The forgotten Legacy of Gustav Eiffel Mon, 26 Jan 2009 I imagined how it would be, if the Eiffel tower as we know it were just a small part of a long forgotten construction built underneath today's urban surface; And maybe there is really more than we imagine below ground. by Michael Raaflaub
Selfportrait Fri, 23 Oct 2009 This illustration was done for the Conceptart.org character of the week activity --> Chow176 http://conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=171722 by Michael Raaflaub
Project 2017 Wed, 18 Feb 2009 Project 2017
was an urban planning program concerned with the redevelopment of asian slum districts.
An enormous urban growth lead to increasing ground prices around the megacities. The government regarded the slums sprawling in those areas with increasing resentment. It intitatet Project 2017. In order to gain space, the slum dwellings were piled up one ontop another. Fearing dropping values of the new won construction spaces, the slums were surrounded by a façade of residential buildings. The "conclaves" had come into being.
Outside, the construction zones were littered with skyscrapers, expensive apartment estates and shopping malls. By and by, also the conclaves were overbuilt. The former slums disappeared into oblivion.
Also when the world economy collapsed more than one hundred years later, nobody could remember the run-down and underdeveloped parts of the megacity. Nor their obscure economic system, which has symbiotically kept alive the city and, interconnected with which, the whole world.
But the slum dwellers have survived. Buried deep beneath the urban undergrowth, they have found new means of existence. Today, they almost live like they did a century ago. Only have the neon lights over their heads become their heaven, the ventilators their suns, solely shedding light onto this long forgotten civilisation. by Michael Raaflaub
