Friday, August 29, 2008

Beauty in Destruction

Its funny...just yesterday in my printmaking class we had a great discussion about Beauty. Defining it, questioning it, trying to understand it. It was brought up that often beauty can be found in the midst of destruction. The storm I found so beautiful last night, turned out to actually be really devastating. When I was riding my bike to school today I got a glimpse of the power that storm unleashed on Tempe. I heard a count that over 200 mature trees on campus were ripped from the ground. Debris was everywhere, broken branches scattered, mud and standing water filled the sidewalks. Apparently there were 100 mph winds and tons of rain dropped in just a few hours time. One report said there were 1,500 lightning strikes in just one hour. ASU just recently finished building a new 8.4 million dollar indoor football practice bubble/dome. In the storm it collapsed and ended up blowing into Tempe Town Lake. Thousands of people are still without power. Cars were crushed, houses destroyed, windows blown out...so much destruction. This really is the worst storm I have ever experienced in the valley.

2 comments:

Larry and Karri said...

Larry took some video on his cell phone about a car at ASU that got totally smashed from a huge palm tree that fell on it. Too bad for the owner.

As for beauty in destruction - I was on a friend's photography website/blog the other day and she did a photo shoot of something kind of similar - "Trash the [wedding] dress." It basically entailed wearing a wedding dress in a swamp and other unusual places you'd wear a dress. Interestingly though the pictures were pretty cool.

Breanne said...

Wow, just as I'm writing this, a storm has just majorly intensified outside.
What I was going to say was I watched that same storm in amazement, but didn't know of all this damage and I live next door to Tempe! I just knew a bunch of power poles came down in the valley.
It's crazy how quickly things can be destroyed -- it puts things in perspective sometimes.