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Comment by redder23 | Hacker News Reader

I find only the very first pic somehow appealing. I do not really see any "beauty" there.

I don't think there is a word to express the melancholic fascination with megastructures, but I certainly suffer from it:

...the intricate patterns of stairs, windows, pergolas and cables, the chaotic and seemingly random arrangement of supports, the organic tumefying rust that de-patterns the otherwise perfect recursiveness...

it is the same feeling that makes one appreciate kowloon walled city and Tsutomu Nihei's superb early works, to give two examples

Same for me with large airports. There's just something about the scale that is fascinating.

Well I kind of get it when people say it, for me personally I do only see it in the very 1st pic a little.

And dystopian, not at all. There are SO MANY crazy dystopian things out there. An oil rig, for me, has nothing dystopian at all.

"Melancholic" is the right word. Like negative romance. It has a peculiar ugliness that makes me want to stare at it, to get lost in the detail, and the contrast against the relative uniformity of the water is really compelling as a photograph. There's also an element of awe at its engineering, at least for me. Growing up, my dad worked at a nuclear plant, and it inspired a similar sense of awe. It's an aesthetic that's been used in a lot of science fiction.

Contrast against this famous photo: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-24/why-the-i... which I find disgusting, though similarly detailed. Maybe it's just the whole "familiarity breeds contempt" thing.

I do think these structures are beautiful. They seem organic and mechanical at the same time. It looks like something that has been constructed to withstand nature in an incredibly contrasted way. It conjures the same amazement I have with large planes taking off, it looks like it shouldn’t work, but it does. I can understand why people don’t find it interesting, but I for one am mesmerized by it.

I think it was in the documentary Crumb where they explained how R. Crumb lovingly filled in random urban junk in the landscape, like TV antennas, power lines, traffic lights, and all sorts of clutter that many artists would elide from an attractive panorama. And yet Crumb found it somehow beautiful in this random jumbled-up morass of artificial trees. I found it admirable.

For me number 5, Draugen, is mesmerizing. I don't know the population of such a platform but seeing it from far way supported by a single pillar gives me anxiety.

Oh, why? That pillar isn't even 300m ;)

There were three shifts of 43 people there many years ago, I expect the number will have changed a little since.

I think you are conflating the quality of the photo with the quality of the subject

the first pic is probably the best photo, but the other platforms have their unique beauty even if the pics are not on par

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