Books, studio, new haven and other things

In the past this blog has mainly been a storehouse for my academic writing as it developed over time. Now that I’ve transitioned into architecture school I’m realizing there will be relatively little time devoted to research in my first year and so updates will mostly come in the form of personal reflections and minor studio projects.

New Haven is grey today and the rain is barely cooperating with any wishes for dry movements. We’re currently on a week and a half break before the Fall kicks into gear, beginning next Wednesday with a bus tour and picnic. The Summer studio with George Knight and Joyce Hsiang was incredibly dense and I’ve never drawn so much in my life. The books I’ve been working on in Germany are finally coming to a close and this week needs to be the final batch of edits before the Fall begins. Formal analysis with Eisenman!

Worlds

“We are easily deluded into assuming that the relationship between a foreign subject and the objects in his world exists on the same spatial and temporal plane as our own relations with the objects in our human world. This fallacy is fed by a belief in the existence of a single world, into which all living creatures are pigeonholed. This gives rise to the widespread conviction that there is only one space and one time for all living things. Only recently have physicists begun to doubt the existence of a universe with a space that is valid for all beings. That such a space cannot exist is evident from the fact that all men live in three distinct spaces, which interpenetrate and complement, but in part also contradict one another.” from A stroll through the worlds of animals and men

Fight the Future

The semester has ended and the Summer has begun with the usual crashing of administrative deadlines, obscure forms and ceaseless requirements to be met. Back in April I sent my admissions decision to the various schools and I have decided to attend Yale School of Architecture in New Haven. The incoming class of M.Arch students appears to be quite diverse, as my friends from the Columbia Summer program have diffused throughout the country, myself being the only one to attend Yale. At first I was entirely cautious about not attending the GSAPP but after a month I still feel devoted to my decision. Among its numerous strengths, the Yale SOA remains committed to building in architecture which is a central concern for me. It’s amazing to think that within a year I will be on a team designing and constructing a project.

My scholarship on the Marx Engels Forum has reached a certain consistency and I finally turned it into all the necessary departments this past week. I will be updating material semiotic with a new page including the text. The project would never have succeeded without the support of Amelia Rosenberg Weinreb, Barbara Hoidn and Wilfried Wang. Without their support over the past year there would be no ethnography nor any framework in which to situated the narrative I constructed. I’m excited to see what the future will produce in Urban Studies and I hope there continues to be a healthy injection of Anthropology in the realms of Architecture and Urbanism. As to the title of this post—I clearly watch too many episodes of the X-Files.

The Next Three Years

March can be a trying month in Austin when one considers the descent of coasters for SXSW, spring break, and the various approaching deadlines for graduation, thesis and general coursework. This March has been especially enervating with the wait for graduate school decisions just now coming to a close.

It appears I now have a month to decide what I will be doing for the next three, or four, years of my life. M.Arch decisions have been very friendly to myself and all the friends I made last summer at the GSAPP. Currently I’m choosing between six schools, all with very different locations and different emphases, though often a focus in digital design. Until April, indecision is the name of the game, though New Haven is a mostly constant thought.

Deterritorializing Strata, Thoughts in a Political Process

Piles of brick continue to grow daily but are kept away, with a fence, from the curious hands of tourists, children and dogs that find their way into the Marx Engels Forum. The fence holds no clues about what is occurring, the sign hinged on the fence is a generic contractor advertisement but a few posters scattered along the fencing of the southern edge of the park, emblazoned with the BVG logo, hint at something transit-related. Craters of earth expose the historic heart of Berlin, accompanied by the rough volumes of stones tossed atop one another, standing as witnesses to the former sites of the GDR’s monuments to Marx and Engels. Ludwig Engelhardt knitted Marx and Engels together from wireframe, then added their flesh and bone through slab of clay after slab of clay only to finish by pouring them as bronze. Sibylle Bergemann, who just passed away in the Fall of 2010, documented Engelhardt in the 1980s when he created the sculpture of Marx and Engels. Her photos show images of both figures pinned throughout Engelhardt’s studio, his guides in crafting the two philosophers. Recorded in black and white, the initial forms are not much different from the piles of stone I see in the MEF, nearly shapeless pieces of earth put one atop the other, to later be placed in the center of historic Berlin.

By now Berlin has many hearts and the districts that are scattered throughout the city lack any simple cohesion. It has been a rough hundred years to say the least for this city and like anything else the torrential storms that have left their scars on its surface have also maimed what was once a cohesive entity. These craters are nothing but scrapes after what this portion of the city has already witnessed, including the marches of Hitler, the destruction of World War II, and the parades of the GDR. The visitors that pass through realize something is changing, but there are no direct or obvious signs displaying why demolition or construction is occurring, or even if it is either or a combination of both. What was once here or what might come to be is completely unclear.

The television tower at Alexanderplatz rises above the forum and the tourists that have come to take pictures here find it absurd that they cannot take just the right photo to commemorate their trip to the big city by standing in the center, the fence prevents this. But they are resourceful and just as the groups of buses that line Spandauer Straße prevent direct circulation into the park, the fence does also funnel visitors around the perimeter of the forum. It’s difficult to notice at first but Marx and Engels are still here, they’ve just been slightly relocated from the center of the city, and the former showcase of East German identity, off to the Northwestern tip of the forum, still gazing East but now nearer Unter den Linden and slightly askew from their formerly central position in the city and state ideology.

This park, it might be difficult to even call it that, is going through a change. Like much of Berlin it is a fairly recent development that is already being reconfigured. It has been here and recognized as a park since (1987) and it has seen the fall of a government, the stitching together of a city and the production of a new German nationalism. It may not be noted as having witnessed all of this, and often this is because the park is almost forgotten. Its chestnut trees distinguish it from Nikolaiviertel in the South, the Spree in the West and Alexanderplatz to the East. The North reflects Berlin’s growing commercial success as a European capital with a new Radisson hotel, Fox headquarters and arcades to pass through while visiting the historic city center. I watch as children run through timed spouts of water in these arcades, waiting with their parents to be seated at the commercial restaurants that are tucked into the cavities of the block that combines hotel with news agency, with tourist shops and aquarium. The entire block to the North of this park is a consumer extravaganza, containing traditional Berlin souvenir items like crossing guard keychains and stuffed bears, upscale restaurants, an Einstein’s coffeeshop and an aquarium. The basement of the building is nothing like its glossy exterior that is coated in glass and reflects the lights of traffic as it flows by. Rather, as I take the elevator into the underground with my boss to pick up a competition model of the city center, I’m introduced to the mechanics of the aquarium. As my boss pieces together the Styrofoam television tower and bags the rest of downtown Berlin so we can carry it to the planning senate’s exhibition, one of the aquarium workers offers to show me Berlin’s last seahorse, whose lover has just died. The block contains too many things all at once and this very quality of difference and density contrasts strongly against the patch of grass situated just South and whose main attractions are the leftovers of a failed dream or maybe the end of a nightmare for some. The dream was Communism and the park is a direct embodiment and celebration of this, while at the same time the commemoration of a nightmare for others, its perpetuation in Berlin’s center signifies both.

But it’s not only the Northern block that I notice when visiting the MEF, Museuminsel also easily overshadows this park, and until fairly recently the prior Palace of the Republic functioned as a containing condition for the park, reinforcing its presence as absence by bordering it on its Western side, across the River Spree. But the park is not really a void so much and it is only an absence in its lack of built structure, besides the combined public toilet and convenience store on the Southeastern corner. This park is one urban form of German Socialism, its history describes an all-too-familiar cultural fantasy of Cold War tensions whereby grand dreams become shriveled realizations and the hopes of a people are barely cobbled together. But the park contains more than just this and the groups of cyclists that assemble among its ringed sidewalks and the tourists that pass through during their brief glimpses of Berlin might realize this. The Berliners that follow behind their dogs, who presumably used to urinate on Marx and Engels, might not envision the site as really being this depressing nor this important. Instead, these individuals might have barely formed an opinion, most of them never even stop here to look around. There is really no reason to do so currently as the park is undergoing construction and Marx, Engels and the other sculptures that used to stand guard in the center of the park have been huddled together inside another fence. Instead, the park is a site for individuals to pass through. The Berliner Dome is just to the Northwest, literally across the street. Nikolaiviertel is to the South and holds a variety of shops and cafés that celebrate and craft traditional German identity through cuckoo clocks, bears, dolls, and German handiwork. Taverns, traditional restaurants and historic buildings of Berlin’s founding, such as Nikolaikirche, Berlin’s oldest church, make the district and match the northern block in quality of difference and density.

The relocation of Marx and Engels is a recent occurrence that took place this past September in anticipation of the extension of the U-Bahn to the Berlin townhall. Now the park is disassembled while an underground stop is added on its Southeastern perimeter, encouraging the flow of individuals through the historic city center along the East/West axis. The construction lines the Southern edge of the park and pedestrians along Spandauer Straße find the pervasive orange cones blocking their jaywalk into the plaza surrounding the King Neptune fountain. During the warmer months of the year this area surrounding Neptune and his maritime companions, and leading up to the television tower holds beds of red roses that filters the throngs of visitors as they move east or find an available bench. The benches that line the Northern and Southern edges of the plaza are filled in the warm months, a cacophony of languages suffocating the water trickling across Neptune’s companions and adding another cloud of speech over the already marked benches which are covered in graffiti tags. As I walk past those sitting in the plaza, a general visitor is entirely too difficult to discern as the young and old blend together, tourist and resident remaining nearly imperceptible. The elderly rest and watch as walkers pass through with indistinct trajectories, though most likely somewhere in the historic downtown, and families take pictures next to King Neptune, trying to hold back their children from diving into the gargantuan fountain. Mostly they are successful as when I’ve passed through the plaza there have never been children directly in the water, instead they tuck themselves into the laps of the figures surrounding Neptune or attempt to climb Neptune as their parents rush them to pose for a photo, the line of likeminded people building behind them and pressuring their candid moment’s appearance. As the tourists generally command the territory around the fountain and beds of roses, punks on their bicycles, skateboards and rollerblades command the stairwells leading into the television tower. Their hair lacks any specific order or style, they’re not the fashion victims of Hackescher Markt nor Prenzlauer Berg and as I pass through I notice their risky movements as they jet through the crowds of people, pushing to see how close they can get to one another or the pedestrians while weaving in and out of the crowds. The television tower itself propels into the sky and on clear days the very tip can be seen puncturing a cloud. But when the grey skies of Berlin gather in the Fall and Winter months the television tower begins to disappear after ten or fifteen stories, becoming lost in the fog and mist, only revealing itself intermittently as a faint red glow pulses from the sky.

Interruptions

“Geryon sat in his hotel room on the end of the bed staring at the blank tv screen.
It was seven a.m. Total agitation possessed him. He had held off phoning herakles
for two days. Even now he was not
looking at the telephone (which he had placed in the bottom of his sock drawer).
He was not
thinking about the two of them in their hotel room on the other side of the Plaza de Mayo.
He was not
remembering how herakles liked to make love in the early morning like a sleepy bear
taking the lid off a jar of honey—Geryon
got up suddenly and went into the bathroom. Removed his overcoat and turned on
the shower. Stood under cold water
for a minute and a half while a fragment of Emily Dickinson chased around in his head.”

Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson

“This event, however, also has impact despite the autobiographical. The poem closes focusing on what happens when someone allows himself to be changed by an event of being-with the object, not in the semi-anonymous projected proximity of apostrophe or the we-did-this and we-did-that sociality of the first stanza and not in terms of a dramatics of an unclosed sexual identity, indeed not in terms of biography at all. The seismic shift takes place in yielding to the proximity to an intimacy undefined by talking, made by a gesture of approach that holds open a space between two people just standing there linked newly.”

Cruel Optimism: on Marx, Loss and the Senses, Lauren Berlant

The gaggle of older women brace themselves against the thuds of the amps, their beat sending shocks through the bodies trailing behind them. As they pass along Unter den Linden, I watch as their heads whip to and fro, their stretched ears waving wildly as the elderly ladies stand back in utter amazement. The beats vary, and with their variations iterations of jerks prolong the moments passing before me. Each truck holds about six speakers the size of my own body, a dj manipulates toggles in the back of the truck and in response, the speakers’ eruptions trigger violent fits from those trailing behind. The procession is unending, as far as I can see there are masses of individuals streaming along and violently shaking their heads in direct enjoyment. But myself and the elderly women stand still on the corner, in disbelief and confusion. I can feel the draw of the procession tug at me and recommend my joining, but I cannot break myself away from the street corner. As we watch water bottles are flung in our direction along with the noisy ballistics, ricocheting from the smooth glass behind us and amplifying until our hearing begs deferral.

As we wait, there are gaps that are created by the pausing of the vehicles. And in enough time that it takes me to realize I could make a break for it, I could pass across the street or fall into the potpourri of bodies, it is already too late and I remain on the corner as a spectator. But now my observances are timed and in sync with these breaks, I anticipate their coming while watching as the parade participants slam their heads against the air, seemingly destroying an unseen barrier with their unrelenting jerks of protest aimed at myself and the others watching them drift along. Like the Spree they move through the center of the city, their breaks in movement reminiscent of the frothing currents passing along the banks of Berlin. And like the tourists in the boat that cruise along the city protected from the ebbs and flows that circulate and wrap themselves in Berlin, the old ladies and I drift.

“Wild”life

“But of course that is exactly it: not that I should ever use the line, but that I should remember the woman who said it and the afternoon I heard it.” Joan Didion

It’s as the park becomes ensnared in a web of lights that I watch the Berlin town hall topple together as a mountain of red bricks, vibrations leaving its tip and sending away cobbled clouds of convulsing birds. These are the very same clouds that, at times, can be found traveling across the grass, their glazed eyes tracking any edible movements and sending them into jerky dances similar to their fits in the air, beaks snapping open and closed with steady wings propelling them about. I watch the airborne cloud sway to and fro above me, its dimensions shifting continuously as it turns from flat and deep to thin and textured. Every so often the shifts occur as the cloud begins to break apart, a rupture tearing away at the texture and depth. The sky seems black as the clouds sway about but when I watch a fissure rip apart the seams, leaks slip through and just like when the cloud is scattering across the ground, its partial masking reveals something further.

The car lights that slide along the edges of the park trace it, their imprint on my retinas tearing a basket around me as their paths differentiate and integrate along the precise asphalt geometry. The fractured pace encouraged by the stoplights is interrupted at times when I watch cyclists rush past, their tail lights out of sync with the usual traffic and fraying the grid, or as camera flashes from the top of the Berliner dome distort the basket by tugging it North and raising its rim. While the clouds either disintegrate into the air or crowd along the ground in jittering packs, its movements are reflected in the leaves and branches as they gently shift, their retort to pressures of the wind. My breath is starting to show now as it’s November and the common fantasies of Berlin hold true with the nights being the days and mostly lacking any clarity in vision due to the constantly grey-purple light. The cloud begins to rest, its parts dropping on the park like a rickety machine falling apart under the stresses of production. Barely noticeable, a rustle in the leaves surrounding my bike and below the bench where I’m sitting, distracts me as part of the cloud lands on me, its chalky white glob smearing across my jacket and just barely sounding louder than the thin planes below me as the tiny footsteps crack them slightly.

My breaths have become more labored now and as my chest heaves in and out to lessen the sharp of the cold in my throat, I notice the distinct flavor of the air, its crispness denoting the chill of the River Spree tainted with the aroma of the fallen leaves and a descending frost. Riding through the park on my bike the surfaces of the leaves wobble my trajectory as the wet mix with the dry, cracking noises being suffocated by a perspiring embrace. As I wait on the bench with the park to catch the breaking clouds, little noises erupt below me, signaling a reason for the agitated leaves shifting angrily. Barely noticeable, something flits back and forth beneath the leaves next to my bike tire and the bench, a gentle crackling following the violent shakes and displacements. The patches of cover echo the clouds that broke apart, their own discontinuities exposing a layer below and it is between these fissures that I first catch a glimpse of the fieldmouse valiantly darting in a meter’s dimension. As I wait on the bench, my book in my lap, it skips between me and my bike, rushing from the base of the bike, hidden under a leaf, to right beside my foot, whiskers flaying like whips and eyes barely big enough to reflect light appearing behind storm-tossed shutters.

The fieldmouse continues its rummaging in the fractured coverage of the leaves and like the people who filter the garbages of the park with their hands and eyes so deftly trained for valuable cans and bottles, the fieldmouse frenzies around me for anything of mouse-value. Its search is lengthy and so focused that my movements do not disrupt its treasure hunt nor scare it away. Instead, its scampering remains uninterested in my page-turning or subtle shifts on the bench and it meticulously combs the area, the potential treasures of the leaves needing thorough articulation and dedicated uncovering. Not unlike the mouse, those that pass through the park to collect valuable trash are thorough and constant in their searching. As they pause by the trashcans at the base of all the lampposts in the park, they quickly discern the contents of the crowded orange bins and clasp whatever they deem of worth. While the human scavengers’ movements are quick, they seek no cover as the fieldmouse does and instead rush to quicken their findings rather than to hide their actions.

Sound bites

What follows are a few quotes from Elizabeth Grosz (The Nick of Time)

“In duration, by contrast, relations of succession function to frame relations of simultaneity, and no “object” can be isolated from another or function to include or contain another.” (182)

“This means that there must be a relation of repetition between each segment, whereby each segment or degree of contraction/dilation is a virtual repetition of the others, not identical, but a version.” (182)

“Duration is thus the milieu of qualitative difference, and each difference it proliferates is different in kind, unique in itself.” (183)

“The future is that over which the past and present have no control: the future is that openness of becoming that enables divergence from what exists. This means that, rather than the past’s exerting a deterministic force over the future, the future is that which overwrites or restructures the virtual that is the past: the past is the condition of every future: the future that emerges is only one of the lines of virtuality from the past.” (183)

weihnachtsmarkt

As the first snow has fallen in Berlin for the Winter, the Marx Engels Forum is oppressed by a plane hiding its recent scars. The padded layer has taken residency over the entire area and is slowly being molded by the visitors who pass through the concentric paths as they move between Museum Island, Nikolaiviertel and Alexandarplatz. But there is a strange contrast that has grown in tandem with the snow. The gentle pulses of the glowing red television tower now compete with the streaming colors of the ferris wheel that has risen near King Neptune’s plaza. Barely reaching half the height of the television tower, a ferris wheel has accumulated across the street from the Eastern edge of the park and its lights dance back and forth while the passengers, enclosed in little carts, receive a view of Berlin only available once yearly. The season of wet leaves and intermittent warmth in Berlin has ended, and with Fall’s passing Winter’s arrival signals the assemblies of groups packed between fake alpine cottages selling traditional crafts, modern gifts and various comestibles. Gluhwein is advertised throughout the Christmas Market and a stand advertising its Dresden roots prepare cauliflower whose aroma distinctly mixes with the assorted candies marketed only a few cottages down.

Passing through the market is a bit like visiting Disney, its fantastically real production conveying an enjoyment best achieved through consumerism as experience. The rides that are dotted throughout the market spin children around on reindeers and other mythical creatures while the children shake bells beckoning the speed to increase. Strollers and the elderly push throughout the area, heading to alpine cottages for an assortment of goods and treats. The air is festive when crowds gather but moving through the marketplace during an off-time one finds the alpine cottages filled with vague expressions of workers as they adjust their traditional costumes or chef’s hats, awaiting the next rush of shoppers and noting the remaining time until they escape the Christmas village. The collection is a true contrast against the plaza’s usual use in Autumn where visitors and residents sit on benches admiring Neptune and his maritime friends. The lights of the television tower and those of the ferris wheel react to one another, one slowly pulsing now and again while the hectic colors of the ferris wheel wash the surrounding area in a technicolor bath of momentary excitement.

Sitting in the Marx Engels Forum one can watch as the crowds that usually move along the Western edge of the park are met by those visitors who are either rushing to or escaping from the parade of lights and crafts. Their faces expressing contentment from the joyous market but slowly waning into a shiver as the wind comes across the river Spree and into the park to greet them. Like so many others, they turn around with their cameras to capture the blinking television tower and the its new ferris wheel companion, whose rotations blend together the lights in their photographs and add to their memory of the city as busy place. The dinner groups abandoning their meals in Nikolaiviertel mesh with the families and tourists who are seeking the warmth of the market, its bright lights advertising a respite from the tundra like park of snow, benches and barren trees. No one is sitting in the park during the day and especially during the night it is abandoned. This changes occasionally and those individuals rushing around the rings of sidewalk or making new paths through the trampled grass are joined in their momentary glimpse of the park by informal groups.

It’s late evening in the Winter before snow has come but the benches of the Marx Engels Forum are freezing. Slight flurries beset Berlin and their remains are scattered along the benches besides graffiti and the few remaining leaves who have survived their departure from the branches above. The Berliner Rathaus quietly bellows as it reaches eight and its sound permeates the park for a brief moment. As the hands reach around to catch the next minute the approaching silence is scuffled by the interfering noises of boots scraping across the sidewalk. The lone individuals that are always passing through the park slightly drag their feet while they check their cellphone’s reception, muttering in mixtures of German, English and French. Before they have finished their calls they are out of the park and crossing into Museum Island or heading into the arcades just North of the park. Those that do not exit the park immediately, appear to have pulled out their phones not to ring home or find out what bar to meet up at, but instead are crouching and contorting along the Western edge of the park while they try to capture the entire television tower in their camera’s viewfinder. A brief flash, they look down and their faces become aglow with their cell’s display. Mostly it takes visitors a few images before they really capture what they want. After looking at their cell display they realize the tower’s tip is cropped in the frame and they move further towards the river Spree, enlarging their perspective and capturing one of Berlin’s namesakes.

Sublimation of form via content

To his future wife Erich Mendelsohn once wrote, “I define ‘function’ as a mode of architectural action dependent solely on conditions of use, material, and construction. I define “Architectural dynamics” as the expression of tension innate to elastic building materials, of movement and counter movement within the immovable stability of the building itself” (Letters of an Architect 166). That these remarks were passed through the post to his soon-to-be wife are somewhat remarkable, and that this engagement shaped his own thoughts displays a unique temperament whereby she exerted influence.

Reflecting on the Max Planck Institute for Human Development urges an assessment of these “architectural dynamics” or as Mendelsohn also called it, “a certain sensibility.” How does one qualify these ideas or is their irreducibility already qualification? In their design for the MPIHD Fehling and Gogel concentrated on the content of the institution and how that content might arise in an architectural form. This approach almost urges an adaptability as the content of a research institute (its practices, methods, concerns) will surely change over time. But as Amos Gitai mentioned last night at the Deutsches Guggenheim, architecture is inevitably non-adaptable due to the discursive restraints that force a single arrangement or narrative (zoning, construction, etc.) Though it is worth noting that such a reductive statement inherently ignores change. While architecture, according to Gitai, might be argued as a single narrative or arrangement, this completely ignores the instability of physical form and its attendant symbolic systems.

The Schlossplatz/Marx Engels Platz here in Berlin is arguably a counterexample to this very notion of non-hybridity. The former baroque palace that was cleared by the GDR gave way to the Palast der Republik which was cleared by the most recent German political manifestation. Inherent in this instability are site characteristics that retain content whose presence is structured through the absence of form (the castle/palace). This is where symbolic systems directly interact with those qualified as material. The green void currently in the center of Berlin is a temporary sublimation of its historical form and content, at least until another architecture or meaning is crafted for the German people. Maybe this temporary presence as absence shares a lineage with the “certain sensibility” Mendelsohn described to his wife, and which manifests in the tectonics of the MPIHD.