In many cities, preservation of a current state tends to win out. Even such a seemingly neutral position can be contentious, though, particularly when efforts to preserve are partial or seem superficial, as in the case of ‘ghost facades‘ where only thin surfaces are saved.

Rote historicism is a simplistic default that can lead to strange and unexpected results and extreme scenarios, like cities demolishing entire buildings to “preserve” the appearance of historical skylines.

In other cases, restorations are pursued, though choosing a target point of time or period can be fraught — some buildings have been changed substantially over centuries, making it challenging to decide what aspects to restore. Either way, renovations involve modifications, which can quickly divide people who crave a kind of physical authenticity from those who embrace the notion that architecture necessarily changes over time — the situation of Notre Dame after the fire illustrates the point. Supporters of extensions and additions that don’t match the original argue that visible differences will help people in the future understand what is truly old and new, while critics note that most famous old structures have already been damaged, rebuilt and changed for centuries. There is no single solution.

Ruination, Rediscovery & Reclamation

There are people, too, who think that historical ruins should simply be left alone to decay. Along those lines, many building infiltrators and urban explorers in the United States, Europe, Asia and other parts of the world where urbex is popular follow an unwritten code to leave no trace of their presence, allowing subsequent visitors to experience a disused space as they did. There is beauty in glimpsing snapshots of history and watching nature slowly reclaim a structure.

Some abandoned places endure through careful consideration and the avoidance of further damage, but many persist in their current form simply because they are less accessible in the first place — the latter status applies to many underwater towns and archaeological sites as well as underground tunnels, crypts and caverns.

Once rediscovered, though, the fates of such places depend on where they are located and current attitudes toward ruination, preservation and restoration, which continue to change over time, much like the locations in question will do … with or without further human intervention.

In Soviet Russia, town welcome you… with retro-futuristic city limits signs that promised more than the blustery, blustering Cold War-era USSR could deliver.

The welcome is, er, radiant in Pripyat, the now-abandoned city established in 1970 to house support staff and workers at the nearby Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Pripyat’s population grew to almost 50,000 by 1986, plummeting to zero when the town was evacuated the day after the plant’s No.4 reactor exploded. Flickr user jesper karstensen snapped our lead image of Pripyat’s forward-looking sign on August 12th of 2013. Flickr user Stanislav (LieErr) captured a view of the sign from a disturbingly different angle five days later on August 17th.

Brave Nuked World

The city of Chernobyl is often confused with Pripyat though the former’s history dates back to the year 1193. Situated just 9 miles from the nuclear power plant whose name it shares, the city was home to about 14,000 people before its evacuation in 1986 – only 704 live there today. The city’s sign was erected in the Soviet era and originally featured a prominent hammer-and-sickle logo as seen in the guide book image at top. Sometime after the fall of the USSR, the logo was covered by a roundel displaying the symbol of the MHC – the Ukrainian Ministry of Emergency Situations.

Photographs taken after 2010-11 show a modified radioactivity symbol fitted in place of the MHC roundel, as seen in Flickr user Steve Messerer‘s images above. Several years later, perhaps due to the current Russia-Ukraine conflict, the radioactivity logo was removed revealing the original embossed soviet logo. The more things change, the more they stay the same, eh comrades?

Welcome to Exclusion Zone

The so-called Chernobyl Disaster spewed radioactive fallout over a wide swath of central Europe and led to the establishment of an Exclusion Zone that spread across the Ukraine’s northern border into neighboring Belarus. Flickr user Ilya Kuzniatsou (belarusian) snapped the above photo of a city sign welcoming visitors to an evacuated town. Call it passive-aggression, post-Soviet style.

You Are My Density

“Asbest is my town and destiny”, proclaims the ominously prophetic welcome sign for the mining town of Asbest, founded in 1885. If you haven’t guessed yet, they extract asbestos there from a mine half the size of Manhattan and 1,000 feet deep – how about that, Todd Hoffman? Asbest‘s population has dropped from over 84,000 in 1989 to about 69,000 in 2010… we’re not sure why *cough*.

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Out Of Limits 15 Retro Futuristic Soviet Town Welcome Signs

In an unprecedented feat of engineering, the world’s most infamous nuclear disaster site has been covered by a huge prefabricated steel arch designed to shield the world from its fallout. Made to fit over the so-called sarcophagus, a crumbling concrete and lead shelter initially erected at the site, the New Safe Confinement structure spans nearly 1,000 feet horizontally.

The original protective shell over the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant’s reactor was a hurried affair and never meant to be permanent — 4,000 people in the region were still killed in the initial catastrophic meltdown but many more were saved thanks to this hasty intervention.

In the days, weeks and months following the disaster, hundreds of thousands of evacuees and emergency workers were exposed to dangerous radiation.

At the cost of 1.5 billion dollars the new lid is also not a solution to last forever, but it is designed to last for 100 years. Weighing 36,000 tons and taller than the statue of liberty (354 feet) the monstrous structure is only partially complete — it still needs to be rendered airtight and radiation equipment is yet to be installed. The entire thing has been constructed offsite on nearby land before being moved into place.

These former battery factories once lead, er, led the way in electrifying society; now they sit abandoned in environs rife with heavy metal contamination.

The abandoned Power City Warehouse in Niagara Falls, New York began producing batteries for automobiles and tractors back in 1910. In the early 1940s, work of a classified nature was being conducted there in support of the Manhattan Project – the top-secret initiative charged with creating the atomic bomb. By the 1960s it had been bought by the Prestolite Company, who re-tolled the factory to manufacture hard rubber battery cases and to fill lead-acid batteries with sulfuric acid. The factory was abandoned in the late 1980s.

The EPA conducted a survey of the site in 2001 that revealed extensive contamination with lead, semi-volatile organic compounds, PCBs, and pesticides in the soil and buildings. Radioactive slag was discovered on the property in early 2012. Flickr user Kevin McBride (Mr Kevino) visited “The Battery Factory”, as it is known colloquially by urbex’ers, in August of 2008 to snap a small selection of photos… hope he wore appropriate clothing like, say a haz-mat suit.

Edison’s Other Bright Idea

Better buy glass company stock STAT – the former Edison Storage Battery factory in West Orange, NJ is being renovated and re-purposed into Edison Village and roughly 900 windows in the circa-1914 main building are due to be replaced.

The factory manufactured batteries for submarines, mining lamps, railroad signals and more. The Battery Building, abandoned since 1965, was the only remaining building in Edison’s once-enormous West Orange industrial complex aside from Edison’s old laboratory, now part of the Thomas Edison National Historic Park. One reason for its longevity was the special “Edison Cement” used in its construction – wrecking balls bounced off the outer walls leaving nary a dent.

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Nothing Shocking Abandoned Derelict Battery Factories

30 years post-Chernobyl and 5 years after Fukushima, we still haven’t figured out how to deal with lingering radiation in the wake of a nuclear disaster or come up with a foolproof way to protect ourselves from similar incidents in the future. Nuclear disaster-focused concept designs address everything from repopulating Chernobyl and safeguarding against radiation-poisoned seafood from Japan to living in a dystopian post-apocalyptic future where mechanical dogs scout the streets.

Self-Contained Fallout-Absorbing City for Chernobyl

People are beginning to resettle the post-Chernobyl nuclear wasteland surrounding Pripyat, Ukraine whether radiation reaches safe levels or not, and this skyscraper concept is an attempt to minimize harm, creating a sort of self-contained oasis among the fallout. The skin of the building essentially acts as an anti-radiation force field, and the ‘Unexpected Aurora’ building itself filters air and water and harvests solar energy.

HAL Exoskeleton Turned Radiation Suit

Originally designed to help people with muscle diseases, the Hybrid Assistive Limb (HAL) suit got a post-Fukushima upgrade to make it a radiation-proof suit for emergency responders. A typical anti-radiation tungsten vest weighs up to 132 pounds, making it very difficult to wear for long periods, but the HAL exoskeleton supports its weight, reducing fatigue and allowing greater access to hazardous sites.

Revitalization of the Chernobyl Zone

Another proposal for repopulating the Chernobyl exclusion zone seeks not to be entirely self-contained, but act as a framework for further development of human activity in the area, with a mono-railroad as its backbone. This rail line leads to modular train stations with emergency shower cabins and a decontamination zone, as well as honeycomb-shaped modular housing and observation towers. The development accommodates stubborn residents and curious tourists alike, providing plenty of opportunities to observe Pripyat in its new form.

Fukushima Plates Detect Radiation

After the Fukushima disaster in Japan, a lot of sushi lovers questioned whether seafood imported from the region was safe, hence this concept by German designer Nils Ferber. There’s a radiation meter built right into each plate, with LED lights to warn you if your food is dangerously radioactive. One glowing white light tells you your food contains low levels of radiation, two white lights advise caution while a large red ring tells you it’s not safe to eat. “In a society that sacrifices reason to profit, security becomes a luxury for those who can afford it,” says the designer. “The plate might become an indispensable tool of survival in the future.”

Mech Suits, Chernobyl Patrol + More by Vitaly Bulgarov

Moscow-based concept designer Vitaly Bulgarov presents a series of digital proposals for ‘The Black Phoenix Project: Chernobyl Patrol,’ ranging from semi-civilian drones to advanced weaponry systems. The artist works for game developer Blizzard and created this 3D visualization as a demonstration on speeding up the process of creating concept art with design software like Brush and SoftImage XSI. The mech designs include robotic Scout Dogs, an ‘Arachnid Tank,’ a missile-launching ‘Public Protector,’ infantry bots and an ambulance/rescue robot, and they’re clearly oriented toward a post-apocalyptic, war-torn scenario in Chernobyl rather than just dealing with radiation.

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Beyond Chernobyl 15 Design Concepts For A Post Nuclear World