Monday, May 18. 2009
The French writer and philosopher Jean Baudrillard once wrote of the freeways of Los Angeles as being “ideally suited to the only truly profound pleasure, that of keeping on the move.” Indeed, nowhere is the pleasure of keeping on the move more profound than in a city whose freeways rarely offer it.
Rush hour in Los Angeles is synonymous with gridlock, but the sheer enormity of the situation can be tough to grasp. Fortunately, there is the architecture photographer Benny Chan, whose Traffic! series depicts the scale of overcrowded lanes of rush hour traffic from high overhead. Shot over a few years during various helicopter trips, the photographs now stand eight feet high and six feet wide, and convey, quite effectively, the enormity of the problem—as well as the need to get things moving.
Traffic! will show at the Pasadena Museum of California from May 31 through September 20. An opening event will be held on the 30th. What follows is a selection of Mr. Chan’s work. Click each image to (dramatically) enlarge.
Click to enlarge.
Click to enlarge.
Click to enlarge.
Click to enlarge.
Click to enlarge.
Click to enlarge.
Click to enlarge.
Click to enlarge.
Click to enlarge.
Click to enlarge.
Click to enlarge.
-----
Via Good Magazine
World-Information City Paris 2009 is an international, two day conference focusing on four major themes within the wide field of new urban geographies: mobility, global flows and local dynamics, the remaking of urban spaces through new strategies of conflict and security, and new approaches to map distributed action in space. Mobility – of people, goods, and information – across distances large and small has become an ever more salient aspect of a wide range of social practices.
For the first time in world history a majority lives in cities but the cities’ form itself is challenged. Virtual and physical space increasingly fragments into fully globalized zones along intensely localized spaces in a single geographic domain. High-level presentations, discussions and workshops offer insights on future urban transformations in a digitally networked world. With: Bruno Latour, Saskia Sassen, Stephen Graham, Christophe Aguiton, Carlo Ratti, John Urry, Eyal Weizman, Solomon Benjamin, Brian Holmes a.o.
address: Maison des metallos, 94 rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud - 75011 Paris (GoogleMaps).
More info>>
-----
Via The Mobile city
Personal comment:
Pour info, un cycle de conférences (approche théorique, sociologique, géopolitique, technologique... mais pas architecturale!) concernant la ville^, la mobilité et la globalisation. Prochaine étape à Paris à la fin du mois.
[Image: The Berlin Reich Chancellery, designed by Albert Speer].
Jim Rossignol's recent guest post about the architecture of "evil lairs" reminded me of a brilliant vignette from Deyan Sudjic's 2005 book The Edifice Complex.
In a chapter called "The Long March to the Leader's Desk" – a virtuoso example of architectural writing, and easily the best chapter in the book – Sudjic describes how Emil Hácha, Prime Minister of what was then Czechoslovakia, came to visit Adolf Hitler in his Albert Speer-designed Reich Chancellery in Berlin.
The Chancellery – Hitler's "evil lair," if you will – proved so psychologically overpowering that Hácha, "a short man in his late sixties with thinning and receding hair," according to Sudjic, suffered a heart attack and very nearly died after walking through it.
[Image: Hitler's office in the Chancellery].
Quoting Sudjic at length:
Hácha was white faced, anxious, and dizzy as he made his way across the entrance lobby, completed just eight weeks earlier. He was exactly the kind of visitor the Chancellery was designed for. If ever architecture had been intended for use as a weapon of war, it was here. The grandeur of the Chancellery was an essential part of Hitler's campaign to browbeat Hácha into surrender. Beyond the courtyard, itself a kind of summation of the Nazi state, was an elaborate sequence of spaces inside the Chancellery, carefully orchestrated to deliver official visitors to Hitler's presence in a suitably intimidated frame of mind. After a quarter-mile walk, visitors were left in no doubt of the power of the new Germany.
Indeed, Sudjic suggests that Hácha experienced the building "like a spelunker, moving from one giant underground cavern to another, never sure exactly where he would find himself, or what he would have to confront next, as an intimidating and bewildering sequence of spaces unfolded in front of him."
Past the chancellery guards and out of the way of the floodlights, [Hácha was led] across the porch and into a windowless hall beyond, its wall inlaid with the pagan imagery of mosaic eagles grasping burning torches garlanded with oak leaves, its floors slippery with marble. There was no furniture, nor even a trace of carpet to soften the severity of the hall. (...) Under the hovering glass and the massive marble walls, the bronze doors at the far end of the hall shimmered and beckoned and threatened. Visitors were propelled down its length as if being whirled through a wind tunnel. As Hácha walked, he was aware of his heart accelerating in rapid fluctuating beats.
At this point, Hitler's Chancellery begins to sound like the boss level of a particularly unnerving videogame:
The hall that they walked through was thirty feet high. On the left a parade of windows looked out over Voss Strasse, and on the right were five giant doorways, each seventeen feet high. They stopped at the central pair of double doors, guarded by two more SS men in steel helmets. On a bronze scroll above the door case were the initials AH.
Even here, at the very door to Hitler's study, Speer's spatial theatrics weren't finished.
Passing through those gigantic doors, Hácha found himself standing at one end of a 4000-square-foot room, surrounded by "blood-red marble walls." At the other end, in front of a fireplace, was "a sofa as big as a lifeboat, occupied by Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Göring" – and nearby was Hitler, seated at his desk.
Incredibly, "To walk from the door to the desk took a nerve-wracking full minute."
By that point, though, Czechoslovakia's fate was sealed: Hácha's will collapsed as soon as Göring began to describe the Nazis' military capabilities, and he suffered a heart attack.
Not before signing his country over to Hitler, of course – "a humiliation that he had ample time to reflect on," Sudjic writes, "during his endless walk back through the marble and mosaic halls of the Chancellery."
-----
Via BLDBLOG
Personal comment:
Sur l'architecture de la Chancellerie d'Hitler comme un "jeu" amenant au "Boss" final...
|