urban tree rings

June 13, 2017 7:35 AM

What thirty years of graffiti looks like, as taken from the walls of cultural centre Doornroosje (Dutch Wikipedia) in Nijmegen. Imgur album by Paul de Graaf.
posted by MartinWisse (11 comments total)

I wonder if graffiti wall chips could be polished up like Detroit Agate or if they aren't hard enough?

Also, I always thought it would be awesome to do the same thing with the walls of the theater in my high school. Every year, the set got repainted a couple of dozen times, from the black it was for normal classes, to the set for a drama class play, to black, to set, to black, etc. I always figured those walls must be getting actively thicker over time with all that paint.
posted by jacquilynne at 8:20 AM on June 13, 2017 [1 favorite]

I have a dim memory of seeing something on the news where they did this with somebody's oil paint palette.

I'm 100% behind graffiti removal.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 8:26 AM on June 13, 2017

I'm 100% behind graffiti removal.

From TFA:
This is "Doornroosje", the location where I took the piece from. It's a Graffiti Hall of Fame in the city of Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

Seems like the sort of place you could leave it up, maybe.
posted by agentofselection at 8:49 AM on June 13, 2017 [3 favorites]

It looks like the cross-section of a jawbreaker.
posted by dudemanlives at 8:54 AM on June 13, 2017 [1 favorite]

This is how historic preservationists determine what colors historic buildings (particularly interiors) were painted [pdf]. It can be tricky, as the composition of historic paints and finishes can degrade dramatically over the years, but there usually aren't nearly as many different layers as that graffiti sample.
posted by Rock Steady at 8:56 AM on June 13, 2017

Wow! Looks a lot like Fordite, “old automobile paint which has hardened sufficiently to be cut and polished … formed from the buildup of layers of enamel paint slag on tracks and skids on which cars were hand spray-painted.” I’ve seen some cuts like this from the old Psycho City wall in San Francisco.
posted by migurski at 9:51 AM on June 13, 2017 [1 favorite]

Wow! Looks a lot like Fordite, “old automobile paint which has hardened sufficiently to be cut and polished … formed from the buildup of layers of enamel paint slag on tracks and skids on which cars were hand spray-painted.” I’ve seen some cuts like this from the old Psycho City wall in San Francisco.

Came here to mention the same, just to learn you beat me.
posted by Samizdata at 10:46 AM on June 13, 2017

Northwestern University has a campus landmark known simply as "The Rock", and for decades it was painted again and again, often nightly, sometimes more than once a night, by frats and sororities and other campus organizations.

They moved The Rock from it's original location a few feet to one side some number of years ago, and in the process managed to chip off some of the layers and layers of paint. I managed to snag a chunk and still have it. As far as I know, The Rock still gets painted all the time.
posted by briank at 10:54 AM on June 13, 2017

Came here to mention the same, just to learn you beat me.

Since Fordite and Detroit Agate are the same thing, technically I beat both of you.

Just sayin'
posted by jacquilynne at 1:17 PM on June 13, 2017

Heh, one of the items for the University of Chicago scavenger hunt several years ago was to strip the Rock. A handful of Scav teams launched a joint operation in the middle of the night and drove up to Evanston armed with cans of paint thinner. As it turns out, turpentine is useless in removing latex paint, BUT the Rock gets painted so often that the inner layers never fully cured. We ended up using a butter knife from the dining hall to pry off long flakes of rubbery paint. I still have a chunk in a box somewhere, it's pretty but probably wouldn't polish up as nice as Fordite. I'm curious where solid spray paint falls on the Mohs scale.

Also, this seems like a pretty well-documented landmark. It would be really cool to create a more accurate timeline by matching up the paint layer colors to historical photos.
posted by yeahlikethat at 1:28 PM on June 13, 2017 [2 favorites]

There's a wall like that ("students paint as school tradition") at Ohio University, as well.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:34 PM on June 14, 2017