Creature of the Shade

always touch the water

Portland

My job is constant travel, so the question is always: "How do I know where I am?"  

GPS is not the answer, because what I really mean, I think, is:"How do I be with (or in) the fact of where I am?"  How do I escape the erasing effect of travel, the grim sensation of "no matter where you go, there you are"?  How do I arrive in each moment with some joy at new possibilities, new sensations, that couldn't have been gotten where I was? 

One answer is to fixate on people, and on certain pleasures of human contact that technology can't replicate.  Another is to fixate on landscape, which this blog shows me to be doing constantly.  For example, my obsession with botany, and especially plant identification, is simply a way to see immediately how this place is different from that one.  An awareness of evolutionary patterns, manifested in the genetic "closeness" of physically distant plants, fuses the necessary sensation of distinction and uniqueness with the equally necessary awareness of connectedness to forge a felt sense of "here."

Another is to touch the water.

It's been my ritual for many years that when visiting a coastal city, I must touch the water.  I'm not much of a swimmer or beach-lazer, so this contact requres an intentional ritual.  The situation doesn't much matter, though obviously a relatively pristine beach is preferable.

You would think, from all I've said, that the real purpose must be to contact something unique to this location.  But salt water is everywhere, and feels and tastes pretty much the same everywhere.  Indeed, nothing is more homogenizing, more crushing of distinctions that matter to us, than the sea.  It helps that cold saltwater is a clammy, unpleasant sensation; like all metaphorical voids, the sea is not there to please us.

I touch plants, too.  I'm not literally a treehugger but while walking I often reach out to touch leaves, and occasionally pause if that sensation is interesting.  

So why water?  Things present themselves most intensely right at the edge of their absence.   This is the intrinsic drama of the urban waterfront -- so much complexity right up against what reads to us as vast emptiness.  Touching a large body of water is a contact-with-the-infinite that intensifies the richness of the finite.  So, after touching the water, I turn back -- to the city or landscape that was behind me -- and can how feel (not just know) that I'm seeing something that is vulnerable, contingent, even doomed sooner or later, and therefore real.  

It's not just that I'm seeing past what the power of architecture wants me to see.  Touching the vastness of the city's physical edge -- cold saltwater -- is as close as I can come to seeing the city's jagged temporal edges of creation and doom.  I'm seeing the waterfront city superimposed on its ruined (or underwater) condition centuries from now, and on the landscape that was there before it was born.  I can see the city's power and beauty as inseparable from its vulnerability and transiece, as though it were a flower.  

In other words, I can see it.

permanent weather and the civic image

Vancouver

Rain in Seattle.  Sun in Los Angeles.  Fog in San Francisco.  Wind in Chicago.  The endless summer nights of Helsinki or Edinburgh.  How could we navigate without our stereotypes of the urban air and sky?

In his odd novel Voyage to Pagany, the great modernist poet (but not novelist) William Carlos Williams tells of a self-absorbed man riding through Europe by train.  In Chapter XIV (adequate fragments here) he's delayed in the middle of the night in Genoa.

Genoa.  The name sounded hollow, depressing as the coldly sulphurous gallery through which he was passing, baggage in hand ...

The placename is a sponge for first impressions, and never quite shakes them off.  For Williams's hero, "Genoa" means "night, don't know anybody, don't speak the language, poor me."  Or to reduce this (literally) benighted city to one sentence:

I will never see the sun in Genoa.

But here's what's odd.  When I read this chapter in graduate school, the only experience I'd ever had of Genoa was of passing through it at night on the train.  In fact, that remains my only experience of Genoa, so that even now, when someone says "Genoa" I imagine a city at night.  Northwest Italy isn't high on my list of travel destinations, so it's quite likely that I too will never see the sun in Genoa, and hence never dissociate the city from this absurdly accidental recollection.

Professional thinkers-about-cities would never reduce their impression of a city to a story of something that happened to them there.  But everyone else does this quite naturally; when I ask a person on the street what she thinks of a city, she'll often mention some joyous or traumatic recollection, presenting that as her permanent definition of the place.  We urbanists are supposed to take pride in having a larger, grander view.  But I bet most of us carry these silly but useful attitudes, at least when we get fairly far down our personal list of Cities We Want to Think About.

Right now, you see, I don't feel a need to expand my awareness of Genoa, except to the extent that I want to expand my awareness generally.  I wouldn't pass up an expense-paid visit to Genoa in the daytime, and would surrender my prejudice happily if I did.  But failing that, the prejudice is working for me.  It's painting a relatively unfamiliar part of Europe with a few touchstones of mood.  Thanks to these quick associations, my near-total ignorance of northwest Italy, while still near-total, is packaged and marked with a couple of personal baggage tags, so I can haul it around as a familiar without having to look inside.

The baggage tags are personal, but they're also authorized by the Greater Truth of Literature.  Anyone can pass through a city at night, but I passed through Genoa at night just as William Carlos Williams's hero did decades ago.  I have a similar tag stuck on Bologna, where I once had a scare of thinking I had missed a late night train connection and would be spending the night on a station bench.  I'd have forgotten the episode by now had Robert Dessaix's hero not had exactly the same experience, in his fine novel Night Letters.  Nonfiction lies all the time, but fiction makes no truth claims and therefore can never be disproven, so it can sell itself as "Access to Deeper Truth" even when it's just the whining of a man stuck in a train station.  Williams and Dessaix tell me that I wasn't alone in my nocturnal and unwanted visits to Genoa and Bologna, that these experiences actually Resonate with the Human Experience.  So I remember them.

Thus authorized, it feels good, at least to me, to permanently associate cities with atmospheric conditions and their related moods.  Even dealing with cities I know well (Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles) I find a pleasure in wrapping each in the stereotypical weather condition (rain, fog, sun, respectively) and experiencing all variations from that as an engaging nuance.  For cities I don't know it's even easier: for me it's always night in Genoa.   These simplifications are silly but useful in maintaining a firm structure on which more interesting thoughts can sometimes sprout.

Now and then I notice myself consciously choosing a new atmospheric prejudice.  I was in Chicago over Memorial Day weekend 2011, and would like to declare that hereafter, I shall consider Chicago a city where towers loom in ominous chilly fog and thunderstorms. 

On my stay there I had two days of that, followed by two days of hot sun.  The fog and storms, I decided, are the Chicago I want, because they allowed me to experience the downtown skyscrapers as overpowering, exactly as they were intended. Structures vanishing into the clouds are not just tall, but unknowably, maybe infinitely tall.

Chicago was built to turn a vast frontier into commodities and profit.  The dramatic starburst of rail lines emanating from it look like force-lines of a blast, so to be at the center of the blast is, well, like the end of a science fiction film when we finally get inside the Center of Ominous Power.  I wanted it to be grand but in mysterious, overpowering, intimidating way.

My ideal Chicago, in short, is a meteorological projection of a conventional story about what makes Chicago unique.  So I feel briefly wise, though actually just prejudiced, when I look at my images of Chicago in such conditions, as though the city is telling me a story I want to hear ...

In such a perfectly symbolic city, a photo that might otherwise be a joke, "Christ the Steakhouse," isn't funny at all.

Nor can "Time" be just the name of a media corporation.

Then the sun came out, and it was all flatter, more like a city anywhere in the midwest.  On a long hike north from the loop, Michigan Avenue looked like Singapore's Orchard Road, Lincoln Park looked like a number of great midwestern city parks, the Clark Road business districts looked nice or not-nice in familiar ways, and the only glorious uniqueness was that my hike ended at a well-known religous site for green urbanists: Wrigley Field, a Major League Baseball Stadium with Practically No Parking.

By then, it was too dark to photograph, so as I sorted photographs in an about-to-close Starbucks in what would have been the shadow of the stadium walls, I thought "this is nice, Wrigley Field at night," which is perilously close to "Wrigley Field is night."   And indeed, not being much of a baseball fan, I'll be fine if I never see the sun there.
 

berlin: the river, the wall, the garden

1.

Say the first word that comes to mind. “Berlin.”

Wall.

That shows my age, of course. As of November 2009 the wall has been gone for 20 years.  I look at my fellow passengers on the U-Bahn subway. That clutch of birdlike teen girls tittering together. The three slouching male teens, maybe watching the girls but pretending not to. The tall, thin early-twenties man, suit and tie, briefcase in lap, hands folded on briefcase, his whole manner stilled and yet not calmed, as though he’s posing for a painter while his judgmental father looks on.

None of these Berliners remembers the wall.  The wall that used to divide Berlin now divides generations: those for whom it's a story, and those who remember.   

After pleasant days admiring cute-because-long-dead Hapsburgs in stately Vienna and Prague, I knew Berlin would be return to the present, if not the future.  Imagine traveling across a continent and finally bursting out onto a beach, half of your sphere of perception suddenly blank. That’s what the future looks like if we get the whole continent of the past behind us: just a flat line and empty space that can mean boundless opportunity or death, whichever suits your mood.

We never get the past behind us, but no city tries to do so more intently than Berlin. The city’s chaotic shape bears witness to a recent past so wrenching that to remember fully would be to succumb, again and again, to the paralysis of shock. No mind can grasp what Berlin has endured in the past century, not just the devastation of two world wars but the transcendent sense of disgrace that surrounds the second, and then, a coda, the surgical atrocity of the wall.  Even reunification brought its traumas. The sudden mixing of what had been separate, like the rush of water from a failing dam – even that struck the city with some destructive force.

Fortunately, there is always a new mass of the young, erasing history as only the they can do.  Year by year, their unremembering energy pries open a space where the next Berlin can be born.

2.

So as middle-aged tourists do, I went looking for the wall. In Potsdamer Platz, where skyscrapers soar over high-concept malls, I noticed a long parklike space between two rows of buildings, an obvious axis in the urban structure. Ah, I thought, that must have been where the wall was. Surely planners meant to mark its location with this grand axis in their new district.

So I asked a bus driver who was lounging nearby. “War der Mauer hier?” “Nein,” he said. No, It was there, see?

He pointed to a double-row of bricks that ran across the space, jagged and seemingly random like the Yellow Brick Road of Oz. It emerged from right under his bus, careened diagonally across the strong grid of the park and vanished under a building. So this was the opposite of commemoration. Nothing about Potsdamer Platz reflects the shape of the wall, or even refutes it. No line of the new city is parallel to it, or even perpendicular. The designers of this space wanted the wall forgotten, all its capacity to influence denied.

I can imagine the feelings about the wall that must have driven post-unification urban planning here, because at the same moment in late 1989 I was watching a similar conversation about a taller but lesser ruined wall: the double-deck Embarcadero Freeway that blighted the downtown waterfront in San Francisco. After the 1989 earthquake damaged the structure beyond repair, most San Franciscans were eager to see it torn down for good. But in one meeting, a group of young architects stood up and said, wait, this is going to be part of our city’s history, it should be marked somehow. They proposed saving a single arch from the structure: just two pillars, and the crossbeams of the freeway’s two levels, with rebar and broken concrete hanging out of them, an intentional modernist ruin. Nobody wanted to hear it.

So it’s impressive that we even have the Yellow Brick Road to mark where the wall was.  Interrupted by many new buildings, ignored by all of the new urban structure, the wall survives as two rows of stones wandering drunkenly like a lost time traveller, sometimes in the street, sometimes on the sidewalk, sometimes lurching on a diagonal across some new square whose designers were consciously heedless of it ...

….  as if “consciously heedless” were not a contradiction in terms. We remember, or we forget, but if we remember, the memory shows in what we do, no matter what we intend.

3.

Berlin has no center, of course, nor even a central constellation.  At the rough midpoint of the city is a district called Mitte, not the center but just the middle, the midst. The years of division required two of everything, and today the resultant doubling still dominates the urban form. Thus West Berlin came to focus on its main boulevard, the Kurfürstendamm, which looks like any high-end shopping street in the developed world apart from the preserved bombed-out church that gazes down its axis ...

Meanwhile, downtown East Berlin was Alexanderplatz, an orgy of gray modernism marked by Berlin’s tallest structure, the communist-built but capitalist-inspired television tower with its requisite observation deck.

The doubling continues in the pair of museum districts. The West built the Kulturforum, which from some angles manages a disturbing resemblance to a dead suburban shopping mall.  

… while East Berlin inherited the city’s "Museum Island”, a jumble of monumental buildings in clashing styles that all face different directions, each ready to be an Arc de Triomphe for its own grand axis. Individually, they are perfectly handsome and much-loved buildings, but jammed together as they are, they look like a bunch of conductors who’ve lost their orchestras.

Photo:  By Ksaraf at Wikipedia

4.

So in this doubled but suddenly unified city, it fell to government to forge a new oneness, to announce, both symbolically and practically, that Germany was one nation and one people. Little remained of the old government sector but the ruined Reichstag or national parliament. Built in the 19th century, partly burned in one of the key episodes in Hitler’s rise, and finally bombed out as the Soviet army closed on Berlin, its shell was a rare surviving symbol of Germany as a nation. So after reunification they restored its exterior, like a sacred historic vase, and then filled it with the sleek 1990s work of Sir Norman Foster, capped by a flamboyant dome.

The remodeled Reichstag is Berlin in microcosm. The structure represents cultural and national continuity, but its bombed-out and reconstituted innards speak at once of both the intensity of the pain and urgent impossibility of its forgetting. There is no Norman Foster glamour-job without the shell of the Reichstag, and no shell without the still-shocked memory of the Nazi years.

But the Reichstag now feels like a gateway or foil to the much more remarkable building just to its north, a rare case of true modernism doing something that only modernism can do.

No reader should trust me, of course, on the subject of modernist architecture. I have always felt threatened and vaguely insulted by its straight lines and blank spaces that deny the organic shape of both nature and history.

As a university student I hated buildings that created dead expanses of neutral, useless space, faced with unwelcoming walls.  Berlin’s Neuegalerie by Mies van de Rohe provides a nice example, but you can find the same on any campus in the western world.

But adjacent to the Reichstag, and part of it in a way, is a group of new government buildings that could only have been done in a modernist vein.  They consist of the Paul-Löbe-Haus and Marie-Elisabeth-Lüders-Haus, but they read as a single composition. They sit at one of the most painful crossroads in Berlin, the point where the wall crossed the main river, the Spree, and walled it off for a short distance.  Anyone who has lived in a great river city will feel at once what a sacrilege a wall along the river must have been. Today Berlin is exuberant in celebrating its river, so where the exuberance crosses the path of the wall, right next to the Reichstag, we have a very sensitive spot.

My first awareness that I was near the spot was a reflection of the German flag in a much-divided glass building face. The flag is just three horizontal stripes: black, red, and yellow. But its form in this window kept shifting and half-rotating, like a woman under the gaze of cubist painter. 

The distorted flag appeared to fly on a ziggurat-shaped building made of nothing but steps.  I was looking at the reflection of a flag on a corner of the Reichstag behind me.  The ziggurat effect was a gridded distortion of the Reichstag itself, formed by the not-quite-flush panes of glass in this new building in front of me. To confirm how intentional this is, a real stairway echoes the illusory one.

These new government buildings are designed to feel like single structure interrupted by the river, almost as though they were a dam that had burst.   Here's how they look on Google Earth, with the Reichstag just to the south of them.

Where the river breaks through, the buildings present a range of faces featuring very large circles and echoing circular arcs.  Note the running man on the far shore for scale.

The Spree flows through carrying bicycles and pedestrians on both sides, and boatloads of tourists and revelers. The building stands like a wall that has parted for them, or been blasted open.  The blank sides of the building are at their blankest right next to the river’s opening. Only at sunset do they seem anything but austere.

 

Looking back from the river toward the Reichstag is an especially striking effect: a warm glass cylinder in the new building on the right, and the old Reichstag tower on the left, but between them a blank modernist wall, as though separating, or interrupting, or pulling apart. 

If you want symbolism here, it's obvious.  Between the optimistic 19th Century builders of the Reichstag and the equally optimistic Germany of today lies a century so horrific that only cold blank space can refer to it.  Here is one place where only modernism will serve.

Those crosses by the river? A small cluster of memorials to East Germans shot to death while trying to cross the wall near this point. 

Their specificity seems to clash with the civic and national themes being worked out in this complex building. To me the clash is more awkward than enlightening, but of course we are not entitled to enlightenment.

North of this building are two other sacred places that feel very much part of the composition.  North and west stands the hypermodernist Berlin Hauptbahnhof, the main railway station, designed on such a massive scale that it feels a bit like a cathedral of German efficiency and modernity. 

North and east is the "Parliament of Trees against War and Violence" by Ben Wargin, a peculiar small garden rich with memorials with an edgy, low-budget feel. 

 

 

The text above is as close as words can come to a moral for all that Berlin has suffered: "We cannot make culture out of politics, but perhaps we can make politics out of culture."

5.

In the end, Berlin stands alongside Los Angeles as one of the world's great postmodern cities: divided, centerless, protean, distracted, and reliant on very shallow roots.  Both cities lack the foundational civic certainty provided by abundant pre-20th-century history, a history that everyone can revere because nobody cares about its motivating quarrels anymore.  Paris, London, Vienna and Prague all rest securely on that kind of history, and although they are full of irony today, irony is safer when your city has a solid core of identity, rooted in a long history, that no modern arts can undo. 

In Berlin, by contrast, the distant past is a void when it isn't a joke.  (If you want a medieval village, for example, you'll have to make do with the Nikolaiviertel, a twee communist-designed medieval district built mostly in 1987.)  Berlin's modern history has been so destructive that there are few grand old memories to anchor the traumatic younger ones.  So even as the city grows and prospers with German efficiency, it manages always to seem bombed out, torn open.  Deconstructed, the postmodernists would say, but that word sounds dainty compared to what happened in Berlin, and how it still feels today.

paris: there will be no miracles here

For the first time in 18 years, I've been back to Paris, and have had a chance to review the impressions it made when I lived there as a student in 1986, and visited for the last time in 1991.  Inevitably, however much I've followed the news -- immigrant riots in troubled surburbs, new metro lines, bike rental systems, EuroDisney, high-speed trains, new museums and libraries -- I still see through my impressions of the city I knew 23 years ago. Those impressions can never be fully over-written because they formed the categories that organise my experience of the city, and categories, by their nature, lurk partly unseen in the life of the senses. 

For example, the very essence of a Parisian boulevard in my memory contains the burning acidic smell of car exhaust, because serious emissions control for European cars came only the 1990s.  I knew it would be different now, but I also knew that the new impression would never shake off one I formed first.  I will always notice the relatively pleasant air quality now, always be comparing it to that of the primal Paris of my memory. 

Because the first impression of a place -- regardless of the age at which it occurs -- is a childlike moment, and no life experience can change how we were formed as children.

As I wandered the city these three days, I noticed all the ways that Paris continues to thicken and enrich itself, things you might notice returning to almost any city after two decades' absence; the air is cleaner, pedestrians are safer, public transport is even more abundant, and of course there are new buildings and, in Paris in particular, new grands projets; every President since de Gaulle has had to add one or two cultural and architectural icons to the city.  For the capital of a country with so many profound social and cultural problems, Paris feels clean, strong, sure of itself, though of course it's always projected confidence even in darkest years. 

But here's what really matters:

 

1.

On a main street lined with local shops far out in the southeast, I come upon a man who seems to hold not just a paper cup but also a key to the city.  He rests on his elbows and knees, head down so we see only the short-cropped black hair, no face.  His lower arms fold forward from his elbows and his wrists fold again, twist upward with the anxiety of a screw, to hold the paper cup.  He seems, from what little I see, to be clean, well-groomed, not clearly young nor old.

He also seems carefully anonymous, showing no identifying features but the back of a head that could be that of a million French men.  So it seems possible to take a photo, to preserve and share what he's offering, without betraying or exploiting him.

His pose expresses natural anguish in way that's actually quite composed, sculptural.  The styrofoam pads he's improvised -- and notice how carefully placed they are -- suggest that he's ready, like a meditator, to hold this pose for some time; certainly he doesn't move a muscle in the three or so minutes I watch.  There must be some serenity inside his anguish.

He seems to quote a specific tradition of Parisian begging.  In the Paris of the 1980s I recall young men in striking kneeling positions, as though constructed by a choreographer, head always down though not as completely concealed as this man's is.  The practice then was to write on the pavement, with chalk, an explanation of the beggar's circumstances.  These ran to a paragraph or two, often so long that interacting with such beggars was like perusing a museum.  Look at the man briefly, form a slight interest.  Then, read the text next to him, which tells his story in terms of dates and mishaps and relationships and ideologies, like an earnest museum tag.  Then back to the folded man himself, notice his clothes, his hair, his stance, the combination of suffering and dignity he's conveying.  Perhaps glance down the line comparing him to others nearby (for they often appeared in groups, as though perceiving each other as colleagues, not competitors.)  Finally, make a decision, centimes or francs.

As with everything, things have sped up.  This man begging in 2009 lacks an expalantory text, but I still see the composition, the intention, the search for dignity on the very point of suffering.

Were his face not concealed, of course, I'd never have taken a picture -- nor left a few euros in his cup after doing so.  The concealed face superficially means shame, of course, and it also makes him everyman; he might look up and turn out to be someone we know, or even ourselves.  But beyond those obvious readings the concealed face asks us to see him in his entire body, as a dancer does.  The hackneyed word expression comes to mind, and I dismiss it.  All bodies express, especially without faces to distract us from them, but the outward energy of expression is almost the opposite of this man's condition. 

Is he taking the pride of a performer in how well he's constructed his shame?

No, that's not the most interesting question, becuase as with all great art I can say little about artistic intention.  Yes, the styrofoam pads look designed, and the sheer power of the effect suggests composition to me, but that's my cynical theatre-trained eye getting in the way.  Am I sure this man is a beggar at all, rather than a theatre student or performance artist?  No, but in Paris that doesn't quite matter.  Parisians simply do not police a hard border between pretense and authenticity, or for that matter between art and life.  Everything is both, all the time.

Whoever he is, I believe he's in pain, and that he's working.  Parisians have an especially visible way of doing that.  To people intent on avoiding pain, it looks like a sort of insult, a showing off.  The British in particular find it maddening.

2.

Though my walk largely avoids tourist centres, I do plunge into the Latin Quarter, where there's a shred of a medieval street pattern -- mazes of very narrow lanes.  It's all touristed to the teeth, always has been.  But I come back because I attach to streetnames as well as to streets, and at the heart of this maze is a tiny lane, less than two meters wide, called Rue du chat qui pêche ... the street of the fishing cat.  It's one of those rare names that cuts straight through all the posturing and egotism of typical street names to elicit a pure moment of life centures ago.  The street gives out onto a quay on the left bank of the Seine, and once, no doubt, it was just a muddy track through filth down to the river.  But someone noticed a cat, enjoyed watching it fish, built some lore around it, and hurled it toward eternity.  (Wikipedia advises that the street was named for a pub, but of course that doesn't erase the cat, just sets it at one remove.)

It's just an outdoor hallway, really.  In one direction the explosion of light at the end blinds all else -- a slice of a vast display on the walls of the Police headquarters across the Seine, 30-foot high images of happy police offiers in all their earnest diversity.

But the walls of the street itself are rich with artistic claims, some not even signed, like this clownish face claiming "La rue est à nous" -- the street is ours.  Unsure if this nous includes me, I can feel embraced and rejected in the same gesture, an consummate Parisian sensation. 

And there are signs of the usual energies of the theatre world, like this poster, which in every detail is something I might have encountered on this spot 23 years ago.

Almost any night in Paris, at least since the 1970s, it's been possible to find an evening of theatre in which attractive young performers get naked for some concept of social change.  Translated literally, the title sounds painfully banal:  "I buy!  Or the decadence of a consumer society." You just can't say that with a straight face in English; at least not in 2009.  But then in English you wouldn't end a business letter with "We pray you accept the assurance of our most distinguished sentiments," as I was taught to do in French.  For better or worse French is a language of excess, long defined by a kind of emotional arms race in which the most intense and overwrought word must be used for expressing the most desiccated quantum of feeling.  It is your right as a Parisian to be presumed to be feeling the most deep and refined emotions, even when buying toothpaste.

 

3. 

At one point in my wandering, I stumbled out of Saint Lazare railway station into the 9th arrondissement, a frankly rather tedious collection of Napoleonic facades and fast-moving streets full of rushing businessmen. 

But almost by chance -- though surely part of some planner's design -- I stumbled onto a gallery, one of those long, high spaces that runs right through a building, or even through several, lined with shops.  This particular gallery had the odd feeling, not uncommon in American shopping malls, that as I moved deeper into it the artifice was falling away, as though at any moment I might be among the rubbish bins.  Fashionable shops gave way to less fashionable ones, and unphotographically baroque embellishments to the architecture also fell back to something that looked unremodelled, dusty in an appealing way. 

Names applied to intersecting hallways, for example, spoke of a marketing mood that might have moved shoppers over a century ago.  But now, where the Galerie des Variétés met the Passage des Panoramas, a half-painted electrical cord dangled between them.

As the artifice declined so too did the value of things for sale, until I reached a kind of terminal economy in the darkest and mustiest section, where rubbish bins really were imminent.  Entire shops devoted to old postcards, for sale for a euro or two apiece.  And finally, topping even that, tray upon tray of tiny, abundant, but now useless things:  Coins from before the euro, still just a decade or two old so hardly collectible. Defunct cards that once commanded telephone calling plans.  And I thought: We have achieved a dictatorship of the proletariat.  Here are their millions of tiny disposable sceptres.

 

4. 

As time ran down, I knew with increasing urgency that I had to get back to Parc des Buttes Chaumont, deep in the city's east, to close some loop with my memories.  When I lived there in the 80s, it was still easy to get mugged in the downscale eastern third of Paris, so there was always a certain frisson to trips to the Buttes.  Getting there also involved using a small out-of-the-way metro line, the "7bis," and emerging, ideally, out of one of Guimard's flowers at Botzaris station, as though I were a stamen.

Paris is mostly flat or gently sloping, but there are two isolated hills, big chunks of volcanic rock not yet digested by the slow work of river and wind.  One is Montmartre in the north, once an arts ghetto, now a tourist ghetto.  The other is Buttes Chaumont, which few tourists have found.  Here, the steep rock has been carved to create a lake with a very tall island -- really a pillar of rock perhaps 20 m high -- with a viewpoint on the top, linked to "mainland" by a high pedestrian bridge.  Paths wind along cliff-faces, sometimes crossing fast-falling streams.   It's a classic spectacle of sheer verticality, such as one expects in California or Switzerland or New Zealand but not in Paris.  Parisians love it, and fill it with all kinds of self-directed expression. 

So here, a cafe in a park makes no big deal of having a wonderful collection of old hanging lamps, all seeming to guard a sensuous but sickly-green blob rising through the counter -- poised right on the treshhold between plant and animal. 

And there's nothing remarkable about a block of scaffolding on a hillside announcing, in English, that there will be no miracles here.  (The yellow police tape is a nice  touch.)

There will be no miracles, so there must be art.  In Paris, art must be everywhere.  It's as essential to urban life as parking meters or fire hydrants.  It shows that we're working, and in pain.

netherlands: the welcoming square

What have I seen in the Netherlands? A nation bent on constructing an industrious and sensible serenity. Content that architecture be simple, square, firm, becuase the opposing impulses (sex, death) are already there in the rippling water of the endless urban canals.

Because water will always destroy right angles, whether in the shimmering instant of reflection or the grinding eternity of subsidence.

When architecture just to the south was exploding with riotous embellishment, the Protestant Dutch picked up a few pleasant curved lines just at the roof, nothing to take too seriously. While the endless filagrees and trumpeting heralds on a Hapsburg roofline announced the stability and glory of the imperial power, the Dutch could announce their power in sheer restraint. At home on tenuous land that is always sinking unevenly beneath them, the Dutch saw no higher sign of God's favor than a house that wasn't slowly leaning into the street, and whose windows were still square.

Even modernist architecture in Holland saw beauty in the right angle, where other modernisms saw only the barren chill of truth. I am a tough customer for modernism, but the Dutch do some of the world's best. Almost every modernist building shows some touch -- a color, a pattern, a too-perfect ratio -- that speaks of attention and caring.

In the postmodern age, of course, the Dutch know this about themselves. An eruptive organic form, such as this cetacean bus shelter in Hoofddorp, is the rule-proving exception. 

It's as though Dutch modernist architects are aspiring alchemists, certain that somewhere in mathematical space is a rectangular solid whose ratios will so please God that he will give it the breath of transcendence. They come close, over and over, as mortals do.

It's the right angle that creates the space of Holland's famous tolerance. The French say they're tolerant too, but Frenchness is such a curved and nuanced space that it's a life's work for the newcomer to fit it, to turn the key that will unlock the bounties of fraternité. In Holland the key is simple: the right angle, the rectangular space, the blank solid. It's the sort of simplicity that demands only meditation and work.  If it seems constraining, just look down, at its reflection in the water, and watch it dissolve.

vienna: the express treatment

Over the last 12 days I've had great times in Vienna, Prague, Leipzig, and now Berlin, where I'll be for the rest of this week.  Human Transit has taken the bulk of my blogging time, and even so it still hasn't gotten out of Vienna.  So I expect this blog will get briefer, sharper shards of impression, easily laid down in the minutes to spare.

So apart from the joy and kindness of Art Nouveau, Vienna might be reduced to this.  The disturbing uniformity of the average 19th century street, as though imperial and bourgeois impulses, on their opposite trajectories, can coexist only if we pretend to be a little boring:

The over-the-topness of the late 19th century Hapsburgs, explained by the usual narrative about greatest-decadence-just-before-the-fall, all of which is also, frankly, a little boring:

The particular Hapsburg habit of building things that are just too big for their site, as though the buildings had swelled in place and might soon explode and hurt someone.

The charming and harmless Friedenreich Hundertwasser cult, expressed not just in his wildly touristed house:

 

... but also in a piece of industrial architecture, part of the works a municipal utility, that tourists aren't told about, and only discover if they're curious about that tower that's not in the guidebook ...

The relief at encountering a living cultural space, something whose current life was more interesting than its inevitable original function as an expression of someone's power.  Here Vienna's crowning achievement is the Museum Quarter, an adaptation of what was once the royal stables, now a lively collection of eclectic small museums anchored by two major museums devoted to art since 1900.  Its large courtyard features simple but endearing yellow furnishings that draw people from all over the city for the sheer pleasure of lounging in them.  

It's the only space I've seen in Europe that seems to do what Portland's Pioneer Courthouse Square or Melbourne's Federation Square do -- namely to feel like the whole city's livingroom, focused yet casual.

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What else?  Well, some of the Hapsburg pageantry does contain human experience after all.  In the end, I identified most with these two characters, near the bottom of one of those grand Baroque cascades of (literally) petrified humanity.  

on art nouveau

I have little to add to my Human Transit post on Art Nouveau, except that ---

Except that I think it's the first period of design that's fundamentally kind. Compared to it, every older style seems to be so clearly about power -- the power of one dead man over others.

 

This isn't to say that the builders of the Gothic cathedrals or the painters of Baroque gold leaf weren't kind people, but still, those styles, indeed, all the styles I can think of before about 1890, were clearly meant to convey power, to put you in your place. They were about the power of God, or of the state, or in most cases both kinds of power in symbiosis. 

Why does Art Nouveau seem so unsuited to the eternal agenda of power? Is it because, for the first time, a style of design seemed to reflect the raw beauty of the organic, of life itself? 

Until then, the only beauty that design had noticed -- apart from landscape as captured in painting -- was that of the human body. Art Nouveau took its inspiration from the calmer beauty of plants, a beauty that's really unsuited to power agendas of any kind.  The artist, of course, is appearing as a power center for the first time in these years. Art Nouveau could serve the cult of the artist, of course, but it doesn't transfer well to any larger power, whether of state or church.

Even Impressionism in painting -- barely a decade older than Art Nouveau -- is always very much about how nature strikes human eyes. It's about the psychology of human perception. And while there's no avoiding that topic when discussing any art, Art Nouveau seemed aware of an organic essence of all things, and that this essence would would go on without us, and that it could be beautiful. 

vienna: the view from my window

So after stumbling out of the long flight from Taipei and finding my way to the hotel, I found I had this view (click to enlarge).

Spires ranging from gothic to baroque.  A constant building height across the city, with me just a hair above it, signifying an intensely controlled urban form.  And there in the middle, on that black tower immediately to the left of the crane, something that looked like a billboard, but much larger.  It said, in English, in plain block letters

SMASHED TO PIECES (IN THE STILL OF THE NIGHT).

This eruption seemed so out of place in this very self-satisfied city that I could only take it as expressing another kind of self-satisfaction, that of the avant-garde, as though it were there to ensure that I'd remember Vienna as "edgy" if I needed to check that box.  In fact, with this photo, all the boxes seemed checked, so I smiled, fell into bed, and slept.

like a cheetah

Sydney

Last night, on the treadmill at the gym, I watched a bit of a National Geographic Special on the maglev train that connects Shanghai's airport with its city center.  Most of it was about the engineering challenges of the project, and the many small dramas of solving them. At the end of the piece, we viewed the train from above as it rushed away on its elevated guideway, while the narrator said something like:  "But the future of the maglev train is very much in doubt."

And I thought:  "Like a cheetah."

That explained the déja vu I was feeling.  At some point long ago I'd heard those words -- "its future is very much in doubt" -- in that same firm and resonant baritone, as I watched a cheetah -- the world's fastest land mammal -- running into the distance from exactly this camera angle.  

And finally I saw what the show was about.  We are meant to care for the maglev exactly as we'd care for a charismatic endangered species.  We're to feel a specific motivating awe for the maglev because it's sleek, fast, muscular, intense and yet, for all that, endangered, just like the cheetah.  We're to believe that because this fast-moving yet inanimate object is the product of human engineers, the sentience of those engineers is there in the endangered thing itself, vulnerable to our judgment, just like the cheetah.

And I don't believe that.  I don't care about powerful-but-vulerable transit technologies in the way I care about cheetahs.  What's wrong with me?

Cross posted from Human Transit.  Photo: Primrose Girl

muscular whimsy: southern cross station, melbourne

 

Cross-posted at Human Transit.

Last time I was in Melbourne, my hotel room looked out on a sea of churning metallic waves.  Forty years ago they would have been called psychedelic.

Melbourne's old downtown was behind me, so those towers in the distance are the new Docklands district, not unlike the Docklands in London, a huge redevelopment area that's packing more people in around the edges of downtown.  

Those waves in the foreground are the roof of  Southern Cross Station.  It's one of five stations on Melbourne's City Loop, the hub of the city's extensive electrified urban rail network.  It's also the Melbourne terminal for the remarkably extensive V-Line system, a network of intercity trains linking Melbourne to the smaller cities all over the surrounding State of Victoria.  I usually arrive here on a bus from the airport, which comes into an adjacent bus terminal.  Southern Cross thus serves as part of the arrival experience at all scales, from daily commutes to flights from overseas.

Designed by Grimshaw Architects, and completed in 2006, Southern Cross Station was created out of the old Spencer Street Station by replacing the building but not the tracks. Remarkably, the station kept functioning, more or less, throughout the construction. 

The new station is all about the roof.  The vast undulating structure has a pattern of transparent stripes running the same direction as the tracks, as though gesturing energetically toward your direction of travel. It can capture the energy of arrival, too, as the waves can easily suggest something in the early stages of crumpling on impact.  It's an effect that you might call muscular whimsy -- a fundamentally lighthearted idea rendered with overwhelming force.  Such contradictions are often the key to creating a building of lasting interest in this deconstructed age.  

The roof floats above the huge space without enclosing it; the station is open to the adjacent streets so that it feels even more outdoors than a classic rail station would, and provides a feeling of continuity with the busy streets on two sides.  Some station functions are in freestanding structures under the roof but not connected to it, such as this large orange box that house two levels of station offices.

The integration with surrounding urban fabric is impressive.  A major sports venue is a short walk away on a pedestrian bridge, which leads on into the highrise Docklands area.  Trams (streetcars) stop on two sides.  The major bus terminal is adjacent, with a large factory outlet shopping centre on top -- the sort of discount shopping that Americans can only get to by car.

The most striking effect of the station, for me, is that it's extremely hard to loiter in, and nobody does.  V-Line trains wait at the platforms to depart, so passengers generally wait on the train rather than the platform.  The platforms deliver the arriving passenger onto a huge featureless expanse of black floor, where the flowing roof seems to help hurry you along. Stopping to take photos in these spaces, I felt I was pushing back against the energy of the building.  

Fortunately, the vast floor leads you out into thick urban fabric on all sides.  The effect is opposite that of the grand cathedral-like space of a classic 19th century rail station, which seems to celebrate the rituals of travel such as greeting and parting.  Southern Cross would not be a good place to jump and down waving your handkerchief as your lover's train rolls in, or out; if you did that, the roof would seem to be laughing at you.  But it's a great place to move through quickly, a postmodern solo traveler with a small rolling suitcase, ready to greet Melbourne, or the world.