I've got that Sinking Feeling: Oh Oily Rocks

Sometimes, against my better judgement, I end up dating cities that can only best be described as... quirky. My recent date with Oily Rocks (Neft Daslari) was one such encounter. I had formed this somewhat romantic view of this city after read a somewhat misleading article celebrating the tenacity of her library, this unique coral conurbation lost to time, falling apart, and so terribly solipsistic....

Come on, how could you not fall in love with her? It's like an internet dating profile that keeps giving and giving, drawing you in like a moth to a flame:

But Oily Rocks belongs to neither Azerbaijan's cosmopolitan past—when the Nobels and Rothschilds made fortunes here—nor its global future. It was built in the 1940's, when the Soviet Socialist Republic of Azerbaijan was part of the U.S.S.R. and oil from the Caspian was helping to establish Communism. Oily Rocks is the oldest, biggest, strangest oil platform in the world, but superlatives fail to capture the overwhelmingly insane spirit of this place. Nothing about it is natural. The whole structure is built on platforms supported by corroded metal poles that stand in about 40 feet of water. At one time, 120 miles of raised roads connected the wells and dormitories and ancillary buildings—including helicopter platforms, a power station, and a bakery—but three-quarters of them have fallen apart. Source: here.

So there I was, on a date with the first offshore oil platform to ever be constructed in 1949. The Post-WWII Soviet regime, hungry for industrial validation, launches an impetuous urban arm 42 kilometres out into the Caspian Sea... beginning the strangest urban adventure in the sea.



Ships were sunk to be used as foundations, and 300 to 350 kilometres of pathways were built - an entire man-made city perched atop the Caspian Sea. In an ironic twist, thirty years later, the oil crisis of the late '70s would see a glut of marine-based utopias, ideal cities colonising inhospitable ocean space (and even polar ice caps) to bring new ways of living with lower dependency on oil.

But here, in the bosom of Azerbaijan's oil industry - was Oily Rocks - a marine utopia supported by oil.


All Oily Rocks images: Source.

In the end, it just didn't work out with Oily Rocks. It wasn't so much her uninspired name, or the fact that she was operating in life at a quarter of her true potential... she was just all work. Utilitarian. The best parts of her - the little grass field where kids used to play, the schools, even fountains - have all gone.

But isn't it fascinating how the more things change, the more they stay the same? Here are some recent dating invitations from artificial reefs that remind me of my horror date with Oily Rocks:


Aircraft carrier USS Oriskany, Florida. Sunk in May 2006.

The main impetus driving this recent colonisation of ocean space is eco-tourism - sunk boats, tanks, train carriages etc form artificial reefs and ideal diving sites, tourist attractions under the surface of the sea.

Below, 2 images of Jason de Caires Taylor's "Silent Evolution", a piece to be slowly colonised by coral.



Sunk superstructure of Gen Hoyt S. Vanderberg, Florida Keys


Underwater cemetery in Florida.


A Jordanian tank sunk in the Gulf of Aqaba, Red Sea.

Last six images from here.

But talking about coral build up, here's a city I would date. It's the Autopia Ampere

Source: here.

By German Architect, Wolf Hilbertz, it uses electrochemical reactions to draw sea minerals into a built mesh that then forms a city-exoskeleton of calcium carbonate in the ocean.

Now that's a sexy sea city.