Comments by "Kim Jong-un" (@SupremeLeaderKimJong-un) on "Stewart Hicks"
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To add more context about Kijong-dong: It was built in response to the real village of Daeseong-dong in South Korea. Under the 1953 armistice, Kijong-dong and Daeseong-dong are the only villages permitted in the DMZ. Because of its location, Daeseong-dong is quite unique among the places in South Korea, as only individuals who lived in the village before the Korean War, or are descendants of those who did, are allowed to move to the village. There is a curfew and headcount as their safety is paramount, and visitors need a military escort. It also comes with benefits as residents are exempt from national defense duties and taxation and are allocated large plots of land, having some of the highest farming income in the nation.
The flagpole of Kijong-dong is because of a flagpole war. South Korea built a 100 m/328 ft flagpole in Daeseong-dong in the 1980s. In response, the DPRK built an even taller flagpole at 525 feet or 160 meters. After the DPRK built this flagpole, it was the world's tallest flagpole for quite some time! But since then, places like Jeddah, Dushanbe, and the New Administrative Capital in Egypt building even bigger flagpoles. Kijong-dong and Daeseong-dong are also the places where the two governments have placed loudspeakers towards each other in the past to convince the other to leave, whether they're spouting patriotic marches or in South Korea's case, K-pop.
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Here are other examples: The Japanese Village was built in 1943 in Utah at the Dugway Proving Ground. The purpose of the replicas of Japanese homes, which were repeatedly rebuilt after being intentionally burned down, was to perfect the use of incendiary bombing tactics. Testing on the Japanese Village coincided with the erosion of precision bombing practice in the US Army Air Force. The principal architect for Japanese village was Antonin Raymond who had spent many years building in Japan. Boris Laiming, who had studied fires in Japan, writing a report on the 1923 Tokyo fire, also contributed. The most successful bomb to come out of the tests was the napalm-filled M-69 Incendiary cluster bomb.
Not whole cities but in NYC, there are buildings used to hide subway or other important infrastructure. One of them is 58 Joralemon Street in Brooklyn. The building resembles any other townhouse on the picturesque tree-lined street in Brooklyn Heights, but the building was acquired by the IRT in 1907 for a subway vent and emergency exit for the Joralemon Street Tunnel! On Pier 34 in Manhattan, what looks like a small factory is actually a vent for the Holland Tunnel, and this same design is also on a pier on the Jersey City side. On Roosevelt Island, the Strecker Memorial Laboratory was originally built in the 1890s, closed in the 1950s, designated a NYC landmark in 1976, and acquired by the MTA in the 1990s as a power conversion substation for the 53rd St Tunnel
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For the Guggenheim: In 1943, Frank Lloyd Wright was commissioned to design a building to house the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, which had been established by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1939. Wright actually didn't want the museum to be in NYC as he criticized the city for not having "architectural merit" (guess NYC icons like the Flatiron Building, Chrysler Building, and Grand Central Terminal don't exist). Wright’s inverted-ziggurat design was not built until 1959. Numerous factors contributed to this 16-year delay: modifications to the design, the acquisition of additional property, and the rising costs of building materials following World War II. The death of the museum’s benefactor, Solomon R. Guggenheim, in 1949 further delayed the project. It was not until 1956 that construction of the museum, renamed in Guggenheim’s memory, finally began.
It took 7,000 cubic feet of concrete and 700 tons of structural steel to form the structure and shell of the museum. Various subcontractors worked together to create the one-of-a-kind plywood forms that shaped the sweeping curves of the building. The museum is constructed of “gun-placed concrete” (also referred to as “gunite”), which is sprayed into a plywood formwork rather than poured. A nautilus shell inspired the spiral ramp and that the radial symmetry of a spider web informed the design of the rotunda skylight. Eric Lloyd Wright, Frank Lloyd Wright’s grandson, was one of his grandfather’s apprentices during the 1940s and 50s, when the Guggenheim Museum was designed. He recalls, “…every Sunday at breakfast he’d give us a talk… And sometimes he would have placed before him a whole bunch of seashells. And he said, 'Look here, fellows. This is what nature produces. These shells all are based on the same basic principles, but all of them are different, and they’re all created as a function of the interior use of that shell.'” Because of the spiral, paintings can't be properly hung in the shallow, windowless, concave exhibition niches around the main gallery. And as a ten-story tower for studios and stuff to go next door wasn't built due largely to financial reasons, William Wesley Peters (Wright was his father-in-law) added a two-story one (which was downsized further from a four-story one because of resident complaints) last minute in 1968. A 10-story annex wasn't realized until the 1990s.
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