The importance of the Berlin Wall remnants

Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Police officers stood guard Sunday at the East Side Gallery, part of which was being removed to make way for new apartments.

I was at my parents´ home that day in November 1989 when Pink Floyd was performing The Wall, against the Berlin Wall, and everybody was expecting it to be torn down. And I remember my emotion when this happened.

But I´d never fully understood how it looked after the event and what had been left of it, until Phil Smith sent me a copy of a film made by the walking artist Kinga Araya. The film is called ‘Ten Steps’, it lasts 70 minutes, and it documents Kinga’s 2008 walk along the route of the Berlin Wall.

Apart from her walking experience, she explains how the remnants are intertwined with buildings, or left in domestic gardens, or just a piece of the foundations in parks, etc. 

Today, the wall that was one of the horrors of the WW, the inspiration for so many artists,  the tomb of so many, has become a monument of memories. An the Germans defend it.

Please keep on reading this interesting article:

In Berlin, a Protest to Keep What Remains of the Wall by Chris Cottrell. March 4, 2013

Photo by Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters

In November 1989, the Berlin Wall opened, and soon after was being torn to pieces by jubilant crowds from both sides. Almost a quarter of a century later, Berliners again took to the streets over the wall — only this time to protect what is left of it.

Late last week, when construction workers began dismantling a roughly 70-foot section of the wall’s longest remaining expanse — a nearly mile-long monument to peace that is covered in paintings and is known as the East Side Gallery — protesters turned up in droves. The first hastily organized demonstration on Friday drew several hundred, but over the weekend thousands of people massed to protect the huge concrete slabs from being relocated to an adjacent park.

They were particularly incensed that the project was to make way for an access road for new luxury apartments — helpful for a city whose budget could use bolstering from development, not so helpful for ordinary Germans.

“History should never be a luxury,” read one placard, capturing the protesters’ dismay over gentrification.

City officials and the developer, Maik Uwe Hinkel of Living Bauhaus, responded by noting that the space would also serve the construction of a nearby pedestrian bridge over the river, to replace one destroyed in World War II, according to the daily newspaper Berliner Zeitung.

Many residents view the remaining row of tall concrete slabs as an important testimonial to life in Communist East Germany, when the 28-mile barrier encircling West Berlin severely hampered their contact with the other side, and they are intent on keeping the East Side Gallery intact.

“It’s about letting future generations know what life was like for parts of this city, and at the same time reminding them of the joy that was felt upon reunification,” said Robert Muschinski, 50, an activist who helped organize the demonstrations.

A popular tourist attraction, the stretch of wall snakes along Berlin’s Spree River and is emblazoned with art from 1990 that was restored in 2008 — colorful graffiti and famous murals like the “Fraternal Kiss,” which shows the Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev and his East German counterpart, Erich Honecker, locking lips.

The work crews removed only one four-foot-wide slab before the protesters blocked them. On Monday, Mr. Hinkel called off any further removals until a major meeting with the relevant players in the project set for March 18.

“I am dedicated to the preservation of this piece of the wall,” the German news agency dpa quoted Berlin’s mayor, Klaus Wowereit, as saying.

Walking the wall with Kinga Araya.

If you want to read about Kinga Araya´s experience walking the Berlin wall and buy the film, please click on this link:

http://www.mythogeography.com/kinga-arayarsquos-ten-steps-walking-in-circles.html

East German border guards look through a gap in the Berlin Wall two days after it was breached, 11 November 1989. Photograph: GERARD MALIE/AFP/Getty Images

Read the article by John Henley 

The Berlin Wall: where are the remains?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/27/berlin-wall-last-remnants

Some urban photographs by Robert Frank

These pictures by photographer Robert Frank are the ones I liked most, from America and England. They were downloaded from Google images.

Robert Frank (born November 9, 1924, Zürich), is an important figure in American photography and film. His most notable work, the 1958 book titled The Americans, was influential, and earned Frank comparisons to a modern-day de Tocqueville for his fresh and nuanced outsider's view of American society. Frank later expanded into film and video and experimented with manipulating photographs and photomontage. His work has been represented by Pace/MacGill Gallery in New York since 1984. 

QUOTES

 "When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice." Robert Frank, Life (26 November 1951), p. 21 

 "Quality doesn't mean deep blacks and whatever tonal range. That's not quality, that's a kind of quality. The pictures of Robert Frank might strike someone as being sloppy - the tone range isn't right and things like that - but they're far superior to the pictures of Ansel Adams with regard to quality, because the quality of Ansel Adams, if I may say so, is essentially the quality of a postcard. But the quality of Robert Frank is a quality that has something to do with what he's doing, what his mind is. It's not balancing out the sky to the sand and so forth. It's got to do with intention." (Elliott Erwitt) in James Danziger and Barnaby Conrad, 'Interviews with Master Photographers', 1977, Paddington Press, p 87

Excerpt from:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Frank

Santa Fe, New Mexico. By Robert Frank

Selection of beautiful gardens

Photograph by Diane Cook and Len Jenshel

In Japan the nighttime viewing of cherry blossoms in spring, like these at Kyoto’s Hirano Shrine, is a special event. “The cherries’ only fault: the crowds that gather when they bloom,” wrote Saigyo, a 12th-century poet. National  Geographic

Photograph by Diane Cook and Len Jenshel

Jade spires of bamboo flank a path curving up to Kodai-ji Temple in Kyoto. The murmur of wind filtering through a bamboo grove is one of a hundred sounds the Japanese want preserved. National Geographic

Photograph by Diane Cook and Len Jenshel

An Islamic garden, it is said, is a palace without a roof. Enthralled with the art of Islam, heiress Doris Duke created Shangri La, her estate in Honolulu. The central courtyard, with its antique Persian tiles, separates public and private space.

With permission of Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art. National Geographic

Photograph by Diane Cook and Len Jenshel

When a freak freeze killed the orchid collection on his Mexican estate, English eccentric Edward James created Las Pozas, a garden with surreal follies like the concrete Bamboo Palace—durable and immune to the vagaries of weather. National Geographic

Part of the gardens in San Juan Capistrano, California. Photo by Myriam B. Mahiques

April 2013

See a beautiful gallery of Las Pozas pictures in Facebook:

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.517934878248307.1073741828.103582076350258&type=1

Las Pozas. San Luis Potosí, Mexico. Google images

Las Pozas. San Luis Potosí, Mexico. Google images

The Rock Garden At Leonardslee Gardens In England. From nature-talk.com

Kew Gardens, Surrey, England. From placespill.blogspot.com

The garden of beautiful speculations. By Charles Jencks and Maggie Keswixk, Scotland. From 

http://all-that-is-interesting.com/worlds-most-beautiful-gardens

The garden of beautiful speculations. By Charles Jencks and Maggie Keswixk, Scotland. From 

http://all-that-is-interesting.com/worlds-most-beautiful-gardens

From http://thetiredtory.blogspot.com/2013/02/beautiful-gardens-designs-ideas.html

From Beautiful gardens in Japan 20

Google images

Enchanted garden. From http://gurillagardening.blogspot.com/2010/04/beautiful-gardens.html

The beauty of ethereal structures

Let us remember some definitions of "ethereal:"

Of or relating to the regions beyond the earth

celestial, heavenly c : unworldly, spiritual

lacking material substance : immaterial, intangible

 marked by unusual delicacy or refinement

suggesting the heavens or heaven 

Characterized by lightness and insubstantiality; 

intangible, airy

Of the celestial spheres; heavenly. 

Not of this world; spiritual. 

Chemistry: Of or relating to ether. 

light, intangible

Existing in the air; resembling air; looking blue like the sky; aerial: as, “ethereal mountains,”  Pertaining to the hypothetical upper, purer air, or to the higher regions beyond the earth or beyond the atmosphere; 

celestial; otherworldly; as, ethereal space; ethereal regions. 

tenuous; spiritlike 

characterized by extreme delicacy, as form, manner, thought, etc.

It seems to me that after some years of a continuous fashion of organicism in architecture, not the one emulating Wright´s forms, but the literal shapes of the animals and plants, there´s a movement in architecture that´s more spiritual, sustained by the lightness of materials and as a revival of the Asian beauties. The metaphor of ¨ethereal¨ in all its references, is always present.

I´ve compiled these examples from the last weeks, and there´s more to come. Enjoy.

Cantonese Opera. Bamboo structure designed by architect William Li. Photograph: Philippe Lopez/AFP/Getty Images

Cantonese opera is one of the major categories in Chinese opera, originating in southern China's Cantonese culture. It is popular in Guangdong, Guangxi, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore and Malaysia. Like all versions of Chinese opera, it is a traditional Chinese art form, involving music, singing, martial arts, acrobatics, and acting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese_opera

London architecture collective Softkill Design has joined the race to build the world's first 3D printed house, announcing plans for a plastic dwelling that could be built off-site in three weeks and assembled in a single day.

The single-storey Protohouse 2.0 will be eight metres wide and four metres long and will be printed in sections in a factory. The parts will be small enough to be transported in vans and then snapped together on site.

http://www.dezeen.com/2013/02/13/protohouse-2-3d-printed-house-by-softkill-design/

Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto has been named as the designer of this year's Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, which will be a cloud-like structure made from a lattice of steel poles.

The semi-transparent pavilion will occupy 350 square-metres of lawn outside the London gallery. Two entrances will lead inside the structure, where staggered terraces will provide seating for a central cafe.

Sou Fujimoto describes his design as "an architectural landscape" where "the vivid greenery of the surrounding plant life [is] woven together with a constructed geometry".

http://www.dezeen.com/2013/02/14/sou-fujimoto-to-design-serpentine-gallery-pavilion-2013/

Stockholm 2013: talks at last week's Stockholm Furniture Fair were held beneath an installation of 11,000 patterned paper sheets by Swedish architect Gert Wingårdh and Finnish artist Kustaa Saksi.

Wingårdh and Saksi staggered the pieces of paper up from the corners of the rectangular area to create a dome accessed by an arch on each side.

http://www.dezeen.com/2013/02/12/stockholm-furniture-fair-installation-by-gert-wingardh-and-kustaa-saksi/

Steilneset memorial. By Peter Zumthor

Architect Peter Zumthor designed this memorial on an island in Norway to commemorate suspected witches who were burned at the stake there in the seventeenth century. Via dezeen magazine. 

This disappearing Church - one of the 14 winners of the "Building of the Year Awards" for 2012. See them all at  http://archdai.ly/boty-12

From ¨In wealthy Hong Kong, poorest live in metal cages¨

Hong Kong: Victoria Peak

This is an excerpt from the article written by Kelvin Chan. All pictures from AP:

HONG KONG—For many of the richest people in Hong Kong, one of Asia's wealthiest cities, home is a mansion with an expansive view from the heights of Victoria Peak. For some of the poorest, like Leung Cho-yin, home is a metal cage.

The 67-year-old former butcher pays 1,300 Hong Kong dollars ($167) a month for one of about a dozen wire mesh cages resembling rabbit hutches crammed into a dilapidated apartment in a gritty, working-class West Kowloon neighborhood.

The cages, stacked on top of each other, measure 1.5 square meters (16 square feet). To keep bedbugs away, Leung and his roommates put thin pads, bamboo mats, even old linoleum on their cages' wooden planks instead of mattresses.

"I've been bitten so much I'm used to it," said Leung, rolling up the sleeve of his oversized blue fleece jacket to reveal a red mark on his hand. "There's nothing you can do about it. I've got to live here. I've got to survive," he said as he let out a phlegmy cough.

Some 100,000 people in the former British colony live in what's known as inadequate housing, according to the Society for Community Organization, a social welfare group. The category also includes apartments subdivided into tiny cubicles or filled with coffin-sized wood and metal sleeping compartments as well as rooftop shacks. They're a grim counterpoint to the southern Chinese city's renowned material affluence.

Forced by skyrocketing housing prices to live in cramped, dirty and unsafe conditions, their plight also highlights one of the biggest headaches facing Hong Kong's unpopular Beijing-backed leader: growing public rage over the city's housing crisis.

Leung Chun-ying took office as Hong Kong's chief executive in July pledging to provide more affordable housing in a bid to cool the anger. Home prices rose 23 percent in the first 10 months of 2012 and have doubled since bottoming out in 2008 during the global financial crisis, the International Monetary Fund said in a report last month. Rents have followed a similar trajectory.

The soaring costs are putting decent homes out of reach of a large portion of the population while stoking resentment of the government, which controls all land for development, and a coterie of wealthy property developers. Housing costs have been fuelled by easy credit thanks to ultralow interest rates that policymakers can't raise because the currency is pegged to the dollar. Money flooding in from mainland Chinese and foreign investors looking for higher returns has exacerbated the rise.

Read more:In wealthy Hong Kong, poorest live in metal cages 

http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_22538602/hong-kong-poor-living-cages-and-cubicles

New York. By Andreas Feininger

Hudson river

Chelsea rooftops in the snow

Masses of tombs

Brooklyn bridge. 1940

Andreas Bernhard Lyonel Feininger (27 December 1906 - 18 February 1999) was an American photographer and a writer on photographic technique. He was noted for his dynamic black-and-white scenes of Manhattan and for studies of the structures of natural objects. Feininger was born in Paris, France, to Julia Berg and Lyonel Feininger, an American of German origin. A painter, his father was born in New York City, in 1871. His great-grandfather emigrated from Durlach, Baden, in Germany, to the United States in 1848. His younger brother was the painter, T. Lux Feininger (1910-2011), who had begun his professional career as a photographer.  Feininger grew up and was educated as an architect in Germany, where his father painted and taught, at Staatliches Bauhaus. In 1936, he gave up architecture and moved to Sweden, where he focused on photography. In advance of World War II, in 1939, Feininger immigrated to the U.S. where he established himself as a freelance photographer. In 1943 he joined the staff of Life magazine, an association that lasted until 1962. Feininger became famous for his photographs of New York. Other frequent subjects among his works were science and nature, as seen in bones, shells, plants, and minerals in the images of which he often stressed their structure. Rarely did he photograph people or make portraits, however, when he did, they became iconic. Feininger wrote comprehensive manuals about photography, of which the best known is The Complete Photographer. In the introduction to one of Feininger's books of photographs, Ralph Hattersley, the editor of the photography journal Infinity, described him as "one of the great architects who helped create photography as we know it today." In 1966, the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) awarded Feininger its highest distinction, the Robert Leavitt Award. In 1991, the International Center of Photography awarded Feininger the Infinity Lifetime Achievement Award. Today, Feininger's photographs are in the permanent collections of the Center for Creative Photography, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, London's Victoria and Albert Museum, and the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreas_Feininger

The medieval Hereford mapa mundi

Two details from the Hereford Mapa Mundi. Screen shots from my computer

The SXIV medieval Hereford,  is the largest intact mapa mundi that is not comprehensible as a modern map, because it is the representation of the Medieval view of the world, with its architecture, history, monsters, animals. It pictures the human knowledge in only one piece of art.

Though the unconventional orientation has been to east, when it is turned around, some geographies are recognizable, like Italy, the Northern of Africa, Greece.

The Victorians considered this map a monstrosity, because it has an ancient characteristic called ¨augmentation:¨  the horror vacui of the first cartographers made them fill the ¨map¨ with all kind of figures -from the real or mythological world-, even with non existing rivers, mountains.
Watch this video to learn more about the Hereford map:

As a bonus:

A Babylonian world map, known as the Imago Mundi, is commonly dated to the 6th century BCE. The map as reconstructed by Eckhard Unger shows Babylon on the Euphrates, surrounded by a circular landmass showing Assyria, Urartu and several cities, in turn surrounded by a "bitter river" (Oceanus), with seven islands arranged around it so as to form a seven-pointed star. The accompanying text mentions seven outer regions beyond the encircling ocean.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_world_maps

Detroit through Dave Jordano's pictures

I've never been in Detroit, but at least have seen lots of photographs on line. The most captivating for me are those of abandoned houses.

I'm sharing these selections of pictures by photographer Dave Jordano, a former Detroit citizen. The following is an excerpt from wired.com

In the past 40 years, the number of people living in the city of Detroit has halved. This has led many to write it off — in many ways, wrongly — as a decrepit ghost town. Unbroken Down is a photo project that counters the images of abandoned buildings with personal, vibrant shots of everyday life in Detroit.

Photographer Dave Jordano – fresh out of college after being born and raised in the Motor City – was part of the exodus when he headed for Chicago to start a commercial photography studio in the late ’70s. Jordano’s father worked for General Motors and joked that motor oil ran in the family’s veins. Three years ago, Jordano returned to Detroit and began photographing the neighborhoods, people, vistas and communities of his hometown. His resulting body of work is an endearing and sprawling document of a city close to his heart.

“This is the most emotional work I’ve made,” he says. “I don’t get tired and I just keep wanting to go back. I find more and more material every time I go.”

Unbroken Down is also an attempt to set the photographic record straight. Jordano believes that Detroit is more than a tale of decline and images of the associated urban decay. Yet, a lot of celebrated photography projects made in Detroit recently have focused on ruination as if the apocalypse passed through and kept going.

http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2013/01/detroit-dave-jordano/?cid=5559794&pid=5173