Urban shockers that clearly don’t have an eye on Feng shui…but should.
Jean-Paul Satre said it best ‘hell is other people’, which has become the go-to phrase to explain any sort of discontent or dissatisfaction we encounter with family members, strangers and co-workers. Now the phrase has turned its eye to the urban shocker.
The famous quote is taken from the 1944 play No Exit by french playwright and novelist Jean-Paul Sartre, who was a key figure in the philosophy of existentialism (and phenomenology). This particular quote is just one of many he has become well-known for.
The play begins with three characters who find themselves in hell, expecting flames and pitchforks, but instead find themselves waiting in a mysterious room, and then gradually discover that this is where they’ll be spending eternity. Alone, together. Which is where that famous line comes in.
You can interpret it in a lot of different ways, and it is often misinterpreted, as ‘other people sucking’, but the saying is actually referencing, that “hell is other people” is implicitly conditional: other people are hell for us if our relationships with them are bad. Sartre has explained: If my relations are bad, I am situating myself in a total dependence on someone else. And then I am indeed in hell.
Clearly, he was not one to put himself through ‘hell’ by giving away his power to others.
Very much a man of inward reflection, and great insight, even he would be shocked I am sure, by the way, that people allow themselves to be at the mercy of others’ foolhardy actions in this modern era.
Take the landlord who thought it was a good idea to install an advertising scaffold that blocked tenants’ windows, or, the newly constructed apartment blocks, whose balconies are facing one another in disturbingly close proximity.
Here are our top 8 urban hell pics that someone somewhere signed off on, and thought was a pretty good idea. Warning: they may inspire a move to the country.
Landlord outs up advertising which blocks all light and air
Coffee drive though vs cafe sit down
Urban hell in the making
Rando Office
Residential block in Hong Kong
Copenhagen, Urban Hell or City porn?
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
