Combining photographs or everyday vernacular designs, artist Anastasia Savinova aims to illustrate patterns in built environments across major European cities as well as rural countrysides. Her Genius Loci (a play on Genus Loci, or: spirit of place) series illuminates the distinctive details and materials of each place she visits and, set against a regional backdrop of landscapes and waterways.

In some cases, it is colors that serve as unifying factors — in others: building materials and typologies. Each one manages to be at once a singular work of architecture and a montage of quintessential parts.

In a way, her pieces serve act like scrapbooks or memories, combining fragmented portions of travels to countries including Sweden, Germany and Italy. They capture those ineffable qualities usually too hard to fit into a single picture frame.

“In this project I am a flâneur, wandering around, inhaling the spirit of places and trying to visualize it,” she says of her work. “I travel, I observe and document. I take pictures, stare into the windows, watch everyday life – all this helps to build the feeling of the Place.

“Architecture and landscape are visual components of the integral image of the Place, at the same time, this image is inseparably linked with a mentality and a way of life.”

“A House on each collage is composed of many buildings, which are typical for a particular country or city, in their connection with the land and the spirit of the Place.”

The Olympics have a long history of leaving a mixed legacy in their wake but the story of Sochi is particularly strange – it was never completely finished in the first place, and is already nearly abandoned less than a year after it hosted the Winter Games of 2014.

Already located in a remote area of Russia (albeit near the country’s largest resort area), it is perhaps no surprise that this Olympic Village would not be sustainable after serving as a venue. Russian photographer Alexander Belenkiy recently visited to document the deserted architecture of the area.

His photos show what you might expect – empty streets, sidewalks, buildings and parking structures, many showing signs of degradation and disuse. Anyone who tuned into the media attention during and in the run-up to the games knows that the facilities were also in many cases shoddily constructed or incomplete to begin with. Even when the place was occupied, its buildings were haunted by stories of electrical outages as well as journalists and participants trapped in elevators and bathrooms.

Stylistically, the architecture is a strange mix of contemporary and chistorical with elements of rural-town traditionalism, resort-village detailing and decorative columns, colors and facades spanning and mixing various movements and periods. Without upkeep, though, these eclectic remixes may not be long for this world.

This was Russia’s first time hosting the Winter Olympic Games, but it had to start largely from scratch: “The site of a training centre for aspiring Olympic athletes, in 2008, the city had no world-class level athletic facilities fit for international competition. To get the city ready for the Olympics, the Russian government committed a $12 billion investment package. According to some estimates, the investments necessary to bring the location up to Olympic standards may have exceeded that of any previous Olympic games. By January 2014 the construction costs had been reported to exceed the $50 billion mark, making it the most expensive Olympic Games in history.”

Urban travelers love taking pictures, but ideal angles are not always obvious to visitors – many ultimately either stand in same hard-to-find spot or fail to take an interesting photograph altogether.

That’s where Mimi Chan and Utsavi Jhaveri step in, spray-painting a set of shoe prints around cities. These markings in turn tell people where to place their feet, point and click to capture the ‘perfect’ (if a bit redundant) image of a given monument or sight.

Starting with San Francisco and New York City, the pair found some of the project upsides included: having an excuse to wander cities (especially after dark), getting external sponsorship to cover expenses and ultimately being thanked by tourists who genuinely appreciated being told how and where to take a better picture – all that and increasingly copious press coverage, of course.

Overtly, the #noshittyphotos project is aimed at reducing poor photography via these cookie-cutter stencils, but of course it makes you wonder: does the world really need more photos taking from the same angle of the same thing? What is it about retaking the same shot that attracts people to documenting something over and over again? Does it help us remember or is it simply a way to lay our own small claim to having seen something?

(Thanks in part to contributions by urban explorer and photographer Jon Dubar)

Abandoned buildings, properties and places take on remarkably different aesthetic character and are treated differently from one culture to the next – particularly in Asian nations where beliefs about the cultural role of architecture or the whims of a dictator can vary greatly. From South Korea to North Korea, Cambodia to Thailand and Azerbaijan to Hong Kong here are seven amazing oriental and subcontinental abandonments from the Near East to the Far East, from skyscraper hotels and pod cities to shopping malls and amusement parks and everything in between – fascinating remnants of past buildings and ways to see how the other half lives.

24 Haunting Ghost Towns & Amazing Abandoned Cities – Click for More!

1) The Lawless Kowloon Walled City, Hong Kong

(Images via MirageStudio, DoobyBrain, MissMeneses and StanleyNG)

In the rogue ungoverned Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong things were so tightly packed that trash blocked off parts of buildings and many occupied apartments literally never saw the light of day, almost as if the place were naturally becoming overgrown.  Like something straight from a William Gibson novel, there were no police or building codes – there was no law. For nearly 50 years this slice of Hong Kong was allowed to exist and grow independently due to a legal technicality. After the Japanese left following the second World War squatters swarmed to fill the space, with the population at 10,000 people (living on seven acres) by the early 1970s – a combination of dissidents, outlaws and both organized and disorganized criminals. Professionals who couldn’t get a license set up shop, criminals hiding from the law thrived, and the self-organized community grew to 35,000. Then in 1993 everything changed – no one wants to deal with this lawless place anymore and it is promptly destroyed and turned into a park.

2) The Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang, North Korea

(Images via: Pbase, NomadLife, MyNinjaPlease and Vanibahl).

The Ryugyong Hotel in the capital city of Pyongyang, North Korea, was supposed to be a record-setting testament to the power, pride and ingenuity of one of the most totalitarian and self-insulating nations in the world. The building, meant to be a core monument to the strength of North Korea, was added to city maps and stamps before it was even half-built and was all set to be the tallest hotel in the world. At first the project simply ran out of funding, then as the low-quality concrete of which it was built began to sag and crack the sobering reality began to set it: the structure would need a massive overhaul to ever be completed. Now it goes unmentioned by tour guides, absent from maps and stamps, a symbolic blight towering on the capital city skyline.

3) The Pod City of San Zhi, Taiwan

(Images via Cypherone and Yusheng)

Rumors abound regarding this legendary abandoned pod city (aka ‘UFO town’) of San Zhi, Taiwan, which was supposedly built by the government of Taipei to be a luxury resort for expensive holidays on the water. Built in the 1970s or early 1980s the modularity of the designs has raised retroactive suspicions that perhaps these stacks were intended to be built vertically over time. Theories on the abandonment of this massively strange undertaken range from poor insulation in a difficult climate, the dissolution of business partnerships, the failure of a regional real estate bubble or even that so many workers died during construction that the place was abandoned as haunted – unable to be destroyed out of a cultural taboo on interfering with the homes of spirits and lost souls. See it from above using Google Maps.

4) The Abandoned City of Agdam, Azerbaijan

(Images via SeamlessTerritory and Lofiversion)

Once a capital city with over 150,000 people Agdam, Azerbaijan has been variously treated as a ghost town, a no-man’s-land and a military buffer zone in a troubled area of the world. In the 1990s it was vandalized and largely destroyed during Armenian occupation, its buildings looted and gutted and its mosque completely covered in graffiti. Currently considered part of Armenia this husk of a city sits in the heart of an area that is at the core of conflicted set of nations from Russia in the north and Georgia in the northwest to Armenia and Iran in the soutwest and south. It also sits at the curious geographical intersection of Europe and Asia, ambiguously defined as being part of both or either one of these continents. Given turmoil in the region it is unlikely to be rebuilt anytime soon – if ever – and its citizens have been displaced in all directions with little likelihood of returning home.

5) Bokor Hill Station in Phnom Bokor, Cambodia

(Images via Theo Wright, Klein Matt and Lenchik)

Bokor Hill Station is located on the mountain of Phnom Bokor, Cambodia and accessible only by a long trek across an overgrown dirt road to an elevation of 3,000 feet. At the top? The remains of a 1920s French retreat that has been deserted since the second World War including a hotel, casino, church, police station, post office, royal residences and other support structures. And today? The damage from mortar shells can be seen in shattered windows, crumbling staircases and decimated walls. The Khmer Rouge removed everything of any value – including the very wiring in the walls of the buildings. The ruins were later taken over by the Vietnamese in the 1970s before they were finally and permanently abandoned, though land mines in the area remain a danger to visitors who stray from the beaten path. Originally built due to the relatively temperate climate and wonderful views to the coast the area still boasts great sites from waterfalls to jungles and a vast array of wildlife.

6) Opko Land Theme Park in Opko, South Korea

(Images via Jon Dunbar)

Once a thriving amusement park Opko Land in Opko, South Korea was abandoned after a young girl was killed in a tragic accident while on one of the ride’s. Though the park was shut down and deserted the family of the unfortunate victim was never compensated for their loss. Most of the structures remain more-or-less intact including roller coasters, bumper cars, a pool building and various smaller rides. The top image above was taken from the highest point of the roller coaster – an ambitious location to seek out and shoot from given the partial disrepair of so much structural elements in this abandoned amusement park.  One would think they would go all the way and destroy these buildings before some adventurous building infiltrators and urban explorers hurt themselves.

7) Chiang Shopping Complex in Chiang Mai, Thailand

(Images via Tupsumato)

The Five Chiang Shopping Complex is a beautiful series of interlocked wooden structures that once constituted one of the most magnificent malls in Chiang Mai, Thailand, a city which (including sprawl) has nearly a million inhabitants. The city attracts many tourists each year who are drawn in part to local handcrafted goods such as umbrellas, jewelry and woodcarving – some of which is evidenced in the wooden decorations, balconies and terraces of this deserted shopping center. The complex was an international joint project that fell victim to conflicting political opinions and a depressed Thai economy and now sits remarkably intact but closed, locked and boarded and utterly unused. However, the local guards are reportedly quite friendly and a few kind words can let you slip past and get some essential background questions answered.

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