A nice bit of car-park related anger in The Half Moon on St. Clements. The author ain't wrong either, there's an awful lot of really really terrible apartment architecture out there. However, I think its usually much worse than anything inspired by either Corb or Stalin. Give me a machine to live in anyday.
So I went to Berlin recently. I love Berlin, its beautiful and ugly like an old man who's had an interesting life. I drank beer by the litre and walked the streets of Prenzlauerberg pretending I was Sally Bowles and he was Christopher Isherwood. What more could you want from a mini-break.
Here are some of my photos. They aren't very good; my camera is awful.
A tiny bike.
Teacups and graffitti
Dog in a fountain in Volkspark Friedrichshain
more grafitti in Prenzlauerberg
Posters, grafitti, bulletholes and some very old looking signage (above the door). Palimpsests.
Building a new socialist future
Berlin is great for urban studies geeks. The history of western Europe is inscribed and reinscribed upon its axes just as the violence of European history is rearticulated as violent, aggressive urban forms slashing through older spaces leaving a bizarre, unfinished and disjointed landscape. Bismark’s Berlin was created brutally on top of an older city; in the interwar period the city was made again as a wholly new imperial city; during the cold war era wide roads, tower blocks and industry, not to mention the Wall, created a brutal modernist form equal in scale and grandeur but wholly separate in orientation to the imperial cities which lay underneath. Today, this sense of dissonance seems only to be ameliorated by the continuing impact of the Berlin Wall on the landscape of much of the city (both in presence and in absence) and the barren, windswept and expensive bureaucratic district coming into existence beside the old Reichstag. Each generation punches its vision of modernity through the city’s landscape so that the city consists today of unrelated, jarring, incomprehensible urban forms.
But these layered modernities are constantly disrupted. Amongst this constant recreation and shattering, renewing images of the future is the constant lure of the past. The large scale urban forms are tempered by beautiful details and small images: the art deco interiors of Hackeschen Markt, the plaques in the pavements where Jewish families once lived, the overgrown graveyards of Judischer Friedhof and Griefswalder Str. Graffiti—ubiquitous and covering the spectrum of artistic merit—is also a key part of Berlin’s aesthetic. In Britain it’s a signifier of urban pathologies but in Berlin it is strangely beautiful, disrupting and reformulating Berlin’s hard lines, articulating a conscious resistance to bureaucratic urban policies.
In many ways, graffiti was key to my understanding of Berlin, because in many ways Berlin was a city I did not understand. It is a walled city with the wall removed, leaving traces in the layout of roads and the orientation of structures which no longer have an relevance to the spaces around them. As an outsider, and as a tourist, its centreless geography is hard to comprehend; as a pedestrian Berlin’s topography makes little sense. Moreover, the social signifiers which structure and decode urban life in Britain—litter, graffiti, demolished sites—seemingly had very different readings and meanings in the German capital. For hundreds of years Berlin sat on top of the fault-line of world politics, and today those tectonic plates have shifted. With this absence of competing powers the city defies and resists interpretation, and that is exactly the reason why it is so wonderful.
I love American cities. I love everything about them, from the gargantuan sophisticated metropolises of the east coast to the anywherescapes of small-town mid-west and further to the low-rise sunburnt cities of California. I love the vertical landscape of New York; the sprawling weird motorways of Los Angeles; the early skyscrapers of Chicago; the kitsch of Miami and Las Vegas. I love the ambition, the creativity, the concrete and steel, the architecture of Gropius and Mies and SOM, Venturi’s Main Street, the engineered beauty of the Golden Gate and Brooklyn Bridges; the unexpected openness of the gridiron street patterns where vistas spill in between blocks revealing open skies and views far into the distance. Gazing westward from Europe, America’s urban places always seemed like the apotheosis of what a city should mean.
Addicted as I was by my fantasies of metropolitan life I have been equally consumed by recent coverage of the decline of these same places. Once grandiose landscapes of the Midwest, constructed by the market are now doomed by the same forces; people and industry leave, and buildings are simply left to crumble. Without the intervention of any form of state aid to keep downtown alive it is slowly reclaimed by plants and wildlife. Of all American cities beset by subprime failure and population shrinkage, Detroit is the archetype: an urban landscape swiftly is turning into a sedimented archaeology of the rise and collapse of America’s motor industry. And indeed, it has received extensive coverage in this regard: a new book out of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre's photos of the city in ruins was profiled recently in the Guardian, while Julian Temple’s excellent Requiem for Detroit (2010) also explored that city’s collapse.
I recently went to Baltimore, a city which has witnessed a long-term population decline of many American cities, but has the unique distinction of this having been captured and fictionalised for mass-consumption in high-school geography class-meets-cop drama TV show The Wire. And while there was much that was recognisable off the show, it was of course a far more interesting place that the mini-series can portray. The Mount Vernon area just north of downtown formed street after street of flat fronted brick buildings, built in a neo-classical style in the early nineteenth-century. Indeed, it could have been London; if picture of one on them turned up in Summerson’s Georgian London you wouldn’t blink, apart from the fact that these areas are strangely bare of people or life (more on that later). The downtown area is a strange mix of 1980s and 1990 shiny glass anonymous highrises and beautiful early skyscrapers. These monuments to America’s golden age are Romanesque or gothic cathedrals at top and bottom with miles of windows elongating an otherwise recognisable architectural form and making something completely new. The inner harbour has been expensively refurbished in the last decade. Its a reassuring non-place of granite pavements, chain shops, and America’s largest aquarium. Surprisingly little of the old warehouses have been incorporated into the new generic spaces. It made me feel awkward. In this distance you can see Baltimore’s diminishing dock area: hard constructivist lines of machinery and metal against an empty sky and reflected in the purple water. Nevertheless, it’s a city full of problems. The city is strangely empty; downtown is full of offices, but few people or shops or restaurants to attract them to spend time in these places. Indeed, white flight has clearly taken place on a massive scale: street after street of empty boarded up houses encircle the central business district, indicating urban collapse on a scale incomparable with anything I’ve seen in Britain. Policing is aggressive. Large cameras, marked out by blue lights are suspended above crossroads at ‘problem’ junctions, indicating an intrusive, aggressive, even colonial approach to policing. It was something I wasn’t expecting in the Land of the Free. I loved it though; it was beautiful and strange and with its mix of architectural styles, jarring of land uses, and clashes of wealth and dereliction, it was just like I imagined an American city should be. I admit it, I was a bit of a tourist, I went Wire sightseeing.
Mount Vernon, Baltimore
So I wanted to write this post about the rise and decline of the great American city (to take Jacobs’s phrase and use it in a way she never expected). But when I googled Requiem for Detroit I didn’t get ecstatic reviews of the film’s cinematography, but rather a Michigan newspaper headline entitled ‘Detroit Cliche Watchdog: Britons continue their obsession with Detroit's ruin.’ Rats. Nothing worse than discovering via a google search (of all things!) that you thoughts are a bit hackneyed and obvious. And what do you know (some further googling ensues...)—Julian Temple is English, Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre come from France, while I have only been to two places in America (I lived in LA as a child, and now retuned to Baltimore as an adult); all my knowledge of everywhere in between comes not from experience from gawping at documentaries and sitting in libraries in Oxford. So what does this mean? Why do we in Europe marvel at the decline of the once great American cities of the manufacturing belt? Reflected in the water of Baltimore’s declining dockside and in the glass of Detroit’s abandoned towerblocks, what do we see here in Europe?
