This is a place I've been itching to return to for a while, since the first time around I only had time to scout a bit. While it's been done to death by the local yokels, I nonetheless wanted to do it for the bizarre, tacked-together industrial architecture and the challenge of entry. Wasn't easy, but as the man said, there's always a way in.
La Rhodiaceta is a classic case of a major factory being done in by a combination of changing economic circumstances, unreasonable labor demands and strikes, and incompetent management. It has stood derelict for almost 40 years, and while its original parent firm still exists in some mutated form or another in the way that only nebulous French zaibatsus can, the terrain has stood uninhabited except for taggers, birds, and an electrical supply firm that rents a side building.
So I was pleasantly surprised when I found the front gate to the main concourse wide open, and realized that, rather than having to set up an improvised mess of packing crates and construction detritus, one of the graffiti artists had been so kind as to leave a ladder against the back wall of the secondary building through which I got to start my ascent.
I'm pretty sure that this whole thing started out as a small factory hall, with additional construction tacked willy-nilly onto it over the decades. I cannot begin to state just how massive, cavernous, expansive, you-name-it, the place is. It is absolutely vast, with much of it reaching six to seven floors up from the lowest cellars. It's also in piss-poor shape, but that's understandable given that it's been sitting derelict for so long. And absolutely none of it makes any sense whatsoever.
N.b. you'll please forgive the occasional clumsy tone mapping, I'm still working out how to use it to even out the lighting without having it come across cartoonish.
And of course the obligatory xan_asmodi spiral (sort of) staircase:
More, as always, at kosmograd.net.
EDIT: DATE: LAST WEEKEND.
La Rhodiaceta is a classic case of a major factory being done in by a combination of changing economic circumstances, unreasonable labor demands and strikes, and incompetent management. It has stood derelict for almost 40 years, and while its original parent firm still exists in some mutated form or another in the way that only nebulous French zaibatsus can, the terrain has stood uninhabited except for taggers, birds, and an electrical supply firm that rents a side building.
So I was pleasantly surprised when I found the front gate to the main concourse wide open, and realized that, rather than having to set up an improvised mess of packing crates and construction detritus, one of the graffiti artists had been so kind as to leave a ladder against the back wall of the secondary building through which I got to start my ascent.
I'm pretty sure that this whole thing started out as a small factory hall, with additional construction tacked willy-nilly onto it over the decades. I cannot begin to state just how massive, cavernous, expansive, you-name-it, the place is. It is absolutely vast, with much of it reaching six to seven floors up from the lowest cellars. It's also in piss-poor shape, but that's understandable given that it's been sitting derelict for so long. And absolutely none of it makes any sense whatsoever.
N.b. you'll please forgive the occasional clumsy tone mapping, I'm still working out how to use it to even out the lighting without having it come across cartoonish.
And of course the obligatory xan_asmodi spiral (sort of) staircase:
More, as always, at kosmograd.net.
EDIT: DATE: LAST WEEKEND.
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