Manhattan in Tuscany

They must have been pretty useful at one time or another, those towers in San Gimignano in Tuscany, Italy. Historians haven't reached an agreement yet about their original goal was. Their estimated guesses mount up to functions such as storage space or defence. In medieval times, San Gimignano was a town devoted to trade, situated on a crossing of some main trade routes from the east to the west.

But, as things go: the practical towers grew out of proportion, into a status symbol. Everybody wanted a tower bigger than the next door neighbors, to show the wealth of the family owning the tower. Laws dictated only that the towers shouldn't be higher than the La Rognosa, the 51 metres high tower of the Palazzo del Podestà (the seat of the magistrate). And even though a tower of 50 metres high wasn't of that much use in medieval Tuscany, as the years passed, the towers of San Gimignano grew higher and higher. And their numbers kept increasing, too. Eventually, there were 72 of these towers in the city.

And the story goes as many historical stories go: the righ and famous families of San Gimignano were increasingly obsessed with their rivalries and feuds. And eventually, they couldn't defend themselves against the attacks from Volterra or Poggibonsi. The power and wealth of the high society of the town decreased, and the towers became obsolete. Slowly, San Gimignano became a sleepy, dull town.

And paradoxically, that is exactly the reason that 15 out of the original 72 towers are still standing in San Gimignano as a unique tourist attraction in this particular small town in Tuscany.

bush library

It's a tradition that every departing US president gets to erect his own library for his legacy. Whatever that might be. It's pretty much final that the New York-based architect Robert Stern gets the job, as the Austin American Statesman writes in the article "good enough for Mickey Mouse, good enough for Bush".

I cannot really be bothered to care about this. First of all, I'm pretty sure that the library building will be un-original, un-spectacular and un-interesting (because of both the architect and the president involved), but also because I think that Bush is a disaster dressed up as president, and I suppose his legacy is right up that alley.

Basically, I couldn't be bothered about the entire thing. Until I found that a magazine called "The Chronicle of Higher Education" came with counter-proposals for the libary, in what they called the back-of-the-envelope-design contest: they asked their readers to submit ideas (literally as proposals sketched on the back of an envelope). And some of them were really funny: some play on the irony of the connection "Bush" and "library", some refer to his bad reputation as a cowboy-cum-president, and some just sarcastically insinuate that the guy is a moron. I especially enjoy the "library and fun ranch" proposal. It would definitely fit the Bush-administration better than a classical library.

A fashionable memorial

At the unveiling of the memorial at the Judenplatz in Vienna, Simon Wiesenthal allegedly said that "This monument shouldn't be beautiful, it must hurt." The monument was designed by Rachel Whiteread to portray the horrors of the holocaust. The inverted bookshelves - engraved with words stating that the monument was meant to commemorate the 65.000 Austrian Jews who were killed during the second world war.

But this didn't stop the high-end fashion brand Don Gil from using this memorial as part of a fashion campaign. The photos show a young, beautiful male model, casually leaning against the monument. The monument isn't depicted as a monument, but as a clean and smooth background for an advertisement. Oddly enough, there wasn't too much discussion about this. True, the Viennese Jewish Committee made some fuss about it, and as a reaction Don Gil took the images from their website. They still distribute the magazine in which it is published, though. It's a clear indictation of the impotence of monuments as such. If people don't see the meaning, they just see a beautiful image, to use for whatever purpose they see fit...


I found this case thanks to An-architecture.com.

What to do with the railways?

It's a problem that many former industrial areas have to deal with. It's not just that the former factories have to be brought to a different use, but also the infrastructure that was used has become abandoned. What should be done with all that?

For instance in the Ruhrgebiet in Germany. The area was heavily dependant on coal and steel industry for decades. Most of the different factories and mining plants were shut down because production was simply not economicly sound anymore. Of course, this left an economic crisis to the area, that suffers from high unemployment. It also leads to urbanistic problems: massive sites need to be redeveloped or reprogrammed. But it's also infrastructural: coal, cokes, iron, steel and everything was transported by rail through the area and away from it. The tracks formed a web of dissections in the urban tissue of the densely populated area of the Ruhrgebiet.

Then, at a certain point in time, somebody had a smart idea: let's re-use those railtracks! Former industrial infrastructure graduately became (and becomes) recreational infrastructure. In place of the former railways, bicycle and pedestrian routes have been established, making place for recreational routes in an area that has otherwise trouble creating just those routes. Two problems - one solution for the both.

So right now, there are several routes crossing the Ruhr area, connecting the different sites of industrial heritage. For a map of the possible routes you can check the site of the route industriekultur. Personally, I'm pretty impressed with the structural solutions this brings. And, more importantly, it's great to ride these routes and see the different sites. For instance: the Erzbahn. It starts in Bochum, at the Jahrhunderthalle (the industrial steel-manufacturing hall that's transformed into an event space. And it runs straight through Bochum, to Herne and Gelsenkirchen, to end in Herten. Along the route there are several industrial monuments, such as Zeche Pluto, the Glückauf-Siedlung or the Malakow-tower, for instance. Other than that, the Erzbahn, which is several metres lifted from the ground, offers a great view of the cities and the landscape. Also, the former railway-bridges offer a special thrill, like the Pfeilerbrücke: a 45 metres high, 340 metres spanning bridge. In other places, new bridges have been constructed to connect "missing links" in the system. The entire trajectory gives the pedestrian or cyclist a whole new perspective on the area.

Church conversion

Holiday season is over, postings continue... For instance, one of the most stunning pieces of architecture that I've seen lately:

Conversions of churches are generally a tricky business. On one hand, there's a monumental spaciousness and aura of the interiour, and on the other there are the pragmatic needs of the new programme.
In a former Dominican church in Maastricht (the Netherlands), the Dutch architects Merkx + Girod designed a bookshop: Selexyz Dominicanen. They restored the grandeur of the church, and let the new programme give space to the atmospherics of the place. In order to still obtain the commercially needed amount of square metres, the architects designed a free-standing, two storey steel element. It looks like a giant walk-in bookshelf, positioned to one side of the former church assembly hall. By the design, the chruch is still very readable, but also functions well as a bookstore. Stunning. It's no wonder that the architects won the Lensvelt de Architect interior prize 2007...

Zeche Zollverein - O.M.A.

The office of Rem Koolhaas, O.M.A., is well known for all kinds of landmarks and iconic buildings they designed, as well as their speculative sociograhics. And for simply being famous, of course. The thing is, I cannot be bothered too much with yet another sexy looking tower-striving-to-be-the-next-landmark-of-some-boring-town. I am more intrigued by the masterplan they did for Zeche Zollverein in the Ruhrgebiet area in Germany.

Zollverein was a coal plant, like the region has several. Until 1983 coal was being dug here, and in 1988 the coal refinery plant stopped functioning as well. A vast industrial area became defunct. Nobody quite knew what to do with the site, but the authorities were wise enough to buy it from the previous owners, and getting it listed as part of the UNESCO World Heritage list. But still, what to do with it? Just leave it as a park? Convert it to another function?

The masterplan O.M.A. came up with is as simple as it is strong. To conserve the atmosphere of the site, it was decided that new structures would only be allowed to be added to the perimeter of the site, making a walled city (which it pretty much was in the past, too). Over the years, this band of buildings will graduately develop further, making a harder edge. The functions of the new buildings will mainly be about art and culture. Like one of the first new buildings: the Zollverein School of Design, designed by SANAA.



So much for the new structure, what about the old? By locating all the new stuff in the perifery of the terrain, the old buildings can keep their position and impact on the visitors. And the reprogramming is rather simple: art, culture and tourism. The old buildings itself serve as a beautiful backdrop for all of these activities. And how to get around in that massive area? Again, simple and strong: the old railway tracks are serving as footpaths, linking all the main buildings. The centre-piece is the old coal-washery (which probably isn't the correct term), which is transformed by O.M.A. themselves into the Kohlenwäsche Museum and Visitors Centre. I have no doubt that the Zollverein-area will be one of the central places in 2010, when the entire Ruhrgebiet is the European Capital of Culture.

Memorial builing Hinzert - Wandel Hoefer Lorch + Hirsch

There are many ways that one can deal with memorial sites in architectonical terms. The approach that the architects Wandel, Hoefer, Lorch and Hirsch took at the former prison- and concentrationcamp Hinzert (near Saarbrücken) was the tactic of the "fremdkörper": an autonomous object in the landscape.
It's a clear marking of the otherwise "unreadable" landscape: the object is the metaphorical X that marks the spot (as Diller and Scofidio wrote in their book "Visite aux armées / back to the front").
In itself, i'm never too sure about this method of putting an alien body of remembrance on a site. For one, it sends a message of disconnection with past, present and future: the time of the acts that should be recalled is cut off from the present in time, and therefore also in place. This means that such a method of memory imprints a distant matter of memorial: one can only remember what is not him, what is not the private and what is not the site. One remembers the abstract "them", far away. There is not a single second that the visitor is confronted with the past as part of the personal history, or is forced to think differently than before.

That being said and done: I can understand why the architects chose this approach: they were confronted with a vast, outstretched landscape of the former concentration camp that needed a documentation center - which is inhabiting the strangely shaped autonomous object.

Maybe the object shouldn't be read as above, but is it explaining the activity of documenting and commemorating as one of distance and uncertainty? That the viewer from the present (we, the visitors) can read all they want about the holocaust, see pictures and movies, but can never fully comprehend the past? This would be a formal interpretation of the words of Eli Wiesel, who stated that 'Auschwitz negates any form of literature, as it defines all systems, all doctrines', with which he implied that the non-survivor cannot approach the historical event, but can only glimpse at it from afar.

I don't know for sure what the motivations of the architects for this building were. All I know is that it functions very well for a small memorial site such as Hinzert: it adds a language the site wasn't speaking before.

Janus (Stadtmuseum) - MLZD

In the small Swiss town of Rapperswil-Jona, there is the need for a new city museum (stadtmuseum), on an infill site between two medieval buildings. Swiss architects MLZD came up with a spectacular gem, that denies the surroundings in form and materialization, but at the same time respects the surrounding building. The thing is: such a plan only works in a coherent site, such as a historic city center. And they took advantage of this completely, shaping the architectural body to work around the openings in both the neighboring buildings.
In the interior, this provides for different exhibition spaces, each with an identity of its own. It's no wonder that MLZD won the competition with this scheme, I think.

more? see http://www.mlzd.ch

Oerol Rings - SLEM

Oerol is a theatre festival on the island Terschelling, in the north of the Netherlands. To celebrate the twentyfifth edition of this festival (in 2006), SLEM created a gigantic sand sculpture (400 metres in diameter), shaped like the rings of a tree - symbolizing the aging process of the festival.

During the festival, the sculpture was "charged" with different events every night. The crowds of people, that moved through the sculpture in rings, were at the same time spectactor and piece of art. Because of the ebb and flow on the beach, the structure was demolished by force of nature every day.

Landscape? Art? Monument? Event? You tell me...



The pictures are taken from the website of the Stichting Landschapstheater en Meer (SLEM).

sleeping in a harbour crane

In the small city of Harlingen in the Netherlands, there are three special hotel rooms. You can sleep in a lighthouse, or in a rescue boat. But, better yet: you can sleep in a now defunct harbour crane. the bluiding itself is a gem of an industrial monument, but the renovation into a hotelroom is brilliant: it's quite comfortable (or even luxourious) with just 60 cubic metres of building. And the view is spectacular: you can rotate your hotelroom 360 degrees...

You can book your night there on the official site that rents out the lighthouse, rescue boat and harbour crane.

Kraanspoor - OTH

Once upon a time, the kraanspoor (a track for cranes) was constructed by J.D. Postma. Actually, the 'once upon a time' means: 1952. It was used for unloading ships in the northern part of the Amsterdam harbour. However, as it goes, the construction became defunct after several years of being in service.
The architects of OTH (Ontwerpgroep Trude Hooykaas) designed a new office building on top of the tracks. It's spanning the entire length of the existing structure (270 meters). The idea was to keep the existing structure intact where possible, and to respect it's formal appearance. And OTH did just that: they made a clear and simple transparent structure, in which existing services are used where possible. For instance, four of the existing stairwells are used to enter the building, and the archives are placed between the heavy concrete structure.

The building will be completely finished in October of 2007, and will house the Dutch television company of IDTV.

Radio Kootwijk

In the early twentieth century, short wave transmittance was one of the important methods of communication between the Netherlands and it's colony Dutch East Indies (now: Indonesia).
A small town was appointed for the radio transmitters, and the town was dubbed "Radio Kootwijk", where construction started in 1919. An entire complex of transmitters was erected.

The picture above displays the main transmitter building, designed by Jules Maria Luthmann. If there ever was a expressionist cathedral-like celebration of technology, this is it. It stands in the middle of a rather flat area of heath, making it stand out even more.

Due to developments in telecommuncation (like sattelites and such) Radio Kootwijk graduately lost its meaning as the most important radio-communication centre. For instance, in 1980 the last major send-post was torn down, and in 2004 the area lost its last broadcasting function. In 2005 the fence around the terrain was removed, so now everybody is free to walk in the 450 hectare large grounds.