Show Caves of the Nouveau Riche
I've got a new post up on io9 this morning, and it may or may not be of interest to BLDGBLOG readers.
It's about what the world might look like if Hollywood celebrities, hip-hop moguls, international financiers, and so on got addicted to digging tunnels...
So they start excavating multi-million dollar show caves beneath their mansions in London, drilling vast catacombs throughout the Hollywood Hills. Robert Downey Jr. Colin Farrell. Ludacris.
Even Bob Dole.
It's the show caves of the nouveau riche.
It's about what the world might look like if Hollywood celebrities, hip-hop moguls, international financiers, and so on got addicted to digging tunnels...So they start excavating multi-million dollar show caves beneath their mansions in London, drilling vast catacombs throughout the Hollywood Hills. Robert Downey Jr. Colin Farrell. Ludacris.
Even Bob Dole.
It's the show caves of the nouveau riche.
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!! oh man, what a thought...
When I lived in Los Gatos in the late 80s, my neighbor, Steve Wozniak dug a cave in the hillside in his back yard and held "grotto" parties.
Was anything in that article actually true?
Everything will be true someday...
i have this recurrent dream in which I find the cellars of my parents house suddenly grow extensions. removing some wooden boards I discover rooms and vaults filled with artifacts and secrets.
when i rise from these mysterious cellars again, neither the house nor the site are the same as before and I shake in horror, setting out to discover what mutations the subterranean abyssus has caused...
I wake up sweating, asking myself "will it really be true someday?"
Claus, in that case you have to read an older post here on BLDGBLOG: The Undiscovered Bedrooms of Manhattan! Seriously.
It's about the apparently universal dream in which a building "suddenly grows extensions," as you write. I think you'll like it.
Hey Geoff, thanks alot for the link! i followed your blog for some time, but that post is new to me.
You're right, the dream seams to be universal. the hidden and the subterranean might just be so much more a teaser to people than the ever-popular highrise projects...
Geoff,
"The Undiscovered Bedrooms of Manhattan" is hilarious, seriously. I had this sort of dream a million times. It has to be encoded in the human beings somehow.
Have you got my mail?
this isn't as far off as anyone thinks...
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/magazine/02design-t.html?ex=1354165200&en=c973a8fa7dad8884&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
this isn't as far off as anyone thinks...
Or as new: the Medmenham Monks (aka the Hell-Fire Club).
Modern troglodytes also like to plant a little greenery to brighten up the place: the Great Tennessee Marijuana Cave.
Mentioned above, Steve Wozniak, inventor and co-founder of Apple Computer, had experts from the California Academy of Science build a show cave in the hillside of his back yard in Los Gatos, California back in the 80s. Read about it here:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/09/03/REGFOKRGQ623.DTL
We've got a case of this happening in Liverpool in the early 1800s created by one eccentric merchant called Joseph Williamson.
The mainline train route into the city cuts through this place, called Edge Hill, giving quite a neat cross-section of the remnants of his system.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williamson%27s_tunnels
Late commenting, but of course this only continues a long tradition of cave-like dens for the rich and famous...in 1630, the Earl of Pembroke is said to have spent 10,000 pounds on his grotto at Wilton (roughly a million and a half USD now) dotted with artificial stalactites, carved marble bas-reliefs in watery themes, statues that wept and moved, and jets of water to surprise the ladies...an archaic version of the home theater.
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