Some people looked at the concrete Los Angeles River and saw an ecological mistake. Greg Ercolano looked at it and saw a gigantic machine worth studying.
The wonderfully overbuilt acronym stands for Friends Of Vast Industrial Concrete Kafkaesque Structures.
Ercolano describes the project as a photo journal created by an amateur industrial archaeologist. He follows the Los Angeles River flood-control channel through photographs and commentary, paying attention to survey markers, bridge supports, training walls, storm drains, channel geometry, debris handling, water flow, and the sheer scale of the system.
The page is not merely a gallery of ominous concrete.
It tries to understand why the concrete is there.
Looking closely at infrastructure
Ercolano explains how urbanization changed drainage in the Los Angeles basin and why flood control became such an enormous engineering problem. He studies features that most people pass without noticing: tapered bridge supports, distance markers painted above outlets, confluences between channels, slots in the riverbed, ramps for maintenance vehicles, and the way structures attempt to manage fast-moving debris during floods.
The captions regularly wander into calculations and hypotheses. A surveyor’s number becomes an explanation of station notation. A wall becomes an excuse to think about turbulence. A bridge support becomes a lesson in what happens when a telephone pole comes downstream at speed.
That curiosity is the site’s real value.
The old Web was full of pages produced by people who decided a subject was interesting without first asking whether a market existed for it. FOVICKS is almost a perfect specimen of that instinct.
It is also a reminder that personal photography can become historical documentation. Infrastructure changes. River restoration projects advance. Neighborhoods change. What begins as one person’s strange photo journal can later preserve details nobody else thought to record.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list is full of pages where obsessive attention accidentally became preservation.
FOVICKS is industrial archaeology with jokes, trigonometry, and a lot of concrete.