Abandoned Neo-Baroque Mansion

I had almost forgotten about this one. As I was going through some photos today, I came across the original .raw-files from this tour and decided to quickly process them.
This castle was built in neo-baroque style between 1854 and 1857.
After 1945, the building was used as the offices for an agricultural cooperative, as kindergarten and as village shop.
After the German reunification, it was abandoned for a couple of years, until an investor bought the mansion and the adjacent properties. He planned to build the mansion into a luxury hotel with a polo course, apartments and 150 residential buildings.
A long story ensued, involving subsidy fraud, foreclosure auctions, indictments and convictions.
Various investors came, but all plans and auctions failed and the castle kept decaying.

In the meantime, vandalism has taken its toll on the ruin of the once grand residence. The outside isn't even woth taking photos anymore, and from what I heard from the guys I was with, the vandalism grows worse by the week.

Windows - Abandoned Navy Barracks (Part 2)

As I've said, the location itself was not that spectatular, typical barracks.
Here's the next set of pictures.
I really liked the windows, because the look to the outside really is something. The Town of Strande, in which this location lies, is located right at the sea and time has made the trees and plants around the buildings grow, so it has a pretty surreal feeling to it.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Abandoned Navy Barracks

I have known about this place for a long time, because it is really close to my home town and right next to a "famous" light house in the region, the "Lighthouse Bülk"
The beach was/is frequently used by teenagers for beach partys and I can even remember one particular party when the soldiers living there kindly helped us out by providing electricity for our music.
For more than ten years, the teenagers have now had to find their electricity elsewhere because after the end of the cold war, there was no more use for this particular small military base.
The buildings used to be the living quarters for a navy transport batallion, typical barracks, two buildings with living rooms, offices, a sheltered basement and a relatively small bomb shelter.

Here's the first set of photos.
I haven't been doing many HDR photos recently because I didn't think that the purpose of documentation was adequately served by this method, but I found different ways of HDR processing that yielded pretty cool results, I think.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Welcome to the Jungle - Abandoned Cooling Plant Factory - Cathedrals of Steel and Glass (Part 4)

One of the things I like most about lost places is the fact that as soon as man leaves the place, nature starts to reclaim it.
And in this place, the nature has a powerful ally in the glass roofs that kind of turn the halls into greenhouses. The collapsed roofs let in fresh air and water, so the plant life can return to a place from which it was banished many years ago.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Abandoned Cooling Plant Factory - Cathedrals of Steel and Glass (Part 3)

After exploring the offices, we went downstairs and found a relatively small basement. There we found the remains of the electric control panels, distribution boards and breaker boxes. As it was pretty dark down there, I couldn't resist and got out some of my glow sticks:

From the basement, we went on to another building. It was also a huge factory hall with steel beams and lots of glass elements in the roof.
The glass in the roof and the holes in the walls and the wooden roofs of the adjacent buildings made for fantastic light effects on the floor and walls.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4