Architecture
The Thames and the City of London
— from Founders Arms, Hopton Street (Bankside), yesterday.
Berlin
Notes (for next time) …
It won my affection very early on: cosmopolitan, easy-going, alive with street life and cafés, art and music. It felt simultaneously safe and louche — and very, very European. History was obvious in nearly every street we walked. The area we were living in and exploring, Kreuzberg and its neighbourhood, is relatively poor and lacks pretension. It was easy to unwind there — and this despite that always present sense of the past and its burdens. A worldly city, urbane, accommodating, with a thin crust between the day-to-day and the life underground that is the past or the lot of the marginal. (The lobby area to our local U-Bahn always had one, sometimes two, much-the-worse-for-wear guys making little attempt to hide their role as drug peddlers: taking written and spoken messages hurriedly passed to them by people coming off a train or based in or near the station, like someone out of The Wire they would read or listen, rush off — or nod and carry on mumbling to the U-Bahn passengers as they flowed out of the station.)
Safe and louche, then, but with a whiff of something more just off-stage, somewhere over there …
We came home to tales of systematic car burning: Berlin's luxury car arsonists - Boing Boing. More here. And here.
So what have I taken away this first time round? Far, far less fraught than London (I could probably live in Berlin, but London would exhaust me) and with none of Paris’ self-satisfaction, it’s still re-creating itself after so many decades of the most traumatic history. Cranes are everywhere, buildings are going up, coming down, being re-purposed or awaiting their time. There’s a wealth of cultural life and diversity and much evident (relative) poverty. It’s a strikingly student-centric city and a place where ideas still matter and are actually … discussed. (How refreshing.)
We rented a flat a stone’s throw, we discovered, from Blu’s work:
I found a couple of videos of these being created:
(Blu; Blu in Berlin, 2008, here and here; JR.)
The NYT has a 2008 piece about Berlin graffiti, One Wall Down, Thousands to Paint (and they have a video, Graffiti in Berlin, here):
The city’s skyline might be defined by a Sputnik-era TV tower, bombed-out churches and the ghost of a certain wall that once split the German capital. But its streetscape is largely molded by graffiti. … The roots of graffiti culture can be traced back to West Berlin in the early 1980s, when the American-occupied sector was the reluctant melting pot of anarchist punks, Turkish immigrants and West German draft resisters. Kreuzberg, a neighborhood surrounded on three sides by the Berlin Wall, blossomed particularly well, with miles of wall space and little police scrutiny.
We walked a lot. Not because of the S-Bahn drama (my thanks to Chris and Paul, through delicious, for these links, there to greet me when we arrived :) — Economist, The Local, World Socialist Web Site) but because we enjoy that: it lets you get to grips with a city at a level of intimacy that matters. I thought I knew about the wall, but the reality of it (the 43.7-kilometres, the path it took, its utter centrality) is quite staggering. Lots to choose from on the web: “Berlin's official Internet site”, Berlin International, was useful — Where was the Wall?; The Wall inside the city; Aerial views of the Wall from 1989.
Talking with friends and then placing the divided city in the divided Germanies (‘to a West Berliner, everywhere was East’) took us mentally to the Helmstedt-Marienborn border crossing:
The Border checkpoint Helmstedt–Marienborn (German: Grenzübergang Helmstedt-Marienborn), called Grenzübergangsstelle Marienborn (GÜSt) (border crossing Marienborn) by the German Democratic Republic (GDR), was the largest and most important border crossing on the inner German border during the division of Germany. Due to its geographical location, allowing for the shortest land route between West Germany and West Berlin, most transit traffic to and from West Berlin was handled by the Helmstedt-Marienborn crossing. Most travel routes from West Germany to East Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia also used this crossing. The border crossing existed from 1945 to 1990 and was situated near the East German village of Marienborn at the edge of the Lappwald. The crossing interrupted the Bundesautobahn 2 between the junctions Helmstedt-Ost and Ostingersleben.
View Larger Map
Back in 2004, we drove to Krakow. One day, I’d like to drive to Berlin, taking the Helmstedt–Marienborn route. Driving these very non-UK distances, crossing land fought over and carved up, again and again, brings home the history.
Amongst other things, we saw the Stasi Museum. The building, numbingly dull, drained the joy from that particular afternoon. If it had been fiction, it could have been laughed off (I heard someone else say, ‘This is all like James Bond’), and it took us a while to fathom the reality behind this:
Yes, the Stasi Had a Giant Smell Register of Dissidents.
I was 10 when George Blake escaped from Wormwood Scrubs, an event which made enough impact on me then for this to pull me up short:
Back home, I was delighted to hear again Tom Bower’s 1980s documentary about Blake:
For 18 years, Blake served as a trusted and senior MI6 officer. But secretly, in 1952, he became a double agent, betraying MI6 operations and personnel to the KGB. Over the course of nine years, at a critical period of the Cold War, he destroyed most of MI6's activities in Eastern Europe. 'I don't know what I handed over', he admitted, 'because it was so much'.
More, and more links, at Stasimuseum Berlin - Stasi headquarters.
We didn’t go to the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial, the main remand prison for those detained by the Stasi. I think we should go to these places but, although it didn’t reduce me to tears (unlike the information centre at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe), the Stasi Museum was life-sapping enough for this brief stay.
We did go to the Soviet War Memorial, about which I’ve made various notes on Flickr. Immense, and immensely moving (7,000 men). Much to learn here.
Memo to self: dig out a copy of Deyan Sudjic's book The Edifice Complex and read the chapter Geoff Manaugh rates, ‘The Long March to the Leader's Desk’. (And is that red marble story true?)
Museum island, of course, and lots to explore another time. Google Maps for Berlin is not keeping up with the pace of change: the map of the area around the Palast der Republik, that area between Schloßplatz and the Lustgarten, confused me. Thanks again to Chris for the link which explained all — Brokedown Palast, a 2006 film about the Palast der Republik by Clockwise Media:
How best to respect, or remember, the past and move on?
In a spot which has become subsumed into a rather tawdry, touristy area, the outdoor exhibition at Checkpoint Charlie does a good job of bringing the history to life:
Checkpoint Charlie, 10 April 1986. Friedrichstraße The New National Gallery has been given over (until 22 November) to an exhibition, Dream Images, of surrealist and early American abstract expressionist works in the private collection of Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch. From the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin site:
The Pietzsch Collection ranks as one of the internationally most significant collections of Surrealist art, with principle works by André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Paul Delvaux, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Joan Miró, André Masson and Yves Tanguy, as well as numerous works by other artists more broadly connected to the Surrealist movement. A second important core aspect to the collection lies in works by the Abstract Expressionists in America, whose art movement rose directly from the roots of Surrealism to flourish in the New York of the nineteen-fifties. Works by important figures who have since become legends in their own right, such as Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman are all represented in the collection together with works by the great Mexicans Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.
FT review is online.
I was particularly taken by the fragments of ‘Capricorn’ (1948), included near casts of the complete piece:
(from bildertraeumeinberlin.org)
From The Burlington Magazine:
In an interview with Patrick Waldberg he [Ernst] announced with refreshing candour: 'Painting is like chess: you have to give your whole mind to it. You live in a state of concentration that is almost unbearable. But with sculpture I can relax. I enjoy it, the way that I enjoyed making sandcastles on the beach when I was a boy'.
From the LA Times:
His sculptural tableau, "Capricorn," incorporated various ethnographic influences visible in exaggerated body proportions and serenely simplified faces. But the piece also was uniquely an Ernst creation, a paean to impromptu inspiration. Everything was pieced together from cement casts of odds and ends: milk cartons cast and piled on top of each other to make the king's scepter (also reminiscent of Brancusi's undulating "Endless Column"), eggshells for the queen's downcast eyes, a cello (harking back to Cubist still lifes) for her body. Like most of his other sculptures from the '30s and '40s, this piece was seldom seen publicly until it was cast in bronze years later (in this case, in a slightly different form). … The sensibility that informed these large and small three-dimensional works was the same puckish, deliberately irrational and willfully inventive spirit that earlier led Ernst to make collages of bizarre encounters (based on illustrations clipped from magazines), fantasy drawings based on rubbings ( frottages ) from pieces of wood, leaves and other materials, and dreamlike paintings. What we tend to forget is that these sculptures also represented a revolutionary way of viewing the human body, beyond traditional Western representations of ideal or actual human figures. During the first few decades of the 20th Century, Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Ernst and others dared to raise the curtain that separated polite, normative behavior from secret and "forbidden" thoughts and actions.
The photo of Ernst and Dorothea Tanning with the sculpture (in Sedona, Arizona) is terrific:
This is a truly historic exhibition, not only because it marks a rare example of the activities, against the odds, of two sophisticated post-war German collectors, but mainly because it represents the transition of great modernist art from Europe to the USA and in so doing commemorates the incalculable damage the Nazis managed to effect upon Germany and Europe, and almost on the rest of the world, too, and finally because it represents the triumph of artistic creativity over totalitarian orthodoxy.
I’d like (almost) to end on this note of play and creativity triumphant.
Berlin, a city emergent, the contours of its past so evident, its new form not yet settled. In Berlin, I was very much aware of a living history and of living in history. Leszek Kolakowski died last month and these much cited words of his came back to me many times during our time in Berlin: ‘We learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are’.
My photos are online.
Desolate places
I remember Dom David Knowles' book, Bare Ruined Choirs, a celebration for, and lament over, the empty, roofless monastic buildings of these islands. Now, Alex has set me looking at Abandoned, a site where Uryevich collects pictures of 'abandoned plants, unfinished buildings, industrial sites. Most of them situated near to Moscow' — haunting, silent, empty places that have a melancholy weight to them, as does this one, an unfinished and abandoned Moscow hospital:
Another of Alex's links was to an abandoned psychiatric facility in Whitby, Ontario. I suddenly remembered the psychiatric hospital where, as a schoolboy, I had sometimes made occasional visits, organised by my school, to chat to patients: Powick Hospital, Worcestershire. Formerly the 'Worcester County Pauper and Lunatic Asylum', it was shut down in the 1980s but is still talked about because of the experiments with LSD conducted there. (In 2002, the NHS settled the claims of 43 former patients out of court, at a level well below the expected.)
Even without reports now online about forgotten children, Powick lives on in my mind as somewhere unhappy and disorienting. I see there is a website, British Asylums ('looking at the era of the “Lunatic Asylum” system during the 19th and 20th centuries. The site largely focuses on the asylums themselves from their origins as providers of sanctuary and care through to their demise in the dying days of the 20th century'), and a Middlesex University index of English and Welsh lunatic asylums and mental hospitals (and a lot more information besides, including a Mental Health History Timeline).
I think of John Clare (1793–1864), committed in 1837 to a private asylum and then, in 1842, to the Northampton County Asylum for the remainder of his life.
I am — yet what I am, none cares or knows, |
The punctuation adopted here is based on that in Robinson's & Powell's 1984 Oxford Authors Series edition and aims to present 'I am' as Clare wrote it. (The poem was written in the Northmapton County Asylum when Clare was in his mid-fifties.) Helen Vendler: '… because Clare was unschooled in standard grammar and punctuation, his manuscripts presented his publisher [Taylor] with the problem of "corrections." By himself, Taylor transcribed the cascade of almost illegible manuscripts (a scribe failed at the task), changing misspellings, inserting punctuation (Clare used almost none), rectifying Clare's dialect-grammar, and suggesting cuts. Clare reacted to the corrections sometimes with gratitude, sometimes with irritation. Increasingly, he wished to assert his independence; yet he depended on his publisher to see his works into print. He went so far as to try to leave Taylor and solicit subscriptions by himself for a volume that he could himself control, but he could not manage to collect enough subscribers.'
Extracting sunlight
In Gulliver's Travels, Swift's satirical treatment of contemporary science, particularly as focused in the section dealing with the Grand Academy of Lagado, reached great new heights. (On one day in 1710, Swift visited Gresham College, the Tower, a puppet show and Bedlam. How his imagination must have responded …)
The first man I saw was of a meagre aspect, with sooty hands and face, his hair and beard long, ragged, and singed in several places. His clothes, shirt, and skin, were all of the same colour. He has been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers. He told me, he did not doubt, that, in eight years more, he should be able to supply the governor's gardens with sunshine, at a reasonable rate: but he complained that his stock was low, and entreated me "to give him something as an encouragement to ingenuity, especially since this had been a very dear season for cucumbers." I made him a small present, for my lord had furnished me with money on purpose, because he knew their practice of begging from all who go to see them. (III.v)
Now, via we make money not art, news of Parans — a Swedish company specialising in designing, developing and offering products for natural lighting:
Imagine an indoor environment where the variation of the outdoors light is always present, or a house that has sunlight in every single room. Now, Parans releases the first sunlight-transporting product of its kind.
… The sunlight is collected by panels outdoors. The sunlight is then transported through fibre optic cables. Indoors, the sunlight flows out through beautifully designed luminaires.
The products consist of the light-collecting panel SkyPort, the light transporting cable SunWire and the light emitting luminaries Björk. The Björk luminaries are beautiful to use in a wide range of spaces, such as boutiques, stores, offices, entrances, etc. Almost any room is improved when natural light is introduced. The flexible SunWire cable makes installation very easy, also in existing buildings. The SkyPort panels are with standard building elements easily mounted on practically any roof.
Parans' luminaires … give a mixture of parallel light beams and ambient light, just as when the sun strikes through the foliage of a forest. This is the reason why the patent-pending luminaires are named Björk, which is Swedish for birch tree. By installing Parans system, you will be able to tell the weather even in the absence of windows or skylights, re-establishing a connection with the outside environment.
Something beautiful … (What would Swift have made of it?)
Aleatoric
Ever since I first read this on Matt Jones' site, aleatoric has remained in my head and refused to go away. So I'm exorcising it now by posting it here. Aleatoric occurs in many associations on the web (Google lists some 8,940 occurrences): there are aleatoric places ('places decided by chance'), aleatoricity is central to Psychogeography, there is (most famously) aleatoric music ('The term was devised by the French composer Pierre Boulez to describe works where the performer was given certain liberties with regard to the order and repetition of parts of a musical work'), there are aleatoric methods for creating graphics ... The list goes on and on.
Aleatory and Aleatoric — Composition depending upon chance, random accident or highly improvisational execution, typically hoping to attain freedom from the past, from academic formulas and the limitations placed on imagination by the conscious mind. There is a tradition of Japanese and Chinese artists employing aleatoric methods, many influenced by Taoism and Zen Buddhism. In the West, precedents can be found among artists of ancient Greece and later among artists of the Italian Renaissance. Leonardo da Vinci (Italian, 1452-1519) recommended looking at blotches on walls as a means of initiating artistic ideas. Aleatory (methodology) was also employed by numerous twentieth century avant-garde artists. Followers of the Dada and Surrealism (movements) produced numerous examples. Jean Arp (French, 1887-1966) made collages by dropping small pieces of paper onto a larger piece, then adhering them (to) where they landed. André Masson (French, 1896-1987) and Joan Miró (Spanish, 1893-1983) allowed their pens to wander over sheets of paper in the belief that they would discover in those doodles the ghosts of their repressed imaginations. Similarly, Tristan Tzara (Romanian, 1896-1963) created poetry by selecting sentences from newspapers entirely by chance. (adapted from ArtLex)
Jean (Hans) Arp, Collage Arranged According to the Laws of Chance, 1916–17
Torn-and-pasted papers on gray paper, 19 1/8 x 13 5/8" (48.6 x 34.6 cm)
Purchase © 2002 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, VG Bild-Kunst, BonnThis elegantly composed collage of torn-and-pasted paper is a playful, almost syncopated composition in which uneven squares seem to dance within the space. As the title suggests, it was created not by the artist's design, but by chance. In 1915 Arp began to develop a method of making collages by dropping pieces of torn paper on the floor and arranging them on a piece of paper more or less the way they had fallen. He did this in order to create a work that was free of human intervention and closer to nature. The incorporation of chance operations was a way of removing the artist's will from the creative act, much as his earlier, more severely geometric collages had substituted a paper cutter for scissors, so as to divorce his work from "the life of the hand". (MoMA)
Images of Modern Architecture from arcspace
(Image courtesy Coop Himmelb[l]au)
Because of the many requests we have had from students around the world, who cannot afford an arcspace membership, we have decided to open all arcspace full features as of January 1, 2004. arcspace
Virtual Tour of VW's Transparent Factory
Tour of VW's stunning transparent factory in Dresden, built at a cost of some €186,000,000, roughly £130,000,000 at current exchange rates.
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