2007 John K. Branner Traveling Fellowship

presentation slides, uc berkeley lecture 02_20_2008

2008-02-29T19:50:00.000-08:00

selected sketchbook pages

2007-11-28T22:46:00.000-08:00

various aspects of Mexico City, Mexicomy hut in San Blas, Panamavarious views of Machu Picchu, PeruMaison Curutchet in La Plata, ArgentinaCopan Building's parking garage in Sao Paulo and two roomsNational Sculpture Museum in Sao Paulo, Brazilsoccer court and street stair in Rio de Janeiro, BrazilNational Gallery art and rooms in Washington, D.C.

expense list, pages 15,16

2007-10-29T11:47:00.001-07:00

charlotte, ballard boys

2007-10-29T09:44:00.000-07:00

For two weeks or so, I’m back in North Carolina to get an overdue dose of family and affiliated animals before I mosey back into the academic arena. The two diminutive gentlemen to the far right—Connor and Aidan—are the contributions of my older brother (to my left your right) and his wife. Apparently the latest Ballard installments were so excited about joining the clan that they popped out before they really knew what they were doing. Times have been a little tense since I left

Chile but lately

conditions have stabilized. Hopefully the twins will head home from the hospital relatively soon.

rio de janeiro, aqueduto da carioca

2007-10-21T04:26:00.000-07:00

(for the video, just view it without the sound for now....I'll work on that...thanks)
Originally intended for water conveyance, since the turn of the 20^th century this hefty white arcade, also known as the Arcos da Lapa, has supported a streetcar (or bonde) which descends from the Santa Teresa neighborhood and crosses over to its downtown terminus. With the once-dense city fabric scraped from its flanks, today the aqueduct looks a bit out of place. Older photographs show structures clamoring up to the level of its lower arch. The aqueduct picks its way neatly across Lapa—which has seen safer days—to join the conical cathedral and the Petrobras cube (both visible in the center image) in the center city's curious scattering of monumental forms.

rio de janeiro, pedregulho housing

2007-10-20T07:25:00.000-07:00

Designed by Affonso Eduardo Reidy and built between 1949 and 1951, the Pedregulho housing development was intended as a model for subsidized lower-class housing. The 850 foot-long building, with its 272 apartments, met with effluent critical approval from such international figures as Max Bill, Walter Gropius, and Siegfried Giedion. It takes center stage in a broader development scheme consisting of four apartment blocks, an elementary school, a gymnasium, a swimming pool, a health center, playgrounds, a laundry, and a daycare center.

Pedregulho’s third floor open corridor—the building’s main entry via bridges—provides communal space while allowing the building’s full seven stories to function without the aid of elevators. The building shares an intimate and sophisticated relationship with its sloping site. Perched on sturdy pillars, the building approximates a contour line with its floorplate and allows the ground to flow fluidly beneath it.

The project’s sinuous curve resembles Le Corbusier’s unrealized urban proposals for Rio de Janeiro while its proportions and monumentality mimic the Aqueduto da Carioca as described in the blog entry above.

Conceived as a white bastion of working class sanitation, Pedregulho is now more of a rotted hulk than Chandigarh’s Secretariat. It reminds me of that crashed spaceship in the first Ewok movie. The ground has accrued a healthy patina of rubbish and rats and its fragile parts—the terra cotta block screens in particular—have largely been broken, filled, or replaced with utmost pragmatism. But the legs still stand, the floors still span, and the folks living there still looked pretty happy (except for the ones yelling at me for taking pictures, of course). To the building’s right in the top image sprawls a typical informal settlement, which sports all the same colors and dimensions without conforming to Pedregulho’s tight, clean curve. Top-down asthetics relinquished, what was once a monolithic expression of the designer’s hand has congealed as a coordinated composite of messy families and private lives.

rio de janeiro, ipanema sugar loaf and christ

2007-10-14T07:32:00.000-07:00

(View the video without sound to avoid the wrath of the evil chipmunks....I'll get them under control shortly)
Rio is a can of Sao Paulo concentrate turned inside-out. Its dramatic topography shifts the order of inhabitation such that the informal neighborhoods (favelas) which skirt Sao Paulo’s peripheral lowlands here climb steep intra-city hills. Unconquerable mountains organize the city, centering on a dialogue between two of the city’s most breathtaking vantages: Pão de Açúcar and Cristo Redentor. The photographs at right and center were taken facing each other. Cristo is the bright white blip in the upper right corner of the night photo and the Pão is that dinosaur-egg-like protuberance above the bay.

The beach at Ipanema (image at left) wasn’t quite what I thought it would be. I think I had in my head something more intimate; coves and palms and old men playing cards and drinking from coconuts, perhaps. And that untouchable girl walking to the grocery store or whatever. But in reality Ipanema is a substantial stretch of sand. It’s a sunbathing institution.

I fleshed out the beach’s remarkable social dynamic over three moderate-to-heavy sunburns. With my fellowship I’ve been looking at types of public spaces and Ipanema is certainly the epitome of its type. Without trees, without buildings (other than public bathrooms, flimsy tents, and the occasional kiosk), and even without paving, Ipanema presents unfettered (or, at most, scantily fettered) social space bounded by the ocean on one side and the boardwalk on the other.

The ocean is a dynamic boundary. The water is so cold it makes the sand feel like that granulated ice you get at Burger King soda fountains and the waves are sufficiently grand for surfing, so languid lounging doesn’t bleed into the blue like it does in more tranquil surfs. The rise of the tide acts first as a compacter and then, past a certain threshold, as an eroder. Reminded of their mobility, people eventually peel away to take their lunch or go on with their lives. With a handful of bills though, no one ever really needs to leave. An unceasing army of purveyors vending all types of food, drink, and trinkets overlays the corporal spectacle. They pass within five feet of any given point every thirty seconds singing songs of mate (tea), grilled cheese, beer, papery fried donut-like rings, and other curiosities. Some relish their patrol while others trudge along subdued but available.

Weekends usher out the entire undressed Brazilian world. The strip transforms into an unabashed repository for bodies of all ages, types, and timbres. Weekdays, however, are reserved for the specialists. There are two types of people on the beach during the weekday: men and women. Men stand and pose, women lie and bask. When the women do parade—a rare and beautiful thing—one can appreciate a unique spinal curvature that protracts the rear and ratchets the breasts horizontal. Less interesting (but very much interested) people such as myself rent chairs and wear sunglasses. The women I understand; I’m used to the idea of sunning on a beach. It’s relaxing and with a warm sun and soft breeze you can snatch an easy nap sunscreen permitting. But for the men, I can’t quite see the payoff. Well toned, chest-shaven youths will simply stand there for hours staring into space, not speaking to anyone but periodically shifting positions to self-consciously indicate various aspects of their upper body. It’s a rare brand of unrequited narcissism. Full-length beach mirrors would be a huge hit.

*center image courtesy of Ivan Valin

são paulo, branner colleagues

2007-10-10T20:11:00.000-07:00

Please excuse this harmless bit of ecstatic self-indulgence and gosh-look-how-special-we-are-this-year-ness.

Brazil

marks the unique intersection of the year's three Branner trajectories; I overlapped with Ivan Valin in Japan, Italy, and

France

but this is my first time crossing paths with Yuki Bowman. Amidst all the jumping and joking and hooting and hollering I have found it profoundly enjoyable to hash out urban landscapes and architectural jewels with two minds enriched by nine respective months of itinerant architectural observation. Our discussions remind me that the fruits of travel—sensibilities stirred, assumptions unsettled—remain freshly inchoate but I've definitely had a blast sampling our distended reservoirs of newly acquired knowledge over carne and Caipirinhas.
*images courtesy of Ivan Valin and Yuki Bowman

são paulo, layers

2007-10-10T05:22:00.001-07:00

São Paulo resembles Tokyo. I did not expect this. Both cities’ unbridled development has led to a fragmented metropolis; a sprawling mash of mid-rise modernism over- and underlaid with arterial networks….In Sao Paulo’s case, the city’s explosive growth after years of relative obscurity—compounded with property rights and a vocal geography—led to rampant organizational disjunction. In comparison to the Spanish colonial grid, São Paulo’s compact fortified Portuguese foundation did little to structure subsequent development.

The two differences between the cities (and look, I realize full well that there are about a million and a half differences between these two cities but I’m talking about experiences and impressions here so just come with me on this one) are (1) the modes in which the city accrues its layers and (2) the means by which the city supersaturates one’s senses.

In Sao Paulo, perforated plates replace Tokyo’s criss-crossing pathways. Conceptually and topographically, ground plays a vital role here. It warps and wobbles, sustaining massive cuts here and there but resisting puncture elsewhere. When the city’s plan needs stacking it goes about it in broad sheets, scalpeling out lozenge-shaped apertures to usher in light, air, and views. Like Brazilian women, the city favors a policy of visual disclosure along its nubile curves.

In the images above, note how this spatial sensibility plays out at progressively smaller scales.

At left, superimposed traffic lanes configure not unlike Park Avenue behind Grand Central in New York, although here roadway replaces railroad and the depression is deeded swaths of sky. Note the continuous band of elaborate graffiti running along the lower wall.

At center, a multilevel metro station (Estacio Se) endows the transit connection with generous monumentality and yawning efficiency.

At right, a multi-floor galleria gives the same priority to multi-level unification at much more intimate commercial dimension. Small shops, each one bay wide and more often than not packed with alternative lifestyle paraphernalia, line the promenade.

são paulo, copan building

2007-10-10T05:18:00.001-07:00

Designed by Oscar Niemeyer and completed in 1953, the Copan Building is a megalithic tour de force of the brise soleil taken to its sinewy extreme. The façade’s slow undulation coaxes its grain into dynamism as hundreds of horizontal shelves draw the eye upward to the waving crest of its perspectival silhouette. The bulk of the façade masks some 1,160 individual apartments sectioned into blocks and perched over a Reubenesque galleria whose floor slowly slopes with the Sao Pãulian topography.

buenos aires, la recoleta cemetery

2007-10-10T05:15:00.001-07:00

Buenos Aires is a very pleasant place and the folks there certainly know what to do with the wee hours of the night but I have very few pictures that capture the place’s particular flavor. My album is reduced to rare snippets of rich materiality; the little pockets where rot presses its earthy sincerity into the venture. This city could be New York were it not for a nagging suggestion of Paris....except I’ve been hard pressed to find pastries with chocolate in them, even in the diminutive croissants (media lunas) the bakeries pump out in scores. The mind amasses too many picturesque lanes and corniced crumbling halls without alighting on that special je ne sais quoi palpable in so many other cities I have seen this year. Buenos Aires elicits little more than a nostalgic “oh, that’s nice” from such an astute and noble critic such as myself.

la plata, maison curutchet

2007-10-01T16:27:00.001-07:00

La Plata is located a bumpy 2-hour train ride from Buenos Aires, during which time Ivan and I were serenaded twice and given ample opportunity to purchase candy bars, scrunchies, elbow braces, flashlight-tipped pens, anti-inflammatories. As usual, Corbusier did not disappoint. Maison Curutchet hybridizes the Villa Savoye and Mill Owners’ Building to accommodate a doctor’s house and clinic. Two pre-existing houses flank the ambiguous airy façade (in the image, foliage largely obscures the house to the left) and Corbusier opportunistically knits the structure into context by carrying dominant horizontal lines--terrace floor slab from the right and brise soleil from the left--and by stepping his building’s silhouette. Throughout the project, Maison Curutchet’s massing caters to its neighbors’ respective heights in order to maximize sun and view penetration. In reference to the park across the street (note the rich foreground green) the house is intensely layered from front to back with thickened two-dimensional planes that cede to inhabitable volumes once the façade is breached. A tree rising in the interstice behind the clinic ushers greenery into the heart of the house (well, it will in a few weeks) and intensifies the framework's complexity.

expense list, page 14

2007-09-28T12:28:00.001-07:00

buenos aires, la boca

2007-09-26T17:15:00.001-07:00

santiago - buenos aires, the andes

2007-09-24T05:40:00.000-07:00

Aloft from Santiago’s airport after sleepy hours of there-too-early waiting: Hills lie waded and plunked on a tiled floor of green and grit. Rivers plow restlessly, their knotted swaths the sum of past indecision. But as we bank eastward the hills become everything—become mountains—with rivered veins and man-made tracks etching out meager horizontals. Drama builds as uncontainable black crags pierce the snow's amelioration, propelling its white—and that of its nebulous source—to near painful brightness.

It doesn't last. As we breach the peaks the snow loses climatic stamina and recedes to whirls and slivers burrowed in shadowing creases. The ground returns, reddish brown and partially parched to tan. Folds and furrows relent to molds and wrinkles before calming to gentle modulation. And like that we’re across and the Andes’ one-act play is complete. Man rekindles his tracings, lakes add blue to clouds’ clear shadows, and God’s lines wriggle and rope as the landscape recomposes for less dramatic endeavors.

valparaiso, independence and the following

2007-09-18T16:36:00.000-07:00

Longer than the longest long weekend, the Chilean Independence day is a full five days of revelry and relaxation. The nation’s biggest holiday may have limited my academic accomplishment but I feel comfortable chalking it up as a legitimate cultural experience. Latin Americans are friendly to the point of congenial coercion and, as developed and international as Chile may be, I find it to (thankfully) no exception to the rule. Folks here have adopted me sans hesitation.

I had the pleasure of attending three family/friend get-togethers over the last week. I was always the obvious outsider—a bona fide novelty, in my view—but Latins are remarkable for their ability to balance attention so I was never the object of inquisition nor was I banished to English-laden silence; instead, with patient encouragement, I bumbled in and out of the conversation, tossing in my two stuttering cents and receiving an occasional mercy catch-up when gossip spun beyond my grasp.

As a novice in the language (an admitted over-statement), I am continuously amazed at the difference between conversational spectatorship and involvement. Sitting outside a discussion is like crossing a highway; there are three possibilities. The first is that I can wait until the moment is just right, when some stoplight or lull or (god-forbid) accident slows down traffic up the road just enough that I can dart through. The second is that I can gather my balls beneath me enough to throw myself into the fray frogger-style. The third—and safest—is that some kindly driver can slow to a halt, eye-contact me, and wave me across. Thankfully, Latin Americans are better conversation-incorporators than drivers so I rarely need to summon guile or gumption to participate.

Taking the highway metaphor from another angle (dead horses are made to be beaten), my on-ramp into the conversation usually takes the form of a now-memorized scholarship spiel—which garners a smile, incredulity, and some variation of “I want that, you lucky bastard”—accompanied by a humble account of my valiant español efforts. Talking about my inability to talk turns out to be the easiest thing I can say and once my confidence gets a few give-and-takes under its belt I can wrestle the context clues enough to get by (and catch up with what I’m smiling and nodding to later).

On Tuesday, after one of my adopted-family barbecues, I walked over to visit Viña del Mar’s ramada oficial, pictured at top. This is not to be confused with a fonda, at which you pay for entry and end up dancing and drinking until the wee hours of the morning. The ramada, named for the tree branches that its organizers inexplicably staple all over their vending stalls, is more like a county fair than a hoe-down. The corridor shown here offers a gauntlet of traditional food and drink including empanadas (pasty-enfolded goodness), anticucho (cow heart), pisco (grape-based liquor that Peruvians’ staunchly claim is theirs and only theirs), and chicha (mildly-alcoholic grape juice). The area next door had all the classic games. People lined up with their girlfriends to knock over bottles, throw things in bottles, and do whatever else you can possibly do with bottles. The possibilities seemed endless. Small children even played a platonic, Wheel-of-Fortune-ish version of spin-the-bottle. Children are a major component of the celebration, dressing up (only occasionally of their own volition, I’m sure) in traditional clothing and dabbling in the ways of the cueca (a traditional dance in which menfolk and womenfolk wave handkerchiefs at each other).

I spent the next day wandering through the Valparaisan hills. It was the right spot at the right time. Most of the businesses on El Plan remained closed as their clientele holed up in the hills with family and friends, taking advantage of the gorgeous day for a last round of grilling and a last attempt to fix their kites aloft in the blue sky. In the picture to the left note the pristine clarity of a view that stretches across the bay and clear out to the Andes.

A hike among the hills is an interesting endeavor. The hills stretch toward the water like a 45-fingered hand that's inverted so that the middle fingers are shorter than the rest. Ascensors lift up to hills’ cusps but, to move from one hill to the next, one has to strike out toward the heartland or descend and ascend steep stairs or the winding roads. The city’s solution is Avenida Alemania / Camino Cintura. Installed in 1930 as the city’s outer limit, this road does its damnedest to maintain horizontality by hugging the 100 meter contour wherever possible.

If you can make here, you can track around the city in continuously scenic sweep that catches radio music, charcoal fumes, and rampant kite string that dares (tragically, in most cases) to brave the electric cables’ ubiquitous tangle.

Finally, the image at right captures my later-afternoon descent back down to flatland. Note the stairs’ intimacy, the drainage-dimension-cum-front-yard to its right, the dog’s placement (firmly in the “nice dog on stoop” category), the afore-mentioned cable tangle, and the answering set of steps at the foot of the next hill.

valparaiso, ascensor artillería

2007-09-18T15:54:00.001-07:00

The latest (1912) and longest (175 m), Ascensor Artillería reclines languidly with its toe at the old customs house and its head by the city’s maritime museum. The site presents a unique tri-edge condition, allowing the ascensor to straddle El Plan and Artillería Hill while tracing the bounds of official port operations. Still visible to the existing tracks’ left is the green dimension of the ascensor’s once-doubled capacity where two defunct frames, bereft of their allotted path, now brace commemorative flagpoles as consolation.

In contrast to the lower station’s tacked-on twin vending stands (whose operational status is difficult to discern but worth pondering whilst awaiting the ascensor's arrival), the free-standing upper structure supports a cluster of balloon-framed café and shop encrustations...with flanking gazebos to boot.

The mirador (overlook) it anchors provides encompassing bay views supported by an array of smartly-designed vending stands. Artisanal hawkers are par for the tourist-trafficked course but here they are standardized, systematized, and refreshingly discrete as they package Valparaiso for popular consumption.

valparaiso, cats and dogs

2007-09-13T17:47:00.001-07:00

Valparaiso is the only city I have visited where dogs and cats thrive in equal measure. In a system of relationshiops running parallel to that of their human counterparts, the animals' patterns of territorial use and behavioral interaction map the city’s fine-grained inhabitability in terms of threshold, prospect, and refuge.

A street section in Valparaiso creates stacked tiers of accessible safety leaving dogs lying comfortably at the bottom, cats treading carefully in the middle, and pigeons perched mindlessly overhead. Although this simple hierarchy holds true in any city, it is rarely fleshed out in such furry extravagance. Moreover, the same steep slope and the domestic scale that sets Valparaiso’s particular patterns in motion also subverts them…such that a pigeon perched on a roof may sit within snatching reach of cats or dogs, depending on the severity of the situation. The inclined terrain’s sectional omnipresence juxtaposes modes and manners of inhabitabation as clearly with the animal kingdom as with civilized society.

The following is a matrix of provisional categories empirically established via recent wanders through Valparaiso’s various neighborhoods:

There are three types of dog. Dog-in-street is almost always nice but often skittish and sometimes stand-offish, Dog-on-stoop is almost always nice but sometimes stand-offish, Dog-in-yard is almost always mean but occasionally nice.

There are three kinds of cat. Cat-in-street is usually skittish but sometimes nice, Cat-on-sill is often nice sometimes skittish, and Cat-in-window is N/A; he doesn’t give a shit about you and you’re not getting to him so why bother attempting a detailed description.

Finally, to complete the tri-partite pyramid, there is the pigeon. Pigeon-in-street is audacious but elusive, Pigeon-on-perch is wary and skittish, and Pigeon-on-wire is contentedly aloof and a fecal hazard. Dogs chase pigeons, cats chase pigeons, but I restrain myself (occasional stutter-step feigned attack nontwithstanding).

The picture to the bottom right depicts an uneasy co-habitation. The dogs have placed themselves in front of their owner’s door and, comfortable with its semi-public condition, are friendly and receptive. The cat claims the same stoop where it has been reduced to a sill dimension. He has situated himself just next to the dogs but remains safely out of reach. The cat was so bold as to rub against the dogs while I was petting them but the moment I moved away he immediately (albeit nonchalantly) retreated to his defensive position. Note the fringe of fencing that protects him from the less-nimble neighbors.

valparaiso, ascensor espíritu santo

2007-09-13T17:27:00.000-07:00

valparaiso, ascensor florida

2007-09-12T17:13:00.001-07:00

Ascensor Florida presents a fairly typical specimen of the type. It is less elevated than some--low enough to sustain a footbridge over it--but, as the video shows, the yellow cabs are intimately visible from a variety of viewpoints along its inclined path. Many of the other ascensors embedded in the urban fabric maintain their presence only from above and below, so Florida is riper than most for amateur cinematography. The stairway at the ascensor's flank--more for descent than ascent--represents standard accoutrement. Regardless of their ascensorial association, stairs reinforce their fabric's domesticity by serving as steeply inclined pedestrian streets. Often, front doors open directly to each landing.

valparaiso, ascensor polanco

2007-09-12T16:47:00.000-07:00

Ascensor Polanco, consisting of a tunnel, a tower, and a catwalk, is the only one of Valparaiso’s ascensors to turn vertical. It is also the only ascensor to entertain a mid-point stop; this occurs where shaft intersects slope and breaches ground. Polanco rises from the hillside like a yellow Tuscan turret, using a similar strategy to Lisbon’s Santa Justa elevator to trigonometrically connect the city’s upper and lower levels. Unfortunately, Polanco is quite un-operational at the moment.

valparaiso, initial impressions

2007-09-11T19:10:00.001-07:00

Valparaiso wraps its harbor like a north-facing amphitheater. Ridges of hills, historically dominated by European immigrant communities, radiate from the bay and its wedge of flat land. Their orientation is reinforced by the city’s near-utter lack of bridges. While the flat land (El Plan) consists of more-or-less straight gridded streets, paths and roadways in the hills follow labyrinthine, ravine-skirting switchbacks that would quickly lead to disorientation were it not for the fact that the slope and the ocean always lead north. A beltway tracing the 100’ contour gathers what was once the periphery. Businesses claim the flats while houses climb the hills. Ancient inclined elevators called ascensores...that function now either miraculously or not at all...connect the two realms.

Situated at the interface of culture and nature, the ascensores were as much about the ground as its defiance, as much about constructing the site as creating the object, as much about topography as technology, as much about tradition as innovation. Fascinating as objects in themselves, the ascensores were part of a more complex spatial, social, and technological matrix, both more complex and more fundamental, that transcends their appeal as objects. --Rene Davids

Valparaiso’s resemblance to San Francisco is striking, replete with devastating 1906 earthquake. In fact, sailors refer to it as Pancho, the name Francisco's affectionate diminutive. Climate is comparable, Victorian architecture abounds, and hills strike out from the bay with equal drama. The other day the city’s new metro system played “are you going to San Francisco” musak-style and the surreality almost overwhelmed me. However, Valparaiso takes the San Francisco analogy only so far. Unlike San Fransisco, it rarely presses its orthogonality into the hills. The city is more like Lisbon in this sense.

And the city has not followed San Francisco into modernity. It remains a panoply of mottled tin and rusted cast iron that began sinking into decay from the time the Panama Canal rendered its circumnavigatory position obsolete. The result is a pedestrian scale preserved through salutary neglect, pock-marked with half-collapsed houses and gutted interiors.

*map image at top taken from Prof. Rene David's article, "City Limits: topography and invention"

expense list, page 13

2007-09-06T08:26:00.001-07:00

lima, cerro san cristobal

2007-09-06T07:15:00.000-07:00

A view over the city of Lima from the centrally located San Cristobal hill. This is a fairly typical scene: bare stony slopes, clustered single- or double-story houses, and the omnipresent wintertime mist. Lima is not a beautiful city. Interesting...but not beautiful. Well, with some beautiful parts, naturally, but on the whole not beautiful. I mean, it's just not.

machu picchu, las ruinas

2007-09-04T16:06:00.001-07:00

Machu Picchu's architectural significance rests on a succession of scales, from its technical virtuosity to its spatial progression to its cosmic calibration. Conceptually, the ruins resemble other royal retreat masterpieces—such as Hadrian’s Villa in Tivoli or Katsura Rikyu and Shugakuin Rikyu in Kyoto (see blog posts on February 28, 2007)—whose cognitive and mnemonic capacities carry their phenomenal richness beyond mere solipsism by rooting it referentially and analogically in the larger physical, social, and cosmic landscape. Like Japan’s imperial gardens, Machu Picchu employs borrowed scenery and situates architectural shelters in a modulated landscape. Like Hadrian’s Villa, Machu Picchu cultivates an air of urbanity within an eccentric situational framework.

Machu Picchu is a large-scale architectural model. Its stepped terraces are freshly laminated cardboard that, with perseverance and some sturdy shoes, can be viewed from nearly any angle. From a perch on the surrounding slopes (preferably with water bottle in hand and coca leaves between lip and gum) one can see that the complex cleaves into two major sections: the upper agricultural zone and the lower inhabited zone. The lower zone in turn divides into two sections: sacred and profane. However, upon entry, this clearly graspable organizational logic plays second fiddle to site-specific spatial experience.

In contrast to Teotihuacán (posted on July 20), Machu Picchu takes a subtle but equally impressive approach to asserting man’s importance in the universe. Its makers neither tame nature nor fold to it. Rather, they cavort to lend happenstantial exigencies a flatteringly humanistic raison d’être.

The pervasive phenomenon goes so far as to bestow a masculine profile on adjacent mountains. In the background of the top image one can make out the forehead to the right, chin to the left, and nose at center. I climbed up the snoz—Huanya Picchu—to capture the image at lower left.

In addition to its paranoid critical demonstration, the top photograph documents the affinity between earth and architecture inherent in Machu Picchu’s material tactility (features have been roped off to staunch erosion from millions of inquisitive hands), in its pinnacle-like roofs and serrated terraces, and in the correspondence of ground and enclosure.

Retaining walls elevate the inhabited zone from the slope below. Their dominant vertical down-slope edges suggest that the terraces progress down the slope rather than up. Attuned to the sequence, residences clamber down the slope like lithic slinkies

The building at center conjoins with its retaining walls to play upon volume and mass. First, it tapers and aligns with the uppermost wall to create an enclosure and a threshold that frames a panorama of the complex beyond. Second, it reverses the face of the upper retaining wall so that what meets the earth below presents a façade above. Third, it melds smoothly with the lower retaining wall to blur the construction’s free-standing—vs—earth-retaining distinction. Finally, the building’s offset from the camera-facing terraces creates a patio to the near side, thereby shifting the lower floor’s orientation 90 degrees from the upper floor’s orientation.

lima, miraflores

2007-08-29T11:38:00.000-07:00

Oceanfront beneath the cliffs of Miraflores, the city's most glamorous district. The waves' sound as they retreat back through the rounded stones (in the image I've caught them mid-backpedal) resembles a cross between sandpaper and crumbling styrofoam soundclipped in reverse. Very groovy.

medellín, santo domingo and la ladera

2007-08-23T15:14:00.000-07:00

(Perhaps not entirely successful but at least well intentioned self-portrait with reflected Medellín land- and skyscape in green opaque glass through punched openings in faux stone wall whilst using the internet. Photograph by the author.)

The city of Medellín has entered an important transitional phase. In the last few years it has rebounded from its narco-traffic legacy (this was the home of Pablo Escobar, after all) and it is now reaching out to educate and incorporate the broad, sloping margins of impoverished neighborhoods. Architecture is at the heart of the city’s recuperative campaign…not in an environmentally deterministic mindset, mind you, but in one that is playfully mindful of figure and ground's interplay. The city is employing Colombia’s architects to revamp its public spaces with formal ambition and spatial sensitivity. The crusade is ongoing at the local and regional scales. As the city proper (financial center, civic center, universities, etc) extends north-south along the Río Medellín, here “regional scale” means down-in-the-valley and “local scale” means up-in-the- flanking-hills.

So far Medellín boasts five local-scale interventions. The two I show here are designed by Mazzanti Arquitectos, the office I visited in Bogotá. Their full names are, respectively: “Parque Biblioteca España en Santo Domingo Savio” and “Parque Biblioteca León de Greiff en La Ladera.” The appellation “parque biblioteca” most comfortably translates as community center. Instead of serving as passive repositories of textual knowledge (although they do harbor small collections) the buildings' main focus is housing a myriad of programs, resources, and services dedicated to all ages...small children being the most vocal.

Informal developments are relentless in their cellularization of space into semi-private and private claims. As such, they can approach modular homogeneity with a density in plan that renders it difficult to discern the circulatory network allowing them to function. In such an environment, a carved and carefully cared for public space coaxes out the public with capillary action. Projects such as Mazzanti’s, positioned in the thick of the informal mash, are fed directly by the pressure of the surrounding urban density. The interventions do not structure the surrounding built fabric so much as redirect its flows and concentrations, rending discreet reconstructive scars that heal into continuities over time.

Parque Biblioteca España en Santo Domingo Savio insets three immense geometricized stones high on a hillside overlook. The top image places the buildings in their social context. Note their modest, tip-of-the-iceberg massing versus the glowering monumental masks visible from below (see image at left). Several security guards--a common sight in Colombian cities--and a few waist-high safety rails are all that protect the parque biblioteca’s property. Its wood-floored main entry rests adjacent to the existing road. Across the street is the church of Santo Domingo and, above it, a sheltered ball court.

The image to the left looks upslope to the chamfered boxes. On a hazy day, the mottled black stones fade into the mountain’s silhouette. As one approaches by the newly installed “metrocable” (also highlighted in red), corners crisp and details clarify. If the library seems more comfortable than usual with my graphics it is because the initial scheme was presented in model form as three glowing red resin blocks.

The metrocable ride is surreal. The cars’ forms mimic those of the library and confuse scale, distance, and function. The system is minimal in some senses and massive in others. Each car is intimate, seating only eight people, and there is no continuous track or trail that needs to be cleared on the ground for the line to pass through. Terrestrial impact is limited to enormous cylindrical footprints and a progression of mammoth station stops. Floating between these implants one drifts quietly, dangling past the (clearly visible) private daily lives of all the conglomerate below.

The center image’s downhill stance elucidates the project’s immediate contextual relationships, conveys the breadth of the landscape beyond, and relates the stones’ idiosyncratic creasing to their interior tectonics. The buildings climbing the slope to the right (a church and ball court), while no architectural gems, mark the neighborhood’s communal center. A clear departure from the local architectural vocabulary, the library blocks’ stolid opacity squeezes the panoramic spectacle to their interstices, where a strong prospect-and-refuge effect begs photographic exploitation (see link to New York Times article below).

The stones’ roof lines reveal them as folded, suspended sheaths. Inside, canted walls whitewash interior towers with reflected daylight. Windows are minimal and placed as much for graphic effect as to account for sight lines. The buildings’ surprising lack of transparency intensifies their figural quality and illusive solidity. Even as the walls’ thinness and luminous interiors belie their ostensible material sincerity, the resultant spaces’ emphatic interiority enhances their union to the landscape.

Finally, the image to the right depicts a stone gabion retaining wall upslope, the main platform above, and an entrance to the partially sunken socle ahead. A layered forest of steel tubes lets air and light into the sub-platform plenum that conjoins the boxes beyond without undermining its solidity.

In Parque Biblioteca León de Greiff en La Ladera, Mazzanti Arquitectos address a similar brief to Santo Domingo by likewise anchoring three discreet boxes in a common armature.

However, whereas Santo Domingo looms with iconic imagery at high visibility, La Ladera hunkers into the landscape. It combs the topography over its head with a formal discipline bordering on Modernist orthodoxy. The building is more intent on views from within than from without. The boxes are view-finders that don’t have to do much searching.

The top image—courtesy of Mazzanti Architects—catches the building at its most charismatic. Below that, the image to the left peers over the library’s right shoulder as it hunkers into the terrain’s broad slope, tracing a contour line while its constituents slide forward out of their holsters. The slope here is much more gradual than at Santo Domingo and its green space more generously inhabitable.

The composition’s concavity catalyzes voyeuristic interrelationships. The image at center looks from one box to its neighbors’ similarly split-level condition. As is also visible in the image to the left, the uppermost deck gently slopes down to enjoy the modules’ formal frontal gestalt’s framing and shading potential.

Finally, the image to the right faces the entrance from within the communal arm. To the left is the ground, to the right are two boxes are highlighted in red, and from above the sunlight filters through young palms rising toward the new ground.

http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/travel/12nextstop.html?8dpc
http://rising.globalvoicesonline.org/hiperbarrio/

medellín, orquideorama del jardín botánico

2007-08-23T14:38:00.001-07:00

bogotá, transmilenio

2007-08-11T14:55:00.001-07:00

I came to Bogotá for two main reasons. First, the city provides a prime Latin American case study on infrastructural development at the metropolitan scale. Like Mexico City, the bulk of Bogotá sprawls across a vast plane of reclaimed land. Unlike Mexico City, Bogotá has decided to develop its roads and bus system instead of implementing an underground Metro. Second (and this is related to the first) I am interested in the work of Giancarlo Mazzanti, a local architect who takes systemic approaches in creating public projects. The two interests dovetail in the pedestrian bridge system his office designed for the Transmilenio bus stations. The bridges, a kit of supports and sections that can kink over and around contextual obstacles, now mark the rhythm of the bus routes throughout the city.

http://www.transmilenio.gov.co/nuevapagina/home_english.htm

bogotá, collegio gavilanes

2007-08-09T20:02:00.001-07:00

The school is less formally-minded than other Giancarlo Mazzanti projects and, as such, it provides perhaps the most concise example of his modular design strategies. The small campus is elegant in its simplicity and organizational clarity. Conceived as a chain of modules to be snaked and shifted into various contexts, the string is tethered by a library/auditorium at one end and a kindergarten at the other. From one of these two singular structures to the other, the chain of one and two-story classroom modules enfolds a central common space (center image) like a necklace. Upper lab rooms, wrapped in stone and ribboned with colorful glass, float above the cloister’s plastic continuity (left and center images). Distances among the modules remain constant but the architects reserve a modest degree of freedom in determining the connective ground story’s final configuration. This reservation allows them to fine-tune the space within and its relationship to the neighborhood without.

It is essential to see this neighborhood (visible in the center and right images) in order to understand the project. While not the poorest of Bogotá’s barrios, poverty is omnipresent in its ramshackle assortment of mortared clay and unpaved roads. Workers were installing utility systems and erecting housing projects to the east and north when I visited. Construction of Collegio Gavilanes is almost complete (note the paint-spattered gentleman putting finishing touches on the ball court at center) and it will be interesting to see how town and gown interact as the project matures.

*aerial photograph courtesy of Mazzanti Architects

bogotá, selected rogelio salmona works

2007-08-04T19:15:00.001-07:00

biblioteca pública virgilio barco

nueva santa fe community center

colombian archives

torres del parque

bogotá, view from cerro monserrate

2007-08-01T21:08:00.001-07:00

The image above, taken from high in the eastern hills, shows three streets that help explain the city's peculiar urban character. Bogota’s traffic has neither the US’s barreling self-restraint nor India’s equilibrating dynamics, and its regulation is a central issue in the city’s contemporary development.

The first street is Jimenez Avenue, which snakes downhill on the left side of the image. It was recently refurbished by a team led by Rogelio Salmona and consists of a stepped linear fountain flanked by trees and lined with lanes of traffic. It was built above a riverbed that had been long been covered. The pedestrian-minded road is a scenic, graceful gesture that doesn’t knit things together so much as rend a linear pause in the city center’s gritty discontinuities.

The second is Carrera 7, the most important organizational element in Bogotá’s urban development. Called “La Septima,” it runs from Plaza Bolivar (highlighted in red), the center of the Spanish colonial grid, to the old salt mines far to the north.

Instead of climbing the Andes’ steep slopes as its population grew, Bogotá spread westward and digested its vast agricultural flatlands. The result is that the city’s main organizational corridor—along with its cultural and financial centers—have been displaced to the modern city’s far east. Its an odd situation that exacerbates traffic pressure. There are miraculous (i.e. highly controversial) plans to install the Transmillenio bus system on La Septima, which would consume precious lanes but ultimately raise its efficiency.

The third street I've highlighted is Calle 26, a high-traffic artery that extends as far as the international airport. Assuming a highway format, it is the most expressively symptomatic of the need for east-west connection. As Calle 26 nears La Septima it sinks below grade to allow the original grid to bridge over and then uses exit-ramps to disperse traffic as it passes the financial center and the Andes’ slope increases. I took this photograph in the morning while the city readied for its birthday celebration on La Septima. It’s one of those pictures that takes down a whole flock.

First, note the yellow sign at center that claims the street for the “Cyclovia” (pedestrian and bicycle use only) on Sundays and festivals, from 7:00 AM until 2:00 PM. I took the photograph on a Sunday that was also a festival day, although unfortunately I had to scoot out before the big parade fired up. Bicyclists are few but you can see plenty of pedestrians taking advantage of the traffic cease-fire.

Second, note the balcony, tarp, and bright light just below the sign. There was a camera crew up there with folks on couches warming up to color-commentate the occasion.

Third, note the tall rectangular sign rising behind the smoker’s head and the tip of the roof poking out from the behind the building on the far left. This is the Transmilenio stop on Jimenez Avenue, which runs perpendicular to La Septima.

Fourth, note the mix of buildings present. The textured wall to the right marks a Spanish colonial church. Far in the distance, partially obscured by the trees, rises a belltower of the cathedral in Plaza Bolivar. The rest of the buildings were established in the 1960’s and 70’s. The avenue here is fairly narrow because of the original Spanish grid in which it sits but as the road extends to the north it widens to take on several lanes of (choked) traffic.

Finally, note the Colombian flag in the upper left and the fellow smoking in the foreground. Bogotá is in Colombia and a fair number of people smoke here.

expense list, page 12

2007-07-31T13:41:00.001-07:00

panama, san blas

2007-07-31T07:46:00.000-07:00

Miffed and scorned by the boat-wielding Panamanian public (my plan to sail the Canal as a line-handler never materialized), I re-directed my last few Central American days to San Blas, a string of islands off the coast that, along with a 232-mile strip of coastal Panama, belongs to the indigenous Kuna people.

It was an odd and incredible experience that I have yet to wrap my head around. Far from any trace of urban armatures that could possibly rationalize such a side trip, my days on the islands were some of the richest of the year. This is not the least because I got to share them with—in addition to the Kuna—the two Irish architects and an entirely impressive UCLA business student that filled out our gaggle of gringos.

Our visit was remarkable for time as well as place. A prominent islander happened to have a daughter going through her first menstrual cycle. Now, ordinarily this isn’t a fact to which I’d be privy but for the Kuna it calls for a celebration including a haircut, a naming, and an island-wide celebration.

The celebration that ensued would never fly at Disney. First the women and then the men proceeded to get absolutely sloshed on traditional sugar-cane liquor and rubbing-alcohol-grade rum. Drunken scuffles interrupted the ceremonial dances while children darted everywhere like a school of skipping, clapping sardines (not the canned kind; the swimming-in-the-ocean kind). It seemed to be an important moment of release, especially for the women, whose social role appeared more structured in terms of dress and behavior. The girl’s newfound adulthood served as little more than a pretense for the party and we visitors never actually even saw the special girl amid all the revelry.

It astounds me that the Kuna were as comfortable with us in their midst as they were. As a people, they retain their traditions with uncanny self-awareness and open-mindedness. They seem to take money with a grain of salt—until recently, coconuts served as currency—and a modest tourism trade garners sufficient cash for whatever modern conveniences they deem appropriate. There’s nothing like a native on a cell phone or Linkin Park in the hut next door.

Part of San Blas’ magic was the odyssey it entailed. Our crew woke up at five, followed a three-hour highway schlep from Panama City with two more hours of mud-slinging jungle adrenaline (top image) and, after out-juking a team of oversexed Caterpillar trucks, we headed to the river. Settled in our canoe, we floated down past crocodiles and toucans until the river spilled into the sea and delivered us to our final destination, a low sandy island barnacled by thatched huts (bottom image). There we slept on hammocks and dined on more crab and lobster than we could eat, spending most of the day on deserted islands with powdery beaches and palm trees (middle image). I may have sacrificed a few layers of skin and a few gallons of perspiration but the pay-off, I dare say, was tremendous.

panama city, miraflores locks

2007-07-22T14:10:00.001-07:00

Image and footage of a ferry in transit...the ship is a flea compared to the usual freighters passing through. The widest of ships leave a mere two feet to each of the locks' walls. I'm going to try to hitch a ride up the canal as a "line handler" in the next few days before I move on to Colombia. I realize that the Panama Canal doesn't quite fall in line with the other case studies I've adopted so far in terms of scale or urban interaction...but it's damn interesting and impressive so I'll just stick it in the BF Infrastructure category for now and have a good time with it.

It doesn’t organize Panama City with small-scale sophistication (it's more like a raison d'etre) but, for such a gargantuan gesture, the Panama Canal seems surprisingly ambiguous. It is not the Lay-Z-River Sharpie slash that I imagined. Instead, the canal is a nexus of infrastructures—from dams to locks to railway lines to freight vessels—that relies on an intimate relationship with Panama's topographical and ecological peculiarities.
I happened to visit during the rainy season, which means chronic dampness and oppressive humidity. Such weather isn’t conducive to daytime activity (nightlife is another story), but the canal depends on this inordinate amount of precipitation for its viability. Daily deluges descend on surrounding swathes of spongy jungle. Dense root networks minimize soil erosion and corresponding dredging requirements. From rain forested slopes, water coalesces in Lake Gatún, an artificial lake 26 meters above sea level that is maintained by three dams. This lake stores the water needed for all the lock operations. There are no pumps. The Panama Canal’s locks operate gravitationally to flush about 26 million gallons of freshwater into the Pacific and the Atlantic per use. As long as the reservoir isn’t overtaxed it’s an incredibly efficient system…and one that is about to get more efficient when a more sophisticated and water-saving set of new locks are completed in the next few years.

mexico city, zócolo demonstration

2007-07-20T19:26:00.000-07:00

I'm still not completely sure what the people were protesting....something about the government taking the shirts off their backs....but I certainly admire the group's pluck. It was coming down pretty hard at the time. The Zócolo is Mexico City's main square and one of the largest civic plazas in the world. The red square in the image at top indicates where they were and the video below should explain the rest.

mexico city, centro historico

2007-07-20T08:08:00.001-07:00

The image above, scanned from Benevolo's History of the City, overlays the original Aztec city (left) and the subsequent Spanish grid (right) on Mexico City's center as it stood in the 1970's.
Mexicans are entrepreneurial masters of sidewalk and subway. The city feels oddly European—even American—in its structure and organization but the way in which its standard communal spaces are inhabited can be completely different. For example, in the metro one is passed by a steady tattoo of small-time sales(wo)men. At high tide there may be one hawker per car, although rarely do they allow themselves to overlap. Most sell CDs (pens, gum, and DVD’s are other favorites) and as they shout out tracks and titles they blare their wares from small speakers in their knapsacks. I have found that Mexican volume, at least in its commercial capacity, is twice as loud as the typical color scheme. Above ground, space and sunlight allow for more flexible salesmanship. About half of the average walkway width is taken up by informal venders…no matter how narrow that sidewalk may be. The images above depict two views of a particularly striking downtown street that goes so far as to color-coordinate itself. In the image on the right, you can see how dense the corner becomes before pedestrians can cross the street. The pressure is so intense that I came close to getting intimate with a bus when I was in their position.

mexico city, tlaltelolco

2007-07-20T08:05:00.001-07:00

Right next to the Plaza of the Three Cultures (so-called because of its indigenous, Spanish, and contemporary architectural constituency) there rises a host of high-rise housing developments stranded in neglected greenspace. A suspended pedestrian roof winds through the site, held aloft by orange frames. It’s almost as if someone connected the dots in Cristo’s Gates project. Although the intervention does distract from the scene's general banality and provide a thunderstorm service, it doesn’t exhibit any of the other capacities that have marked other similar projects I’ve seen. It appears to be a mono-functional, circulatory gesture more than a spatial, organizational, or structural armature.

mexico city, xochimilco

2007-07-20T08:00:00.001-07:00

The image shows one of the Xochimilco’s garden-lined canals originally coaxed—and still cultivated—by organically landfilling an ancient lake. The right side of the canal has been shored and concretized but the left bank remains in its original earthen form. The trees growing along the bank were planted to prevent aqueous erosion. Their densely netted root structures act as an effective landscape cloth. Let me call your attention to the festooned flotillas you might have missed floating in the foreground, each with a built-in table, room for fifteen or twenty, and an oversized paper mache faceplate on front. I imagine the scene would be a bit more active if I had come during the weekend. The boats number in the thousands. Unleashed, they must be an awesome sight. Finally, in the distance undulate the impossibly thin concrete curves of Felix Candela’s Los Manantiales, a restaurant constructed in 1958. This building haunted my structural engineering lectures for years but I never quite understood how it sat in the landscape. It’s under renovation at the moment but I did manage to scramble under its petals for a quick snap-happy look around.

mexico city, casa luis barragán

2007-07-20T07:47:00.001-07:00

Luis Barragán, an engineer-cum-architect with a love for both modernism and Mexican dwelling, inhabited and periodically redesigned the house from 1948 until his death in 1988. Visitors are supposed to set up an appointment to get in but I stumbled upon its stoop just as an American tour group had arrived. They were more than happy to share the experience….and their impressions along the way. Note the personal testimony halfway down the stairs. The house was impressive for Barragán’s daylighting techniques, his sophisticated interior-exterior relationships, and his remarkable ability to exploit ostensible solidity for scenographic effect. It is an essay in the phenomenal potential of pared essentials.

mexico city, issues of scale

2007-07-20T07:17:00.001-07:00

The image to the left pairs a totemic monolith with a modern onlooker at the museo nacional de antropología. While the museum’s extensive collection runs the gamut, pre-Columbian sculptors seem at their most impressive when operating in stony solidity. It is a monumental sensibility shared by their architecture. The image to the right depicts the ruins of Teotihuacán, a massive pre-Columbian capitol. Rising from an expansive valley, Teotihuacán uses orientation, geometry, and a sublimely hubristic scale to embed itself in the panorama. Views are carefully considered. I took the photograph from atop the so-called Temple of the Moon, which stands at the head of the city’s wide central corridor. This corridor continues for an indeterminate length toward the distant hills. To its left, slightly set back, a massive pyramid referred to as the Temple of the Sun geometrically regularizes its mountainous halo. The minor pyramids scattered at its feet cement the geologic analogy. Touting their power with acoustical response, the precinct’s ancient planners created a grand gesture of which even Le Corbusier would be proud.

uc berkeley, branner midterm report

2007-06-30T13:07:00.001-07:00

elkin, the ballard estate

2007-06-26T20:34:00.001-07:00

I am in North Carolina again until July 3, basking in southern humidity and parental hospitality while I parse the infinite and profound lessons of my ongoing international investigation. Since the sorting has so far been the frustrating opposite of instantaneous, I try to spend as much time outside as possible QT'ing with my dog and reveling in the bliss of a perpetually available washing machine. This image is of an interim project to the north of my parents' house: bounding some previously planted bushes and roping our arbor into the gently rising hillside.

selected video segments

2007-06-25T08:14:00.000-07:00

Some colorful cuts culled from a couple of the more cogent clips I could collect since cutting out of the country...

View toward Monaco's Grand Prix from just above Corbusier's Petit Cabanon in Cap Martin, France

Portici di San Luca in Bologna, Italy

Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, Germany

Queen's Day in Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Stepwell in Ahmedabad, India

Monument to the Open Hand in Chandigarh, India

Shibuya Station in Tokyo, Japan

selected sketchbook pages

2007-06-24T07:49:00.001-07:00

A few of the more legible (to me, at least) European sketchbook pages, freshly scanned and occasionally relatable to the grand scholarly scheme.....

Corbusier's cabin and gravesite in Cap Martin, France

Villa Savoye in Poissy, France

Notre Dame au Haut in Ronchamp, France

Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, Italy

Laurentian cloister and sculpture in Florence, Italy

Artwork from Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and from Leopold Museum in Vienna, Austria

Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista in Venice, Italy
Ca' d'Oro in Venice, Italy

The Peristyle in Split, Croatia

Wiessenhof Siedlung in Stuttgart, Germany
Olympic Park in Munich, Germany

north carolina, lake norman

2007-06-16T17:23:00.000-07:00

The joys of coming home: a typical conversation with my best friend's son, Penn.

expense list, pages 8 - 11

2007-06-16T14:52:00.000-07:00

poissy, villa savoye

2007-06-05T10:10:00.001-07:00

A final Corbusier project before heading home for a spell....

paris, promenade plantée

2007-06-05T10:06:00.001-07:00

*This map, scanned from National Geographic of October 2006, plots Paris' extensive park system. I have highlighted my objects of inquiry, Place des Vosges and the Promenade Plantée, in red.

Designed by Jacques Vergely (landscape architect) and Philippe Mathieux (architect), the promenade is a 2.8 mile elevated park in Paris’ 12^th arrondissement that extends from Opera Bastille to the eastern city limits. It reinhabits a 19^th century railway viaduct abandoned since 1969 and has inspired several United States parks-in-progress including the High Line in New York, the Bloomingdale Trail in Chicago, and the Reading Viaduct in Philadelphia.

I took the three images above from the promenade’s primary section, called Viaduc des Arts. Here the park perches above broad supporting arches filled with arts and crafts workshops, visible in the image at right. The image at center captures the typical condition above: a wide, paved path with periodic resting points engulfed in an overwhelming explosion of greenery whose novel vantage surrenders cinematically screened city views. Panoramas appear when a wider street must be spanned and the viaduct section correspondingly thinned, as on the image to the left. Note that, in the right and left images, the smaller promenade plants naturally conform to the street trees’ height, reinforcing the raised relationship to and urban unity with the Parisian street life below.

paris, place des vosges

2007-06-05T09:42:00.001-07:00

*the place and its context cropped by a 1,500' x 1,500' frame. Lines in red represent building plans I have collected thus far.
The plaza, originally Place Royale, was designed by Baptiste du Cerceau under Henri IV and completed in 1612. Behind a unified façade punctuated by the king and queen’s axial personal pavilions, individual properties were given loose rein. Hence, a host of architects participated in the development’s realization despite its single-hand appearance.

In Collage City, Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter refer to Place des Vosges as a “stabilizer”, a spatially-centering structured enclave anchoring a larger locale. The square’s grand geometric void stands out against the small-scale row houses and small palaces of the surrounding Marais district, grounding and centering small-scale landowner and home-owner operations in a clearly ordered pattern.

Though the Place is not connected to a major urban artery it does yield one of its sides to a minor throughway, shown in the image to the left. Here, to the north, the place’s façade lies flush with the Parisian fabric, its residential depth embedded and its loggia capped by flanking storefronts. Without the three other walls off-camera to the left, this royal construction could seem to be but a pleasant private development.

The image to the right shows two of those other walls and the family-friendly park space they surround, chaperoned by fountains and foliage. Green seems to do more in Paris than it does elsewhere. Here, a dense, nearly continuous belt of green three trees deep buffers encircling traffic, shelters park benches, and renders the communal dimension more intimate without interrupting the ground plane or obstructing the facades’ rhythm beyond.

*Top image scanned from Leonardo Benevolo's The History of the City, pg. 655

ronchamp, notre dame du haut

2007-06-03T09:17:00.000-07:00

Playing my Corbusian cards like they’re going out of [international] style, I visited Ronchamp today. I intended to spend half a day there and half a day at a canal lock he designed—what with trying to stay within my fundamental underlying initial infrastructural framework and all—but there was only one bus to the lock at noon, sans return. So I was proud to dedicate a day to the chapel, which turned out a fitting move on account of its richness and relatively remote location. I’m showing the chapel in its classic contrapposto here because it encapsulates several features in one go . . . and because it was one of the few sunny photographs managed to snatch. At the same time, it strikes me that such a faux-totalizing view tends to construe the masterpiece as more of a toadstool or clog-stand, dispensing with the roving complexity that marks its true genius. There is a lot to this building that the photograph doesn’t show, and even if I couldn’t see it (said with brow-furrowed gravitas), I at least got to take a gander.

firminy, firminy-vert

2007-06-03T09:14:00.000-07:00

I paid a visit to Corbusier’s Firminy complex—about 45 minutes outside of Lyon by regional train—and spent most of my time out of the rain in the church of Saint Pierre, which was begun in 1961 and only completed in 2006. I was suitably awed. As always in a Corbusian construction, I caught frequent whiffs of his students…this time most strongly Koolhaas and Miralles. The concrete’s modern smoothness only enhanced the intended effect and rendered the project that much more relevant to a contemporary architectural sensibility. Brightly colored daylighting and sculpturally canted prisms puncture a deceptively complex curvilinear cavern, which in turn envelopes a raised ground constantly evolving between topography and floorscape as one processes around and through. I’m including an interior and exterior view here, with the incising green lightbox as a hinge between the two.

lyon, vieux de lyon

2007-06-03T09:11:00.000-07:00

Since I first saw them last summer I’ve been interested in the system of corridors and courtyards, called “traboules,” that intersperse Lyon’s dense old city blocks. Apparently they were developed during heavy involvement in the silk trade, when it paid to have quick access to the riverfront…..but I must say, that explanation absolutely pales before the architectural phenomenon it supposedly spawned…so I’ll have to get back to you. Regardless of their impetus, the traboules are a coy, internalized attraction; virtuoso stereotomic displays that usher light, air, and dynamism to the block’s internal microcosm and whose only external traces are the periodic narrow doorways dotting each block.

Those doorways presented a considerable frustration until I made the brilliant discovery (i.e. some French guy showed me) that the “service” button opened each and every one without the least bit of resistance. Instant gratification from there on out. In the narrow streets I was jowl-to-jowl with tourists, schoolchildren, and miserably oversized delivery trucks … but once each door closed behind me I entered my own magical world of spiral stairs and anthropomorphic vaulting.

I chose one particularly rich block, which I’ve colored red in the top two pictures above, to bound my investigation. Note its breadth and spiky heterogeneity, marked as it is by multitudinous chimneys and stair towers. One particularly agile traboule courses completely through but twenty or so others inject themselves an average of forty or fifty feet in before turning vertical and dissipating around their courtyards’ perimeter.

As was the case with Bologna’s porticos, Lyon’s traboules find their apotheosis into high design through the hands of an esteemed architect—in this case, Philibert du l’Orme. The first two images depict two tight traboule courtyards in the same block. The image on the left depicts the bottom of a projecting gallery (upper right), the intersection of a spiral stair and a corridor (straight ahead), and double squinches supporting a complexly vaulted gallery to the left. The central image shows a stack of broad galleries abutting the circular tower of a spiral stair. These are two elegant but typical examples of the traboule typology, which du l’Orme digests and redeploys in the courtyard to the right. In the upper tiers du l’Orme applies the classical orders with Bramante-esque precision, while in the lower sections he hops and skips around pre-existing conditions with geometric and curvaceous acuity. The result is a remarkable site-specific flexibility and organic articulation gleaned from the problem-solving methods previously employed in the surrounding urban tissue. Incidentally, Du l’Orme’s design sensibility, thus developed, set the norm for next generation of French architects.

*Top image scanned from Raymond Chevallier's France from the Air

l’abresle, couvent sainte-marie-de-la tourette

2007-06-03T09:10:00.000-07:00

Today I dug further into my sack of architectural self-indulgence by visiting La Tourette, Le Corbusier’s Dominican monastery. Walking through it I felt inverted echoes of the scores of buildings it has inspired—from the Elkin Public Library, through Koolhaas’ Kusthal, and deep (if depth is possible) into the very core of Richard Meier’s raison d'etre. Simultaneously mass, landscape, and volume, the monastery conforms to a simple programmatic diagram and a liberally collaged composition. It was a visceral visit and I spent the day wrestling with the building’s awareness of ground, its interplay of darkness and light, and its pervasive material irregularity. The building is a messy, sloppy masterpiece, if for nothing else than the pure ballsiness of its sculptural maneuvers.

monaco, grand prix

2007-06-03T09:07:00.001-07:00

Come for the Corbusier, stay for the Grand Prix, I suppose. The engines’ whine was clearly audible from the cabin’s front door (I’ve placed a red rectangle around Monaco in the previous blog entry) so in the evening, after the race had ended, I snuck in to see how the city had adjusted itself to the spectacle. The Gran Prix is unusual because it takes place on the city’s streets rather than on a race track. I didn’t walk the whole course but I did explore the harbor, which the surrounding hillside cups like a grand natural amphitheater.

The top panorama pictures the cove toward the end of the evening. The water is filled with multi-million dollar yachts and the red cranes to the right are busy disassembling barriers and a huge television screen. I’ve placed a red rectangle around where I took the next panorama, just below, earlier in the evening. For me to walk on those bleachers a few hours earlier would have cost 750 Euros, because the race circled the harbor where the yellow moving van and red truck can be seen. On the other side of the road are the yachts, which comfortably replace the American skybox or the RV parked in the middle of a NASCAR competition.

The third image is taken from the opposite direction, standing alongside the track. I include it to reiterate the relationship between stands and yachts and to look with a little more depth at the road boundary mechanism. Here, barriers keep rogue formula 1 racecars in as much as they keep rambunctious spectators out. The setup consisted largely of highway guide rails, chain-link fencing, and lashed-together automobile tires (the chain-link fencing has already been taken down here). Tires struck me as slightly morbid but I suppose it’s a bit like the native Americans using every part of the buffalo.

Unlike other urban celebrations I’ve seen, the Gran Prix is decidedly non-participatory, at least for the duration of the race. It is a carefully regulated linear spectacle, with controlled viewpoints (120 Euros for standing room) and constructed seating. It paralyzes the city for a brief, spectacular, and incredibly lucrative spasm and then life continues and street traffic resumes….only in this case, street traffic consists of Lamborghinis and trophy wives and the life consists of gambling and martinis on the rocks. I thought I had it good to be paid to travel for a year but this event left me feeling absolutely insignificant in the socio-economic scheme of things.

cap martin, le petit cabanon and corbusier’s resting place

2007-06-03T08:58:00.000-07:00

I visited Corbusier’s holiday cabin—the only house he ever built for himself—and hiked up the hillside to pay my respects to his gravesite. The design of the one seems to have informed the composition of the other. It was a powerful experience to inhabit the natural environment that so affected the greatest architect of the twentieth century: a steep, rocky landscape that gives way to the two shades of blue.

The cabin sits just above the sea, just below the railroad tracks, and along the aptly named Promenade Le Corbusier. Its door was locked and its windows shuttered but, registering with the Cap Martin tourist office, I was able to take a look inside the next day. After sketching my lodgings’ close quarters for the last few months I felt primed to take in Corbusier’s lessons in diminutive dimensions. That the exterior rusticity is but a self-conscious appliqué is belied by its selective, idiosyncratic fenestration. My excitement to step inside was well-rewarded, needless to say.

After some searching and a bit of charades with the locals, I found Corbusier’s grave in a local cemetery beside the medieval chateau. Understated, its concrete squre-and-golden-rectangle design is unmistakably his, with a cylindrical planter to represent his wife, Yvonne and a stylized shed for himself. Though it faces away from the sea instead of toward it, the resemblance to the cabin and its rounded retaining wall is unmistakable. I’m not necessarily keen on pilgrimage but I never feel as content traveling as I do when I’m off on a Corbusian tangent. Even his headstone is an instructive manifesto.

bologna, i portici di san luca

2007-05-24T12:41:00.001-07:00

*in the map at top, shading indicates the historic city center and red represents extant porticoes. The map below scales this information to include I Portici di San Luca. The church stands in the lower left (southwest) corner of the image, shaded in gray. Also shaded in gray are the soccer stadium and Bologna's major cemetery, the Certosa, which connect to a portico spur constructed under Mussolini.
Bologna’s porticos, like the ones pictured in the large photograph above, are the products of late-medieval municipal codes and interpretative compliance. The passageways are nearly continuous within the city walls, creating a communal space that is the sum total of individual contributions. Such porticos are a common enough phenomenon around the world, though rarely have I seen them executed with such continuity and creativity. What makes the phenomenon even more interesting is its 3.5 kilometer extension outside of the city fabric to the ancient shrine of S. Luca.

The image on the far left shows the portico’s mouth, just outside one of Bologna’s old city gates and what was once a peripheral canal. This portico—unlike those inside the city gate—was designed by a single architect. Only later did buildings grow onto it, plugging into its archways and matching their facades to its rhythm. The buildings and their portico host continue for awhile until, at a dramatic, curvilinear Baroque gateway (second image from the left), the passageway crosses the road and heads uphill, the road branching to run at its side. The road allows the portico to retain its characteristic one-sidedness. If the road passes through, as it does in the center image, then the portico simply reverses itself to accommodate the change. Landings and open-air chapels punctuate the walk’s meditative monotony until finally, after a damned healthy hike, the portico ramps up to a pavilion and doubles back to meet the entrance of S. Luca. The two images to the far right show the final rise and the view back over the city.

John Habraken says it best: "the same form, during successive centuries, passed under sequential control of different kinds of agents pursuing different objectives. Beginning in the collective imagination of inhabitants, it passed into the realm of bureaucratic regulation of an urban fabric, ultimately ending in a symbolic gesture professionally executed by a prestigious architect. The development took centuries to unfold. Thus the common gives rise to architecture."

*map at top scanned from Leonardo Benevolo's History of the City

milan, duomo

2007-05-21T11:33:00.001-07:00

I wrote my undergraduate thesis about the Milan Cathedral’s developmental relationship with its host city and the investigation sparked my interest in urban projects. The cathedral also shares a piazza with the perhaps more germane Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele II and, although one must buy a 4 euro ticket and ascend a few hundred steps to get to it, the cathedral’s broad roof, bounded by a filigree of spires and stonework, presents an intensely communal platform as bright as its vaulted hall is dark.

milan, rho fiero

2007-05-21T11:23:00.001-07:00

The swooping glazed roof that carpets Massimiliano Fuksas’ exhibition corridor harmonizes the various building types deployed along its length while a raised walkway creates a continuous circulatory datum by which typological form and building access can be modulated. The building types contain program, the walkway coordinates their use, and the roof characterizes the communal space. Despite the project’s eccentric appearance, Fuksas restrains each element’s variation in order to evoke more deeply coherent compositional relationships among building types, walkway connections, and roofscape behavior. Immense exhibition halls lining the corridor define the project’s dimensional parameters.

milan, galleria vittorio emmanuele II

2007-05-20T16:21:00.001-07:00

The galleria connects the cathedral’s piazza to that of the opera house. It cuts a channel into the block’s mass, monumentalizes the newly exposed material, and glazes the operation’s abscess. Despite my weak anatomic metaphor (I'll work on it) the galleria is incredibly— monumentally –grand; on par with New York’s Grand Central Terminal. The singularity of its internal atmosphere becomes all the more apparent when one gazes down at it from atop the cathedral and notes the dispersion of its pedestrian-vantage coherence. Spines, antannea and a hodgepodge of parapets lend the passage’s external ironwork the air of a half-buried Buck Rogers spaceship.

florence, vasari corridor

2007-05-20T16:14:00.000-07:00

Giorgio Vasari designed this corridor for Cosimo I de’ Medici in 1565 as a literal power trip: its purpose was to provide private passage for the Grand Duke and his family between the Pitti Palace to the south and the Palazzo Vecchio to the north. The product of voyeuristic autocracy and a symptom of popular political unease, the corridor strolls through the city center like a flamboyant chameleon on stilts. It is in turn monumentally expressed and dutifully repressed. The private hallway and its supporting apparatus reorganizes the city in some instances and conforms to contemporary conditions in others. It crashes out of the Palazzo Vecchio and allows the Uffizi breathing room before creating an outdoor enfilade along the Arno, pacing the Ponte Vecchio, sidling around Mannelli Tower, leaping across Via de’ Bardi, lending Santa Felicita a pious hand, and finally sliding into Palazzo Pitti’s flank via the Grotta del Buontelenti.

The first image on the left highlights the passage as it sky-bridges from the Palazzo Vecchio to the Uffizi, which Vasari also designed for the Medici family. The relationship between the Corridor and the Uffizi is curiously ambiguous, internally interlocked but externally offset. As you can see in the image, the Corridor attaches just behind the building’s articulated mass rather than incorporating into it.

The Corridor leaves the Uffizi in the next image to the right. The discernible connection is again absent but this time the gallery turns grandly autonomous as it crosses to the bank of the Arno and marches to the Ponte Vecchio. As it extends the length of the bridge, it paces the shops’ dimensions and uses their barnacle-like conglomeration to cement its connection to the older stone bridge below. At mid-span, the corridor’s pillars frame a view of over the Arno. Without this break in the line of storefronts, it would be difficult for a pedestrian to realize he wasn’t on solid ground. The corridor did not instill this capacity—shops have inhabited the Ponte Vecchio since the medieval era—but it did distinctly change its timbre. On account of foul transit odors, Cosimo I relocated the contemporary meat market (sited for waste disposal convenience) in exchange for the goldsmith shops that occupy the bridge today.

Not all of Cosimo’s edicts were so successful, however. The Mannelli family successfully opposed his call for their tower’s demolition and the next image, second from the right, shows Vasari’s resultant evasive maneuver. Here he cantilevers the corridor out on sporti, wooden struts anchored into stone corbels. This tectonic strategy had been typical in medieval Florence when towers such as the Mannelli’s provided protective cores that could blossom and even interconnect into fortress-like enclaves of related clans.

The corridor next arches across Via de’ Bardi with a Ponte Vecchio-like span (far right of the image second from right). Soon after alighting across the street, the Vasari Corridor passes before a church (image to far right) and disappears into a building development. With only the slightest tidying tweaks of its tectonic language (pietra serena column capitals and sail vaulting), the corridor presents itself as an ecclesiastic loggia. Above the public space thus created, the corridor punctures the façade to deposit a personal balcony over and behind the other participants’ heads. The Medici could thus observe any religious observances without being observed themselves.

*map at top scanned from Leonardo Benevolo's History of the City

venice

2007-05-20T16:11:00.000-07:00

Venice is rife with infrastructure and Venetians have about as many names for streets, plazas, and waterways as Eskimos have for snow. The variation is almost infinite, but the parameters seem exceptionally clear if one adheres to the typical tourist itinerary. Piazza San Marco is the best example. It essentializes Venice’s textural charm in spacious volume and monumental ornament. In many ways, the piazza is a singular infrastructural event--like the Arsenale, the train station, the Rialto, or the Grand Canal. However, unlike these other examples, Piazza San Marco organizes the city through emulation. Formally and organizationally, its components set the prototype by which the city’s political and social nodes develop.

The particularly Venetian concept of architectural emulation is visible within the piazza itself. In the plan of Piazza San Marco to the far left, the piazza proper opens to the cathedral’s face while the Palazzo Ducale courtyard (lower right on the plan) addresses the cathedral’s flank. The white chapel visible in the second image from the left compensates for orientation and scale. Neither space is a copy of the other but their similitude proclaims social and political affinity.

The easiest example of emulation outside of the piazza are the city’s bell towers, mostly derived as diminutions of San Marco’s brick behemoth. Several of these are visible in the second image from the top. More fundamental are the various social, economic, religious, and political institutions dotting the city. The Palazzo Ducale-- Venice’s governmental seat—acts as a touchstone for a particular network of social institutions, scuole, that played an essential role in maintaining the republic’s harmonic social stability. The scuole—part social club, part local government, part artistic patron, and part charitable organization—emulate the Palazzo Ducale’s administrative and architectural format.

The format is as rhetorical as it is structural and organizational. The Ducal Palace uses its striking white and pink façade—which only covers its two most visible sides—to promote a misleading external image. What appears as a massive, ornamented block from the piazza turns out to be a series of linear spaces bounding a substantial courtyard. Furthermore, this string of spaces is not continuous but made up of disparate wings erected in a series of campaigns. The wrapper façade deftly obviates the differences on the exterior. The second image from the right shows the space between two of the blocks. The facade’s characteristic stone lacework is visible against the sunlight streaming in.

The image to the far right shows one of my favorite scuole, that of S. Giovanni Evangelista. The scuola is highlighted in the map at top. While not a copy of the Palazzo Ducale, its architects use similar compositional, screening, and masking techniques to knit processional spatial sequences into grand organic coherence, with overt references to the Ducale’s grand meeting rooms and ceremonial stairways contained within.

*the map at top was scanned from Leonardo Benevolo's The History of the City and the view of San Marco below it was scanned from an on-site postcard

rijeka, city nucleus

2007-05-20T16:05:00.001-07:00

Rijeka was a bit of a disappointment after the glories of Split, Hvar, and Dubrovnik but seeing it did help flesh out a few regional urban trends. In the left image is the “Stara Vrata” or Roman Gate. It served as the entryway to the original Roman outpost. Although I hunted it down imagining its potential pedigree parallels with Split, the gateway turned out to be no more than a weary band of stones taped together with concrete and strung across a neglected alleyway. Earthquakes and the need for rapid modernization have all but demolished Rijeka’s earlier iterations.

Just down the hill from the Stara Vrata is the site of the medieval gateway. The archway I’ve highlighted at center was installed in 1873 after a 1750 earthquake destroyed the original. The medieval version opened directly to the sea. As was the case with Split, the reclaimed strip is now the city’s primary pedestrian promenade. Apparently the Korzo hosts a pretty intense carnival earlier in the year. When I took this photograph, the only street entertainment was two Latin Americans dressed up as Indians and playing wooden flutes to heavy electronic accompaniment. I think I have seen these people in every city I’ve been to so far. Usually they either pipe Unchained Melody or some Paul Simon tune, but today I got treated to Last of the Mohicans, a personal favorite. With dramatic kneeling, a few flourishes, and a little rain dance they gather a crowd every time. The shopping center to the left of the gateway is a type I’ve seen repeated along the Korzo. Eschewing window-shopping potential to meet the street like an inert cinema, the interior is crammed with shop stalls of various sizes. It was an odd, claustrophobic experience to slalom escalators to the top although I would have felt completely comfortable doing the same in India.

Finally, the right image highlights the city’s medieval citadel. Neither Split nor Dubrovnik sought such high-ground protection but Hvar and several other Croatian cities I’ve passed through sport similar bastions. Due to the terrain they still stand aloof and will probably never be absorbed by their hosts like their Roman predecessors--and, to a lesser degree, their Renaissance progen--have been.

dubrovnik, city nucleus

2007-05-20T15:49:00.000-07:00

Dubrovnik’s old nucleus nestles with ostensible security in its medieval walls. The historic core sustained extensive damage from warfare in the 90’s but has since been immaculately rebuilt. Despite slightly more breathing room than Split, most paving stones are still claimed by cafes and restaurants. In the midday heat, gobs of tourists following flag-toting commanders gobble up the rest.

In the left image, the city wall frames a few of its ward. Such a view was a rare find. The vast extent of the wall seemed massively intact, to be walked on rather than in. The wall was more container and vantage than spatial organizer. Buildings did abut the wall but only in a few cases did they absorb it, using the top of the wall as a terrace or breaking through to claim the rocky cliff face at its base. The wall may not have been as complex as I had hoped but it was still an incredible experience to circumnavigate the old city on high.

I took the photograph at right from the wall’s highest point; a watchtower at the northern corner. The wall marches toward the sea, widening to overlook the city’s main landside entrance, doglegging around a monastic cloister in the distance, and re-ascending to veil the city atop its sea-facing cliffs. The old city strikes a remarkably valley-like posture to be so close to the sea. The landside entrance—located in the middle-ground of the wall pictured here—is directly on axis and nearly level with the seaside entrance off-camera to the left.

hvar, the beach

2007-05-20T15:45:00.000-07:00

I’m not going to apologize. A man has to take a vacation from his vacation sometimes, you know?

split, diocletian's palace

2007-05-09T01:42:00.000-07:00

*the roughly composited images above give a sense of the palace's development. The image to the left superimposes red (extant structure) over black (original structure). The image to the right superimposes black (original structure) over red (current structure).

Gaius Aurelius Valerius Diocletianus constructed his palace on the Adriatic Sea between 293 and 305 AD, in time for his planned abdication from the imperial throne. He chose the site under several considerations. The first was his political reform, the empire’s East-West division under a tetrarchical political format. [1] Spalatum, in the very center of the eastern coast of the Adriatic, had always been a natural boundary between West and East and from this vantage the Emperor would be able, even after his abdication, to follow the development of his political innovations. The second was a desire for proximity to Salonae, his birthplace. The site’s natural conditions were highly favorable. The deep south-facing inlet was sheltered form the north by the Dinaric mountains and from the south by central Dalmatia’s off-shore islands. Nearby were excellent limestone quarries. Finally, the sulphur springs, almost within the Palace itself, were famous for their medicinal properties and still manage to make the southwest corner reek of rotten eggs.

Split has been an odd jumble of domestic, military, religious, and urban design from its imperial inception. Initially, it served not only as a retirement home to the abdicated Diocletian but also as a temple to his deity status, cared for and protected by the provided urban population. The complex’s typological ambiguities have played out across the centuries.

After Diocletian’s death, the palace passed through successive imperial hands largely intact. In the 7th century, the palace’s transformation to its present state began when the Avars and Slavs destroyed Salonae, compelling a considerable faction of the city’s surviving citizens to take refuge within the palace walls. This wave of inhabitation provided the kernel for a new city—Split—which grew through adaptation and alteration as well as through outgrowths and satellite constructions.

The Venetian Republic engulfed Split from 1420 until the republic’s abolition in 1797, building trade facilities and intensifying fortifications. From Venice, Split passed to Austria and then, from 1806 to 1813, to Napoleon. The French altered the interior, demolished much of the Venetian city wall, and regularized the embankment and park system. The fall of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy bequeathed Split to what became the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and, finally, Split was linked with the continental European centers by railway in 1925, hastening its belated modernization.

This is the very railway I arrived on and, for the past few days, I have been exploring the palace, which is currently under Croatian control. I followed up a string of festivals by rolling in during Sudamja, the feast of St. Dominius. Ceremonies began in Diocletian’s mausoleum, the core of his emperor cult which was later re-named for the city’s patron saint and elevated to cathedral status.[2]

The Feast of St. Domnius, held each year on May 7, remains Split’s grandest celebration day and is comprised of mass, a procession, a feast, a grand game of bingo, and fireworks. The procession begins in the peristyle pictured at center and exits the palace through the eastern gate along the decumanus that divided the palace in twain. Originally, the southern half belonged to the imperial suites and cult and the northern half to servants and a defensive garrison. During the medieval era this same road facilitated urban growth beyond the western wall’s protective boundary. Perhaps for this reason the eastern stretch of road remains wider and its gate left bare, the better to process through. The proud citizenry then rounds the wall south and strides west along the waterfront. With too expansive a population to squeeze within the palace’s modest confines, mass and most festivities now take place by the sea.

The image to the right shows Split’s southern, sea-facing wall from along the recently revamped Riva, or promenade. I’ve highlighted the visible remnants of the original palace wall and, in the distance, the reconstructed medieval bell tower that marks the city center.

In the image to the left, a gentleman enjoys a smoke from the scant remnant of an original northern aperture. The northern and eastern walls remain more clean-shaven than their southern counterpart, while the western wall is all but engulfed by the city’s early outgrowths.

The center image shows the city’s central outdoor space, the Peristyle, as people gather for early morning ceremonies. The belltower and cathedral stand just to the left and what were once Diocletian’s apartments lie beyond the prothyron straight ahead.[3] I've logged this entry from the image’s right side. The cafe that took over the ground floor of the Renaissance palace that took over the side of Diocletian's arcade just happened to have wireless access. Originally, the Peristyle gave access to the imperial apartments, the mausoleum, and the temples. It also brought order to the complex relationship of varied levels and provided a transmissive link between north and south.

In its coordinating role, the Peristyle acts as an urban manifold. Like Grand Central Terminal, it appears as an elegantly articulated void placed upon a carefully coordinated, sectionally significant groundplane. As in other examples, we see here the primacy of the floorplane and the spatial utility of the screen. The space feels regular and symmetrical without actually being so. The steps, flanking arcades, grand façade smoothly synthesize the various ground levels. The space is an odd, uncanny inversion of interior and exterior, akin to the intimate enclosure of Barcelona’s Plaça Reial but reserving the hierarchical disposition of Paris’ Place des Vosges. The central ceremonial space serves as a cognitive constant to coordinate and relate the surrounding site’s varied spatial experiences.

Split supports special scrutiny for several reasons. First, compared to Venice’s impacted opacity or Tokyo’s hyper-commercialized cacophony, Split’s chronological coherence seems sufficiently digestible as to occasionally appear downright diagrammatic.[4] Second, Split walks an absurd line between domestic design and city planning.[5] The “urban design” I am pursuing with this fellowship falls somewhere between these two extremes.

Simultaneously, Split also renders an effective critique of such a golden mean. Like many of the urban phenomena I have observed thus far, Split’s contemporary democratic appeal actually originates in an initial authoritarian imposition. In this case, a town was founded to sustain and worship a single man. The relationship between shared space and its political underwriting is not always a comfortable one. Finally, the city is sobering in its operative obsolescence. Dwarfed by the metropolis it figureheads, the palace now reserves only symbolic and touristic roles within the larger urban milieu.[6] Even at the core, the old city’s busiest sectors are relegated outside its walls--a market to the east, a promenade to the south, and pedestrian arteries to the west. Most of the palace’s open space has been rationed to café’s and bars—not necessarily a negative, but requiring commitment to a chair and some Kuna (Croatia’s national currency) for inhabitation.

[1] The tetrarchy established two Emperors who would in their own lifetime withdraw from the throne to be replaced by two vice-emperors. Diocletian re-located to Split in 305 AD after abdicating from the throne in Nicomedia, from where he had continued to rule the eastern part of the empire after its division.

[2] St. Dominius was martyred under Diocletian’s Christian persecution. Hence, Split’s cathedral registers the paradigmatic power shift from persecutor to persecuted at the close of the Roman Empire.

[3] The prothyron’s entablature rises above an arch between central columns. In antique architecture a prothyrum marked the transition from the outside to the inner door of a house.

[4] It is also well documented, having been drawn and measured by notable architects and authors since Palladio. These include Fischer von Erlach in the 18th century, Robert Adam and Charles Clerisseau in 1757, C.F. Cassas in 1780 (published in a 1802 book by J. Lavallee), Georg Niemann in 1910, Ernst Hebrard and Jacques Zeiller 1912, Msgr. Frane Bulic and Ljubo Karaman in 1927, and Cvito Fiskovic and Tomislav Marasovic in recent decades.

[5] In terms of urban development, Split’s disposition invites comparison with other towns of Roman origin such as Florence. The initial logic is similar—the castrum plan with cardo and decumanus—but Split is smaller and, with the palace’s exterior walls left extant, more hermetic. Florence’s division of political and religious centers is inverted in Split. While Florence’s cathedral was established outside the original Roman settlement and the Palazzo Vecchio built within it, Split reused the Roman religious center (originally also the political center) and then developed its own political center outside, to the west.

[6] In Recombinant Urbanism, David Graham Shane charges that, “European cities have intervened to recondition and rehabilitate their central squares as new public life-worlds, living rooms where individuals can be made comfortable. Previously, individuals had been merged into the mass for formal political demonstrations or protest rallies, military or state-controlled parades in the Cine Citta; now they are herded together to enjoy the spectacular repackaging of their cultural heritage as historically themed places where they can (ultimately) spend money.” (Shane 194)

*composited structural plan and developmental sequence images scanned from J. Marasović's Diocletian's Palace and photographed from on-site signage

vienna, looshaus

2007-05-05T10:36:00.000-07:00

Not quite on-topic, but today I saw the Goldman and Salatsch building by Adolf Loos, pictured on the right facing the imperial palace. Its austerity in 1909 was downright controversial. Looking at the building's neighbors one can see why...and at the same time one can see how cleverly Loos toned down the surrounding ostentation. The thickly veined marble that makes up the lower facing has since been applied ad nauseum throughout the city. The plain, punched fenestration for the floors above has been applied ad nauseum throughout the world. The crowds, tents, and stage in the plaza are for Vienna's StadtFest. Significantly more demure than Amsterdam's Queens Day, it was nonetheless a lively smattering of concerts, foodstands, and performances.

vienna, museumsquartier

2007-05-05T00:42:00.000-07:00

The Museum Moderner Kunst (right) shares a sheltered plaza with the Leopold Museum (left). Enclosed in their courtyard, neither building enjoys the urban command of Stuttgart's Kunstmuseum. However, their urban design strategies are remarkably similar. All three announce themselves as hermetic prisms while extending programmatically under the public domain. This can be seen in the giftshop/cafe-cum-public stairs attached to both volumes. Upon ascending these stairs one reaches more intimate spaces (that of the Museum Moderner Kunst is pictured at center) before vaulting up through an older building's roof to a series of artist-in-residence studios. In Stuttgart the significant grade change was an obvious topographic factor. In the Museum Quarter, surrounding buildings shield the city's natural slope. The vaulting stair absurdly puncturing the center image's red roof actually reconnects with the next street at grade.

rotterdam, kunsthal

2007-05-02T15:05:00.001-07:00

In Rotterdam I visited another OMA project, the Kunthal. Its stretched stair corridor (pictured on the right) caught my attention from a few hundred yards away. What makes it pertinent to my study is the way in which the ramp in the center image cuts straight through the building; very similar to the Staatsgalerie passage in Stuttgart. Another road cuts perpendicularly under the top of the ramp, while the auditorium in the image on the left ramps in the opposite direction, crossing at the entrance. Not related to my fellowship but also interesting is anther similarity to the Staatsgalerie: both designs take remarkably Mannerist stances, riffing with glee on established architectural canons. Le Corbusier is omnipresent in both. For the Staatsgalerie the architect's other source is primarily Italianate Renaissance. For the Kunsthal, Mies van der Rohe is a point of departure to which Koolhaas returns repeatedly; jazzing, ramping, and revamping.

the hague, souterrain

2007-05-02T14:57:00.000-07:00

A view of OMA's tram tunnel in The Hague. To reach the platform from the surface one must first descend (rather dramatically) through two levels of parking. With rambunctious sectional play and compositionally savvy materials, the souterrain is one of the most experiential underground experiences I've experienced (and, as a world traveler, that's talking from experience).

expense list, page 7

2007-05-01T10:14:00.000-07:00

amsterdam, queens day

2007-05-01T02:29:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you get lucky. Ever since I looked at European cities during the last world cup I have been intrigued by cities' potential to activate themselves; to turn on and pull the stops out in celebration. But it's a difficult thing to time one's travels to the international festival calender. So I gave myself a little grin when I happened to stumble into Amsterdam's biggest celebration of the year. Really, I didn't mean to, I swear. I came to look at the canals....I just didn't realize that they would be choked with d.j.'ed party barges lobbing techno beats at one other. The left and middle images try to do justice to the phenomenon. The left image is also interesting because the hubbub behind the party-goers is actually for a post-WWII independence celebration later on in the week. I watched military boats tug in a series of floating bridge sections to establish an amphitheater on the canal. The yellow crane in the background has comandeered a bridge to coordinate a substantial stage raising. The right image depicts the street situation around the city center. Amsterdam streets are fairly wide but judiciously portioned into pedestrian, bicycle, automobile, and tram lanes. In festival mode the pedestrian mass swells to absorb the entire cross-section. And anyone can set up a stall (almost) wherever he wants to sell (damn near) whatever he pleases. Hence, the city erupts into a collective garage sale punctuated by dance venues and canals of carousers. The Netherlands' flag is red white and blue--you can see it flying in the middle image--but everybody gets a liberal self-dousing in orange to honor the Queen Mother, a member of the House of Orange.

essen, zeche zollverein

2007-05-01T01:51:00.000-07:00

Zollverein School of Management and Design by SANAA is the first new building to be built on Zollverein's grounds. Three cores coordinate open floor plans of varying heights that are in turn wrapped by a facade of graphically graded fenestration.

essen, zeche zollverein

2007-05-01T01:38:00.001-07:00

Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), which authored the site's masterplan, instlled a visitor center in the former coal washing plant opposite the main gate. The image to the left shows the plant and its iconic hoisting rig from the so-called "court of honor." The image at center shows the five-story escalator corridor that (quite harmoniously) plugs into the plant and carries visitors to the reception desk. I took the image to the right looking down the lit railing of an orange stair inhabiting the cavernous space between museum shop / cafe and exhibition space.

essen, zeche zollverein

2007-05-01T01:31:00.000-07:00

Foster + Associates installed the Red Dot Design Museum, Zeche Zollverein's first new tenant, in the former boiler house. Cogently cognizant of the original construction, the architects string catwalks and displays both vertically and horizontally. The museum recognizes state-of-the-art industrial, furniture, and product design.

essen, zeche zollverein

2007-05-01T01:24:00.000-07:00

Vast defunct coal-mining complexes litter the Ruhr regional landscape. One of the most substantial is Zeche Zollverein, the 2001 recipient of a UNESCO World Heritage Site designation and a flagship for industrial re-use strategies. These images show the former coke processing plant, largely unsanitized but for a small out-building to one end. The plant is a mammoth exemplar of muscular machine aesthetic and calibrated volumetric drama. The image to the right, taken from the out-building cafe, peers out down a thin pond between widely spaced rails; these are the tracks along which the indecipherable apparatus in the center image used to trundle. In the winter, the pond serves as an ice-skating rink. The image to the left returns to the steel-frame-and-brick-infill model that marks most of the rest of the Zeche Zollverein complex, replete with absurd proportions and diagonal connection corridors perched upon spindly canted struts.

düsseldorf, hafen

2007-05-01T01:09:00.000-07:00

In Germany's Ruhr Valley I have focused on designer-intensive attempts to tranform former industrial zones into cultural lodestones. One type of urban structure under treatment is the "hafen", or port. This example, photographed from the massive TV tower that every German city seems to sport, is newly completed (see the 1997 Gehry project blooming in the foreground) and other efforts in Hamburg and Duisburg are gradually reaching fruition. Harboring offices, apartments, galleries, and chic spots-to-be, the new hafen ushers the (upscale) city back to its original lifeblood.

expense list, page 6

2007-04-29T23:44:00.000-07:00

munich, fünf höfe

2007-04-17T12:48:00.000-07:00

Translated as "Five Courtyards," this Herzog and de Meuron project embues a pre-existing galleria complex with remarkably phenomenal atmosphere. The basic typology is not that uncommon in Europe--a warren of ground-level stores weaving though a dense urban block--but such shopping conglomerates never receive this degree of high fashion care. The designers carefully configure surfaces, materials, and spaces to maximize their performance in concert. The result is a subtle exterior announcement that dissolves into ethereal illumination and surreal reflection.

ulm, ulm university

2007-04-17T12:44:00.000-07:00

Otto Steidle designed this segment of the university as an essay in timber and steel tectonics. He organized the campus' program to branch from a long elevated corridor, photographed above. The linear, branching organization benefits enormously from the walls, grasses, and waterways which which it interlocks.

munich, olympic park

2007-04-17T12:19:00.000-07:00

Günther Behnisch designed this complex for the 1972 Olympics with Frei Otto as structural engineer and Günther Grzimek as landscape architect. The three design forces meld with a sensibility that seems more contemporary than historical. Adjacent, Coop Himmelb(l)au's slowly emerging and heavily digitized BMW museum (visible to the right of the tower) will be hard pressed to compete.

stuttgart, weißenhofsiedlung

2007-04-12T15:10:00.000-07:00

I didn't bring many books with me, but I did bring my Corbusier guide. This is a building he designed for a 1927 prototype housing development coordinated by Mies van der Rohe. Many of the great names of early 20th century modernism (Walter Gropius, Mies, Bruno Taut, Hans Scharoun, Peter Behrens...) have claims staked on the surrounding plots. It was quite an experience to walk among them, especially on such a gorgeous day and with such an incredible view over the city of Stuttgart.

stuttgart, kunstmuseum

2007-04-08T10:59:00.000-07:00

Three images of taken from the museum looking out: on the left is a view over the rear, upper-level plaza, in the middle is a view over the stairs that connect the two plazas, and on the right is a view over the lower piazza to Konigstrasse, Stuttgart's main pedestrian avenue. The left and middle images belie the extent of the "cube's" coverage; the glass strip running through the plaza on the left acts as a continuous skylight for galleries below and the stairs provide roofing for the museum's extensive bookshop. The image on the right shows the stone-faced inner mass and, in the distance, suggests that Konisgstrasse's success may be due in part to its double-tree-lined Las Ramblas resemblance.

stuttgart, staatsgalerie

2007-04-08T10:49:00.000-07:00

Three images of the museum focusing on the public sweep of its open-air drum: on the left is a view across the drum toward the walkway's lower entrance, in the middle is a view to its upper entrance (or exit, if you're going that way), and on the right is a climbing view from the walkway itself. Follow the handrail if my semi-circular description has lost you. And in the center image the doorway is red simply because that's the color that it actually is.

stuttgart, mercedes-benz museum

2007-04-08T00:06:00.000-07:00

Three images of the museum: on the left is a view through a transitional corridor into a darkened gallery, in the middle is a view down through the central atrium, and on the right is a view of a gallery's edge showing the interaction of daylight, structure, visitor, and automobile. The more glamorous galleries--such as the one in the image to the left--face in, encased in concrete for controlled, dramatic lighting while the more supplementary exhibits of working class models--such as the one in the image to the right--face out, inhabiting the glazed, daylit zones. In the center of the image on the left are two of a hearty crew of cleaners armed with squirt guns, squee-gee's, and swiffers. My favorite feature in the middle image is the capsule elevator that tracks cinematic projections against the concrete as it rises and falls.

stuttgart, pedestrian museums

2007-04-07T10:38:00.000-07:00

I arrived in Stuttgart, Germany on Friday evening and I will head into Behnisch Architeken on Tuesday morning. In the meantime, I will focus on three outstanding museums that go to great pains to incorporate public terrain. On the left is the new Mercedes-Benz Museum, a super-sexed trefoil spiral that coils above a landscaped plinth. In the middle is the Kunstmuseum, a pair of nested cubes that support an interstitial walkway and a stepped landscape to their side. On the right is the Staatsgalerie, a sprawling post-modern composition whose statue gallery splits to allow a public walkway to wind up and through. The Mercedes museum stands near the brand's factory surrounded by sports fields, a stadium, an arena, and Stuttgart's main fairgrounds. The other two museums are located in the city's center amidst other cultural institutions, parks, and various scales of shopping centers. Rarely have I seen such a pedestrian-friendly municiple mindset and from the throngs I see shopping, dining, lounging, and strolling, the effort seems to be paying off.

expense list, page 5

2007-04-02T15:19:00.000-07:00

elkin, the ballard estate

2007-03-29T08:06:00.000-07:00

Until April 5th I am regrouping in North Carolina with my family, three cats in various stages of living decay, and a black lab too obese to do anything but sprawl out and emote. Every man needs a hobby that he can hyperbolize, and mine is dry-stack retaining stone walls. It's a heroic task of domestic proportions. I hunt down the rocks, wrest them from the earth, drag them to my wall, wrestle them into position, and tamp new ground behind them. Not to mention, of course, the intellectual rigors of interconnecting irregular geometries. The image presents my interim project: fitting my parents' toolshed into its sloping terrain. After walking around thinking about cities for a few months it's refreshing to douse myself with sweat, coat myself with clay, and sleep like a sonofabitch.

new york, long island city

2007-03-21T12:34:00.000-07:00

An explanatory drawing for Aranda/Lasch's Color Shift project.

new york, columbia university

2007-03-13T04:51:00.000-07:00

Interior elevations for Aranda/Lasch's Color Shift exhibition at Columbia, which opens on the 19th.

philadelphia, loews philadelphia hotel

2007-03-10T09:09:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I attended two sessions of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture's annual conference. I'm not a fan of conferences...even architectural ones...but it was nice to hear how the speakers construed the term "infrastructure" and positioned it and the architect in terms of the city. Although I could have just found the publication later because everyone basically read the paper they had submitted. But Philly's a nice town and it has some strange goings-on, what with Edmund Bacon's underground passages and all.

expense list, page 4

2007-03-08T05:48:00.001-08:00

expense list, page 3

2007-03-08T05:47:00.000-08:00

new york, brooklyn

2007-03-06T10:01:00.000-08:00

I landed in New York last night and, with the good-spirited help of a college friend chauffeur, I shot straight out to Brooklyn to get a glimpse of Aranda/Lasch's latest conspiracy. It was pretty easy to spot from the highway. They've commandeered an enormous free-standing video billboard, shorn it of its usual FreshDirect banter, and altered it into a color-evolving neighborhood nightlight. On the left is the board and on the right is its effect. Over the next two weeks or so, I'm going to help the duo set up an exhibition of the project for Columbia University.

alaska, dawn

2007-03-06T09:55:00.000-08:00

sendai, mediatheque

2007-03-04T15:05:00.000-08:00

naoshima, yayoi kusama pumpkin

2007-03-04T07:42:00.000-08:00

The rest of my recent tagential travel, tenuously tethered by the color red as a thematic thread. I have made use of my Japan Rail pass for the last week, taking a break from Branner dictation to acclimate to the larger country. Tonight I fly to New York to assist Aranda/Lasch with their new project ColorShift and to attend a conference on infrastructural urbanism in Philadelphia.

miyajima, torii

2007-03-04T07:40:00.000-08:00

nara, kasuga taisha and nigatsu-do

2007-03-04T07:38:00.000-08:00

Please note the roving fireball ceremony in the lower image.

kyoto, kyomizu-dera temple complex

2007-03-04T07:36:00.000-08:00