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.