Urban KAP above Slaughterhouse 'hood

Urban KAP - flying a kite with a camera in the city - is always fun ... the wind is completely unpredictable, the turbulences are having a blast, the high rises, power lines, streets and people are just waiting for a kite to crash into them ... and every tree is of course an evil kite-eating tree.

We've found a nice kite launch place - a disused heliport just east of Ljubljana city center, with enough open space to let the kite fly without total panic all the time ...

The heliport was used for medevac choppers - the largest Ljubljana hospital was built without one on the roof, so the choppers had to land here and the patients needed a short ambulance drive to safety ... Now a new heliport at the hospital takes all the traffic and only stories (some sad, most of them happy) remain while the nature slowly reclaims the tarmac.

The name of the 'hood derives from the slaughterhouses that once stood here; it was a degraded urban space with slum-like housing built haphazardly around the nasty industry ... the whole place was called "Harlem" - in socialist times people of Ljubljana were joking both about their city and the decadent imperialists. The yellow building in the background and the chimney is all that remains of that era.

This modern neighbourhood was built by Ofis architects (Rok Oman, Spela Videcnik Martina Lipicer, Nejc Batistic, Neza Oman, Marisa Baptista, Karla Murovec, Neli Ouzounova, Florian Frey) in 2004-2006.

Each building is divided into four identical modules, each with its own vertical communications core. There are 42 apartments in each module, varying from small to larger duplex apartment on the top two floors. The module is repeated four times with slight variations at the far ends of the building.

it's a cool place to live (one of KAP Jasa kite club members lived here and he says both the buildings and the apartments are very well done, with a nicely designed interior and a balcony) - there is a lot of open space, a couple of green areas, the Gruber canal is right there, and the views go either towards the Ljubljana old town or into the green forests of Golovec hill.

The flight went very well, despite all the traps of urban KAP, but we really need to do something about the Picavet - it was designed for a different camera; when we fly the compact Canon, it goes askew and every photo looks like this ...

Kite aerial photos shot with Canon A810 on the venerable Blue Rokkaku.