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.