Remdoogo: Fitzcarraldo + Totaltheater

What could it mean to build an Opera-house in Burkina Faso, one of the poorest countries on earth? Does it make sense at all and what precedents could we find? Klaus Kinski in the movie Fitzcarraldo by Werner Herzog played the role of Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, an adventurer and opera-fan who is determined to build an Opera-house in Iquitos, in the middle of the Peruvian Amazonian jungle, and invite the tenor Enrico Caruso to sing there.



Christoph Schlingensief, German film- theater- and opera-director, seems to materialize this idea; he was the initiator of the Operndorf project: an opera-house (Remdoogo) in Laongo, one hour drive from Burkina's capital city Ouagadougou is supposed to help social and infrastructural development through art. Since he was diagnosed lung-cancer (he will die in August 2010), he began thinking about the project. As partner architect he chose Diébédo Francis Kéré, a local architect who currently works (and studied) in Berlin, who received in 2004 the Aga Kahn Award for Architecture, for his school in Gando.

After seeing the effects of a major flooding in August 2009 in Burkina, Schingensief and Kéré thought not only to build an event-house to host different performances, but to develop around it a village, composed most of all of modular housing, which could be built by the residents themselves (a common feature of Kéré's architecture and idea of sustainability and participatory planning). All buildings are designed in such a way to provide natural cross-ventilation and avoid high- and energy-consuming technologies; material is produced locally (loam-bricks) and for roofing additional metal structures are adopted.



For the opera-house a reproduction of Walter Gropius' Totaltheater (designed in 1927 together with the director Erwin Piscator), realized for the Ruhrtriennale and never used was shipped to Burkina: its main feature is the rotating stage, which allows three different settings, from the frontal stage to the central arena-like stage. Its core, in Kéré's modified version, is sheltered by a row of wooden poles, to protect loam-bricks from sun and rain.

W. Gropius' Totaltheater, 1927, with E. Piscator

There beneath the blue suburban skies

400 mq villas. Photo by IES Global

The annual personal income in the chinese town of Huaxi is roughly 25 times the average earnings in the country, thus being its richest town. Huaxi lies in the province of Guizhou, roughly between Nanjing and Shanghai: founded in 1961 as a rural village it counts nowadays more than 300.00 inhabitants and 80 industries, which started to flourish from mid 1980s onwards, mainly dealing with steel, metal and textile production.

Map of Huaxi: in blue industries

If you decided to live there, you would have, apart from the high monthly income, your own villa (400 mq), car(s), medical insurance and cooking oil. But you would work 7 days a week, marry someone from Huaxi, and if you ever wanted to move, you would lose everything. It is possible to travel, but copies of the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Freedom, Arc de Triophe and the Chinese Wall seem to discourage that...

Pagoda-offices. Image by Bert van Dijk

This mix of socialism and capitalism works like this: inhabitants are partners of a holding, the Jiangsu Huaxi Jituan Gonsi, quoted on the stock exchange. The Chinese channel in English CRI realized the following video about Huaxi.

The idyll of American suburban life (more and more popular in the country), apart from being some 50 years late, is paid at a high price by the residents, who by the way seem happy about their life-styles and satisfied with the 2 million tourists visiting the town (pretending city) every year. In the meantime we can see renderings of the new high-rise core by MAD Architects.

Suburban Chinese life. Photo by IES Global

Arc de Triomphe in Huaxi's World Park. Image by Bert van Dijk

Vagabonds abroad: European 1930s travelogue

How does Europe look like in the 1930s to an American couple? Here a home-made film about the European tour of "Bill and I": this travelogue, as Giuliana Bruno might call it, is seen from the perspective of a woman and gives a very good amateurial picture, free from propaganda or commercial intentions.

The recording is titled "Vagabonds abroad. A pictorial narrative of my European travels" and it is clear from the very beginning that we will see the travel-journal of a woman, while the male partner is relegated to a minor role. They head towards Europe (probably from New-York) on March 21st (likely 1936, since we see the Hindenburg Zeppelin flying, later on in the movie).

They visit Lisboa, Gibraltar, Algiers, Palermo, Napoli, Capri, Monaco, Geneva, Wengen, Lucerne, Kölln, Brussels, Wien, Budapest, Salzburg, Münich and Berlin: while the Mediterranean cities hold a typical degree of picturesqueness and well-established sightseeing and panorama views (the bay of Napoli is in this respect paradigmatic), towards the end of the journey and traveling north the written comments rarefy and we have the impression that "Bill and I" are baffled by the Nazi troops marching in front of the Brandenburger Tor.

Pasolini and the shape of cities

Here two marvelous must-see documentaries by P. P. Pasolini.





Le mura di Sana (The walls of Sana) is a film shot in 1970-71 when Pasolini was in Yemen on the location for his movie Decameron:  he addresses it directly to UNESCO, calling for the preservation of the old city of Sana'a, under threat in a period of rapid and aggressive modernization process in the country. In '74 he adds then a sequence with interviews of people about the Italian medieval village of Orte, not far from Rome, which will be the subject of the following documentary.





Pasolini e... la forma della città (Pasolini and... the form of the city) was shot in autumn 1973, sponsored by Italian National TV Company RAI: even if there is some editing by Paolo Brunatto, the film can be easily attributed to Pasolini, who chose to speak about the shape of cities, focusing on Orte and on Sabaudia, one of the five new cities founded by Fascism on the Thyrrenean sea, as part of the national reclaiming program for marshland. Pasolini conceives a "city" referring mainly to its shape and sticking to the idea of a compact, (medieval) core, defined by clear boundaries between built land and nature. With Orte Pasolini can deal with building speculation and its aesthetic consequences; with Sabaudia he addresses Italian '60-'70 socio-cultural changes, comparing them to Fascism.

Plattenbaumuseum

Renovated Plattenbauten: extra metal-frame balconies in light-blue, existing ones with new blue glass-bricks.

If you can stand a bit of Ostalgie and have a Sunday off, the Plattenbaumuseum in Berlin Hellersdorf is worth the visit: in Hellersdorf, part of GDR, between 1976 and 1986 were built roughly 42.000 prefabricated concrete-slab apartments (Plattenbau), the majority of which consisting of WBS-70 typology. This type was characterized by a modular raster or 6 x 6 mt., a depth of 12 mt., floor height of 2.80 mt. usually rising till the 5th, 6th or 11th floor. A building with 30 apartments could be built in 4 weeks, 18 hours per apartment. In a WBS-70 could live a couple with one or two children, or a couple with no children who needed an extra working-room.

General WBS-70 plan.

Kitchen: note the all-present wallpaper.

Bedroom.

The company in charge of the renovation wanted to show how the original situation was, compared to the "new" apartments: in fact you can also visit the very next renovated apartment and see the difference. Getting rid of a partition wall and of wallpaper, reducing the rooms from three to two, adding an extra balcony, external insulation and increased care of the green spaces are quite easy moves. What unfortunately is harder to change is the absence of mixes functions in the neighborhood, and the relative distance from the city center (at least the perceived one) and from the Ring that runs across Berlin. One has anyhow to say that an underground station lies quite close to the blocks.

Two apartments at ground floor share the garden.

Ongoing renovation: note the external insulation being "attached" and the effort with colors.

New entrance with shed. Again the color-attempt.

An example of Plattenbau-description that escapes (n)ostalgia is "Platte mit Aussicht", a film-documentary on the Dresden-Gorbitz quartier.

Gorbitz - MyVideo

More and high-quality pics here.

Housing Problems - London 1935

In 1935 Arthur Elton, Edgar Anstey, John Taylor and Ruby Grierson filmed Housing Problems, sponsored by the British Commercial Gas Association, an attempt to tackle the problem of slums in the outskirts of East London, seen both from the perspective of experts of planning and architecture (from whom we hear only the voice) and slum-inhabitants, exposed to the camera via direct interviews.

Brief history of smuggling between Ticino and Italy

Smugglers carried goods (25/30 kg.) in their "backpacks" made of jute.
B/W images via swissinfo.ch

Smuggling between Italy and Ticino was since the early 19th Century an endemic economical trend, because of the very basic reason that roughly half of the Ticino boundary lies along the Italian one, and different tax legislations let a convenient income margin for goods that were not declared at the border: this borderland was a strategic hub for goods traveling from north to south Europe and vice-versa. With the construction of the Gottardo railway tunnel (1872-82) this "European" role was strongly enhanced.

Model: in black Ticino; from left Lake Maggiore, Lugano and Como.
White wires are smuggler's main routes. Brown piece of cloth is jute.

Governments in Ticino and Lombardy (Spanish, Austrian, French, and then Italian) always tried to address and stop illegal commerce, but since in Switzerland there is nearly no flatland to cultivate, grain and flour in great quantity was transported (illegally) from the "Pianura Padana" to the Swiss population and smuggling represented an opportunity for both populations, dealing with basic commodities, that is why this activity was seen as a relief for communities on both sides; to get what was necessary, not what was luxurious; a way to resist to the fiscal oppression of foreign powers, ruling the north of Italy in the 18th and 19th Centuries. It also represented a way of communication between the two States, since it was necessary to set up a net of personal and fiduciary relationships.
After the French Revolution the Italian State (under the control of Napoleon) promulgated in 1803 the monopoly of salt, tobacco and gunpowder: these goods started coming then from Switzerland, where no monopoly was run, as well as coffee.

Support from the population was necessary: smugglers were well accepted.

In order to avoid patrols smugglers chose demanding routes.

Around 1848, when the constitution of the Italian Republic was still in progress, Ticino was fundamental in printing democratic pamphlets and distributing them illegally in Italy, or hosting central figures of the Italian Risorgimento, one for all, Carlo Cattaneo. As well in 1848, with the purpose of damaging the Austrian Government in north of Italy, in Brissago, on the Swiss shore of the Lake Maggiore, was founded a tobacco factory, producing the same products of Austrian factories: same quality but lower price. Cigarettes were then spread in Italy through smuggling.

Goods left along the way.

Patrolling around Lugano CH.

Towards the end of the 19th Century a fence was built along the border, and smugglers had to organize themselves better and more efficiently.

Jute "shoes" were need to minimize noise while walking.

Between the two World Wars, smuggling was reduced, because of better patrolling, due to the fear that enemies would invade the territory, and because much of the male population which was not fighting found a job in building infrastructure for the Army. Between 1943 and 1948 smuggling arose again: this time the main good to smuggle was rice, coming from Italy to Switzerland. From the 1950s on, smuggling started dealing with monopoly goods, rather than basic goods, as well as with drugs, becoming a international criminal organization.

A moment of rest cleaning out mud from shoes.

Transportation system: New York 1940s vs. Beijing 2010s

A couple of interesting videos related to mobility in a metropolis, distant in spatial terms but also chronological: first a short movie about New York City in the 1940s; although 1941 appears as release date some footage is more recent, coming from the early '50s. The idea of blood circulation from William Harvey is taken as a main reference to represent and explain mobility and fluxes right from the title: "Arteries of New York City".



Second video, a TV Chinese broadcast about the new "Straddling bus"(to be seen along Beijing's streets soon?).



Related posts:
The Changing City - mid 1960s
Urban renewal: 1955 vs. 2006

The Changing City - mid 1960s

Though oversimplifying reality and popular in attempt, this short film from the mid-1960s gives you an interesting hint of the debate about suburbia and the city in general in USA at that time, catalyzed
in New-York on one side by the journalist and activist Jane Jacobs and on the other by the urban planner Robert Moses: avoiding the risk of drawing a caricature of them as antagonists, it is nonetheless possible to say that Jacobs, especially with her book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities", 1961, addressed a sharp critique to the most rigid elements and aspects in terms of urban planning and architecture of Modernism, which Moses happened to represent. This film touches in 15 minutes the questions of sprawl and suburbia, car-dependency, social boredom; urban renewal and investment, decay of city-centers, governance.

Bearing in mind the contemporary tendency and easiness in pointing out the failures of Modernism, one of the main urban and housing modernist catastrophes, contemporary to Jacobs, was the 1954 housing project Pruitt Igoe in St. Louis, Missouri, designed by architect Minoru Yamasaki, best-known for the Twin Towers in New-York. The following is a description by Robert Hughes, quoting architecture historian Charles Jencks, claming the demolition of Pruitt Igoe (1972-74) to be the death of Modernism.



Like tragically September 11 and the Twin Towers, Pruitt Igoe became widely popular on screen, as you can see from Kooyanisqatsi, film documentary by Godfrey Reggio with music by Philip Glass.



Related posts:
Urban renewal: 1955 vs. 2006

Table-architecture

In Murano's Museo del Vetro (Glass museum) you can find a surprising example of what one might call "table-architecture": as you can read from the caption this enormous glass piece is a "table-triumph, or deser, in shape of an Italian garden with fountains, arches, flower-vases, flowerbeds. XVIII Century".

As Rebecca Solnit puts out in her Wanderlust: A History of Walking, the garden, also in its prototypical form of labyrinth or cloister has been used by noblemen to find in a secured place an occasion to wander. And the "tighter" the garden became as socioeconomic changes marked the decline of aristocracy and its own world, the more it was filled with statues, fountains, to enrich it and create a narrative of space without leaving it for the real world. But from the XVIII Century wandering in the outside landscape was considered a much better experience. The same destiny happened to the typology of the gallery, at the beginning an opportunity to take an easy walk inside a palace, it turned out as another spacial narrative when paintings and their exhibition replaced totally the original purpose. Murano's glass-triumph reverses the process, bringing the outside garden to the inside, a journey of the mind at table.

Impressions from Ravenna

With a trip to Ravenna I had the chance to visit the city and its UNESCO World Heritage for the second time; here some impressions:

Stone slices vs. painted glass

In Basilica di San Vitale and in Mausoleo di Galla Placidia the warmth and the particular tone of light is due in the first case to a layer of yellow/orange coat of paint on the window glasses, and in the second thin slices of alabaster substitute proper glass. In both monuments glass and stone are not original but have been replaced during time, however the feeling of the proper atmosphere remains.

Interior of the Mausoleum. Photo by dvdbramhall

Alabaster-slice. Photo by Medieval Karl

In recent times Sigmar Polke referred directly to this Romanesque technique in a commission he had for the Grossmünster Church in Zürich, as you can read in the official press release:

"In 2006, Sigmar Polke won the invited competition to design church windows for the Grossmünster in Zürich. Seven windows in the western part of the nave consist of sliced agate, creating brightly luminous walls of stone. The five windows to the east depict five figures from the Old Testament in stained glass."

Sigmar Polke's Agate-window. Photo by Perspectix

"The seven windows to the west consist of sliced agate stones assembled like a mosaic, and joined with strips of lead, known as cames. Sigmar Polke draws on the custom of occasionally fitting windows with slices of stone in Romanesque church architecture of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. This is most famously illustrated by the alabaster used in the Byzantine mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna in the fifth century. By closing off the windows and, in effect, the entire rear of the church with slices of agate stone, Polke succeeds in transforming the Grossmünster into an event of luminous colour, resulting in the seeming paradox of walls that are solid but radiantly translucent. Geologic time resonates in the images of nature within the agate stones themselves. Their intense colouring, which makes them look so contemporary, at times recalling movements of Modern Art, is, however, the consequence of the complex processes to which the stones were subjected after extraction: almost alchemical acts of applying heat, using chemical baths and adding pigments."

Alexander Brodsky, Russian artist and architect proposed in 2004 his "Vodka Ceremony Pavilion", a luminous folly comprising nothing but re-purposed windows and a few wooden braces, all whitewashed and assembled into a small hut. Built for the Art-Klyazma festival, it was equipped with only the bare essentials for its function: a small table and a pair of tin cups tethered to a basin filled with spirits." Here all window-glasses are painted in white, giving to the material a translucent quality.

Brick vs. mortar

Again in San Vitale you can note a particular way of constructing brick-walls: since under Justinian I, Eastern Roman Emperor, Byzantine culture spread significantly and Ravenna was a major pole in this sense, even building techniques were adopted from the Constantinople: there, pozzolana, a volcanic ash used by Romans to get stronger mortar, was missing, so they had to build walls with a core of abundant cement and stones, kept together by two layers of bricks, larger than Roman ones. Moreover, mortar between bricks had to be thicker, sometimes even thicker than the brick itself.

San Vitale, detail

Sigurd Lewerentz in 1956 designed the most renowned St. Mark's Church, Björkhagen, Stockholm, in which mortar gains in thickness, giving a softer mood and avoiding monotonous walls.

St. Mark's Chirch's interior, architectu S. Lewerentz. Photo seier+seier

On Walking

I came across some books and material recently, connected in a way to the rebirth and increasing popularity of walking as a random activity, following on one hand Walter Benjamin's flâneur and on the other Situationists' psychogeography.

Francesco Careri, member of neo-situationist group Stalker, "a collective subject that engages research and actions within the landscape with particular attention to the areas around the city's margins and forgotten urban space, and abandoned areas or regions under transformation", wrote in 2001 Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice, in which he goes back to the primitive men to introduce his suburban idyll on foot. Needless to say that they took Tarkovsky as main inspiration.



In the same year Rebecca Solnit, cultural mastermind of San Francisco, was writing Wanderlust: A History of Walking, with a more American and artistic/historic viewpoint, influenced by Italian anthropologist and architect Franco La Cecla, who by himself, wrote Perdersi (to get lost).

Iain Sinclair published in 2003 London Orbital, a book and short movie about his city, seen from the perspective of a pedestrian who walks following the marginal land and territories near to the M25 motorway that encircles Greater London.



Two other wonderful publications, connected with the idea of detour and the relationship between architecture and journey: Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film, by Giuliana Bruno, a deep insight on the history of vision, roaming through photography, cinema, geography and architecture, and The Situationist City by Simon Sadler, a history of the Situationist Movement and psychogeography applied to the city.

Living in a productive landscape

View to fields

I post a recent project that I proposed together with Matteo Pietrantonio for our final crit this year: the site is a suburban village east from London, Rainham; moving from the wonderful book by Carolyn Steel Hungry City about the relationship between the city of London and food, and from André Viljoen's Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes we started developing our proposal.

 Suburban agriculture, London, 1945, featured in A. Viljoen's "CPUL's"

London Bridge agriculture, 1945, from Viljoen's CPUL's

The project addresses the theme of living in a suburban area, designing a new housing development in a brownfield, mixing row-houses of three different typologies with gardens and allotments, apartment buildings, light-industrial activities and small retail. A reclamation of polluted soil and of the green and water area along the creek is needed.

Urban agriculture could modulate various lifestyles, seen as a hobby, a nice way for retired people to spend their time, a mean of domestic economy, an educational tool, an opportunity for fresh food supply, with an overall attempt towards sustainability: shaks and rain-water-collection are provided for each garden, and by designing a local covered market and a botanical school the project tries to propel a sense of community for the new residential area.

Along the central pedestian “spine”, connecting the school with the market, a rickshaw transportation service is proposed; the nearby industrial area could serve as CHP provider for the new development, and PV panels are located in the residual space between two railway lines and on the rooftops of apartment and public buildings. Interviews with local people were a starting point for the design.


Dwellings:450
Inhabitants:1300

Wax model with and without intervention

If in 1940's urban agriculture was related to dig for victory, nowadays it has more to do with pleasure and hobby, especially in relation to the many retired people who live in Rainham.

Model of Rainham's (sub)urban fabric

Existing situation

General view: solar panels (pink), light-industrial activities (blue), school and market (red)

Masterplan

Close-up

Section through pedestrian "spine": water collection

"Urban" view: various typologies at ground floor

View to local market

Here high quality pictures