M.J. Rose

So beautiful. So crumbling. Everything is ephemeral in our world…even stone.

Journalist Spends Four Years Traversing India to Document Crumbling Subterranean Stepwells Before they Disappear

by Christopher Jobson (COLOSSAL)

Doesn’t that look like an M.C. Escher piece?

“Across India an entire category of architecture is slowly crumbling into obscurity, and you’ve probably never even heard it. Such was the case 30 years ago when Chicago journalist Victoria Lautman made her first trip to the country and discovered the impressive structures called stepwells. Like gates to the underworld, the massive subterranean temples were designed as a primary way to access the water table in regions where the climate vacillates between swelteringly dry during most months, with a few weeks of torrential monsoons in the spring.

Thousands of stepwells were built in India starting around the 2nd and 4th centuries A.D. where they first appeared as rudimentary trenches but slowly evolved into much more elaborate feats of engineering and art. By the 11th century some stepwells were commissioned by wealthy or powerful philanthropists (almost a fourth of whom were female) as monumental tributes that would last for eternity. Lautman shares with Arch Daily about the ingenious construction of the giant wells that plunge into the ground up to 10 stories deep…”

For the rest, and spectacular photos. click here.

So stunning, so poignant.

Imprisoned in Ash: The Plaster Citizens of Pompeii

By Atlas Obscura/Salon

“Those that did not flee the city of Pompeii in August of 79 AD were doomed. Buried for 1,700 years under 30 feet of mud and ash and reduced by the centuries to skeletons, they remained entombed until excavations took place in the early 19th century…”

Click here for a gallery of incredible photographs of the plaster casts, and links to more about the world’s hidden wonders.

A beautiful representation of the theory of four-dimensional space….

(When we think of the “tesseract” we are reminded of our favorite books of childhood, A Wrinkle In Time.)

“A series of images from Charles Howard Hinton’s The Fourth Dimension (1904), a book all about the “tesseract” – a four-dimensional analog of the cube, the tesseract being to the cube as the cube is to the square. Hinton, a British mathematician and science fiction writer, actually coined the term “tesseract” which appears for the first time in his book A New Era of Thought (1888). We are not going to pretend to have given the time to his book to understand fully the concept behind these diagrams, but they are a fascinating series of images all the same (particular the coloured frontispiece featured above), and offer a glimpse into the theory of four-dimensional space which would prove so important to the development of modern physics. Although Hinton’s work was an important stepping stone in understanding four-dimensional space, the real breakthrough came in a 1908 paper by Hermann Minkowski, in which four-dimensional space was thought of in non-Euclidean terms, leading to the revolutionary concept of “spacetime”…”

More here. And many extremely strange and wonderful diagrams!