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his one is a photostory illustrated by more than one picture. Or, at least, I think just one picture does not produce the desired effect. Something like that…

I visited the South periphery of Amsterdam for something completely different.

I was looking for the Peregrine falcon pair that is breeding, year in, year out, on the high-rise building of one of the Dutch banks (no point in making publicity for them in this context).

The weather was quite gray and the falcon was staying very high and not descending anywhere near for me to get a decent photo.

That made me start to wander around this very new part of the city. A place of high-rises, skyscrapers and in general the most hideous architecture a (deviant) human mind can conceive.

At first sight, all buildings looked to be leased offices or corporate headquarters, though I started to discern among the concrete casting poured all over it, some places where someone had tried to give it a semblance of humanity, just to underline that that spot was not a sterile office inhabited by 9-to-5 working ghosts, but a human residence of sorts.

Level upon level of gray concrete, jutting angles, receded cubes, as if a gigantic kid had been playing with construction cubes and then, appalled by it all, had thrown everything on a big pile without any order or harmony.

The only thing that distinguished a group of levels from the other were the coloured glass balcony fences that had been used in a vain attempt to liven up the horrible concrete pile.

I thought the best effect would be to render the gray shades of the walls in black-and-white and only enhance the colour channels of the balconies.

The idea was to externalize in a more clear way the absolute sense of dismay and alienation I would feel if I had to live there.

I don’t think many people have a very large choice when trying to find a place to live and also not everyone likes the same, but these dwellings (I still find it difficult to see them as “homes”) made me think of a beehive (“alveare” in Italian; “alveari”, plural).

Though I admire Nature and thus also the real beehives and their industrious inhabitants, I could not find one single positive quality to the buildings, well maybe except they were new…

Within less than 20 minutes I managed to get from a state of euphoria (while looking at the aerial acrobatics of the hunting Peregrine falcon) to a total dismay, bordering to depression at the sight of those buildings.

A sight that every time makes me wonder where human race is actually heading to…

Nowhere good, I fear.