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Comment by __void | Hacker News Reader

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

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"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.

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.

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

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