2024 06 20
Soon, the tallest building in the United States will be in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma (pop. 700,000).
Soon, the tallest building in the world will be in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (pop. 4,000,000), surpassing the current tallest building in the world located in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (pop. 3,400,000).
I’m not sure what, exactly, the meaning is, but there has to be a correlation between late-stage-capitalism and the rise of inequality to the locations of the world’s tallest buildings. It would be interesting to see a graph of the tallest buildings in the world per capita.
List of skyscrapers per capita, as found on a random page on reddit:
UAE - 36.09
Monaco - 25.61
Qatar - 19.58
Singapore - 16.39
Panama - 15.45
Bahrain - 12.05
Malaysia - 8.72
Australia - 5.82
South Korea - 5.37
Kuwait - 3.64
One thing I learned about the UAE by going there is that nobody wants to be outside, so it kind of makes sense to build upwards. That said, I’ll bet that within one hundred years, many of these buildings which have popped up like weeks in Dubai will need to be demolished as it will be cheaper than maintaining them.
-Clayton
Downtown Atlanta, Georgia. May, 2024. © Clayton Hauck
Soon, the tallest building in the United States will be in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma (pop. 700,000).
Soon, the tallest building in the world will be in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (pop. 4,000,000), surpassing the current tallest building in the world located in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (pop. 3,400,000).
I’m not sure what, exactly, the meaning is, but there has to be a correlation between late-stage-capitalism and the rise of inequality to the locations of the world’s tallest buildings. It would be interesting to see a graph of the tallest buildings in the world per capita.
List of skyscrapers per capita, as found on a random page on reddit:
UAE - 36.09
Monaco - 25.61
Qatar - 19.58
Singapore - 16.39
Panama - 15.45
Bahrain - 12.05
Malaysia - 8.72
Australia - 5.82
South Korea - 5.37
Kuwait - 3.64
One thing I learned about the UAE by going there is that nobody wants to be outside, so it kind of makes sense to build upwards. That said, I’ll bet that within one hundred years, many of these buildings which have popped up like weeks in Dubai will need to be demolished as it will be cheaper than maintaining them.
-Clayton
2024 05 04
This blog post is being written from my studio office, which is inside the Kimball Arts Center. Before I signed the lease on this space, I spent a few years searching, scheming, and dreaming about buying a building which I’d then convert into my own space. This building, pictured here for sale off Elston Avenue, is kind of exactly what I was looking for. The problem was, anything I could find that fit what I needed was either a) well over a million dollars and out of my budget or b) so far away from anywhere I wanted to be that it didn’t make sense.
One building popped up and looked promising, however, I knew it would need some work (as they all do) so hired a brick guy to come out and look at the space with me. Upon arrival, he told me he’d crossed the street to avoid walking next to said building because the condition was so bad he figured the top my topple over at any moment. I got the point and didn’t make an offer on the $400,000 property, which seemed like a great deal at the time.
Before we got to this point, I’d gone to scout out the building and the surrounding area myself. While wandering the nearby alley, a man yelled to get my attention from a dark rear vestibule. Clearly a man down on his luck, sleeping on the floor with a wheel chair next to him, my suspicions were high but I nonetheless approached him cautiously. He asked me to help him get up into his chair. This is when I noticed he didn’t have any legs and the only way he was going to get back into his chair was with the help of someone passing by, such as myself in this moment.
What do you do at this point? Your only choices are to make some jumbled excuse and leave the man helpless on the ground or do your best to get him back up into his chair, so that is what I did. That’s the story of how I held a homeless man in my arms while trying to scout some cheap real estate to fulfill my professional photography career dreams.
Fellow photographer Noah Kalina recently joked on social media that the only ways to get rich in photography these days are to either win a copyright infringement lawsuit or buy real estate in Soho in the 1980’s. So funny, sad, and true.
That building is still standing, however, the ornate stone crown atop the structure, which my inspector was worried would collapse, was nowhere to be seen the last time I drove past. Be careful where you’re walking.
-Clayton
A man walks down Elston Avenue. Chicago, Illinois. March, 2024. © Clayton Hauck
This blog post is being written from my studio office, which is inside the Kimball Arts Center. Before I signed the lease on this space, I spent a few years searching, scheming, and dreaming about buying a building which I’d then convert into my own space. This building, pictured here for sale off Elston Avenue, is kind of exactly what I was looking for. The problem was, anything I could find that fit what I needed was either a) well over a million dollars and out of my budget or b) so far away from anywhere I wanted to be that it didn’t make sense.
One building popped up and looked promising, however, I knew it would need some work (as they all do) so hired a brick guy to come out and look at the space with me. Upon arrival, he told me he’d crossed the street to avoid walking next to said building because the condition was so bad he figured the top might topple over at any moment. I got the point and didn’t make an offer on the $400,000 property, which seemed like a great deal at the time.
Before we got to this point, I’d gone to scout out the building and the surrounding area myself. While wandering the nearby alley, a man yelled to get my attention from a dark rear vestibule. Clearly a man down on his luck, sleeping on the floor with a wheel chair next to him, my suspicions were high but I nonetheless approached him cautiously. He asked me to help him get up into his chair. This is when I noticed he didn’t have any legs and the only way he was going to get back into his chair was with the help of someone passing by, such as myself in this moment.
What do you do at this point? Your only choices are to make some jumbled excuse and leave the man helpless on the ground or do your best to get him back up into his chair, so that is what I did. That’s the story of how I held a homeless man in my arms while trying to scout some cheap real estate to fulfill my professional photography career dreams.
Fellow photographer Noah Kalina recently joked on social media that the only ways to get rich in photography these days are to either win a copyright infringement lawsuit or buy real estate in SoHo in the 1980’s. So funny, sad, and true.
That building is still standing, however, the ornate stone crown atop the structure, which my inspector was worried would collapse, was nowhere to be seen the last time I drove past. Be careful where you’re walking.
-Clayton