The Wild Hunt (https://wildhunt.org/tag/architecture)
Exhausted, sweaty, and painfully hungry, I take my back into the gravel road of what must be Sōdra Ugglarp. On the horizon a long earthen-colored brick building stands against the deep blue sky, like a wall. In front of it, I notice a concrete-pit filled with horse manure. Closest to me, nearly as long as the barn, lies the stone ship, shaped by dozens of massive standing stones, like teeth of a giant rising from the green earth.
Many know the famous monuments aligned with the solstice, but there are others and some are modern.
International columnist Lyonel Perabo reflects on the meaning of Notre Dame and the conversation surrounding the fire that engulfed it earlier this month.
Psychogeography is the effect of place upon the psyche and the importance of the psyche within the landscape. The term was first discussed in the early 1950s by Guy Debord of the Situationist International, who attributed its coining to “an illiterate Kabyle.” The concept itself is simple, ancient, and foundational to an animist view of the world. In his essay “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” Debord defines the term rather dryly and pseudo-scientifically as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” The occultist and writer Alan Moore (who explores psychogeography in his graphic novel From Hell and in his novels Voice of the Fire and Jerusalem) adds another layer of nuance to Debord’s definition by emphasizing that consciousness also embeds itself into the landscape in turn: “in our experience of any place, it is the associations, the dreams, the imaginings, the history—it is all the information that is relevant to that place which is what we experience when we talk about a place.”
Outside of my dormitory room at the University of Iceland stretched a long and mostly empty expanse of land. Directly across the street, construction crews were erecting new campus buildings, but beyond that, I saw mostly empty ground: the pond called Vatnsmýri, the lawns surrounding the Reykjavik airport’s landing strip. In the distance there was a hill with a shining dome resting at its peak. The dome is called Perlan, a revolving restaurant and tourist hub; the hill itself is called Öskjuhlíð. I never had reason to visit Perlan during my visit, but I came to the base of Öskjuhlíð several times –a trail leading to the beach at Nauthólsvík runs alongside it, and I often went there to swim.