Amazing World Online

00:50

Couple Spends 20 Years Building an Amazing Off-the-Grid Floating Island Home

Posted By Raj on Wednesday 19 October 2016 | 00:50

Wayne Adams, 66, and Catherine King, 59, were just not going to make do with what the world has to offer for what they earn. They realized early that they wouldn’t be able to afford any good real estate options that would satisfy them. So, instead they set out to build something unique and very inspired on their own. The result is an amazing floating house which has 12 connected sections that house four greenhouses, the living quarters, a kitchen, a workshop, an art gallery, a lighthouse and a beautiful open air dance floor.

Named Freedom Cove by the couple, it weights about 500 tons, that’s a million pounds, and everything floats on the surface of the water. The house is tethered to the shore with lines instead of anchoring at the bottom of the lake. It is also very secluded with no road access and the only way to get there is by boat.

It took them 20 years to build everything by themselves and they are still thinking of making more improvements. While they are not working on their home, they earn a living through their art. Adams is a wood carver and King is a writer, painter, dancer and musician.

Image Source: boredpanda

22:08

Spomeniks: The Incredible World War II Memorials That Resemble Alien Art

Posted By Raj on Monday 12 October 2015 | 22:08

Spomeniks means monuments in Serbo-Croatian and they can be found in tranquil fields in Serbo Croatia. They look alien and at odds with their surrounding hills and farmhouses. Their beauty is in the misaligned locations. They are concrete structures that are lost in a natural landscape and conspicuously out of place. The only people who get to see these structures are the brave enough who are not scared of exploring Balkan’s nether regions.

Spomeniks: the second world war memorials

If these structures had been built today, their obliqueness would spur a lot of controversy in the world of art. Built in the 1960s and 70s, their designers must have had their imagination stretched to the limits. Former President, Josip Broz Tito, commissioned them to commemorate world war II battle sites. Leading architects and sculptors like Dušan Džamonja, Miodrag Živković, Vojin Bakić, Jordan, Iskra Grabul, Bogdan Bogdanović and Gradimir Medaković did this incredible work.

Jan Kempenaers from Belgium photographed the abandoned sculptures for a period of three years. He discovered them on an art encyclopedia in the Jan Van Eyck Academy library, in Maastricht. Zagreb, a friend, helped him and together they found a map that showed all locations of the monuments. They sought them out one by one and discovered that most of them had in fact been destroyed…and deliberately- “because they referred to the previous regime and during the Balkan war, many were dynamited,” Kempenaers says. “They refer to the fight for independence of Marshall Tito’s partisan army, who led the resistance against the German army.”

The monuments conveyed the confidence, power and strength of the Socialist Republic. In the 1980s, they attracted millions of visitors yearly for their patriotic education, especially to the young pioneers. “They were like medals in the countryside. Tito couldn’t erect figures or busts in honor of generals because he didn’t want to be seen to be favoring any ethnic group, for example a Bosnian general or a Serb war hero, so instead they made these things that didn’t refer to people.” The monuments were devoid of identity and were used to cultivate cultural togetherness. They were, however completely abandoned after the republic dissolved in the early 1990s. Their symbolic meaning was also lost.

According to Kempenaers, nobody cares about them today – both the young and old. Those who encountered him as he photographed them thought he was mad. The spomeniks are in fact crumbling: they have been urinated on and graffiti scrawled on them. They are no longer being preserved and are slowly rotting away. Kempenaers gives them back their dignity with his series of photos; otherwise, they would be forgotten and lost forever.