20060521
It was architecture that Saddam Hussein used to consolidate his grip on Iraq. And it was architecture that the Serbs and the Croats deployed in the first stages of their bloody battle over the division of the former Yugoslavia. Both sides marked out their territory by building churches: steel and glass modern for the Catholic Croats; neo-Byzantine in so-called traditional stone and tile for the orthodox Serbs.
Often quite wrongly, architecture is equated with political beliefs. Flat roofs have been associated with modernism and progressive politics, while the use of dated historical styles is believed to embody traditional values. When the Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron were hired by the University of Texas to design a campus art gallery in 1998, Tony Sanchez, a fund-raiser for George W. Bush, engineered their resignation because they refused to adopt the Spanish colonial style, which he, as a member of the university's board of regents, found most fitting.
Architecture, it seems, matters more than ever. It affects us personally, in ways that we have all come to know. Certainly it has never been more talked about than it is now. The argument about how to reconstruct ground zero turned every New Yorker into an architecture critic. And as the popular onslaught against the banality of the first designs suggests, the wider audience is far less conservative than the professionals presume [..]
Architecture matters because it lasts, of course. It matters because it is big, and it shapes the landscape of our everyday lives. But beyond that, it also matters because, more than any other cultural form, it is a means of setting the historical record straight.
If that is so, no city has more need of architecture than Berlin, which, as the Dutch architect and critic Rem Koolhaas once observed, has far too much history. To imagine Hitler completing the construction of the triumphalist city of stone that he planned with Albert Speer is to imagine his total victory. It is here that the East Germans dynamited the huge Baroque hulk of the royal palace in 1950, principally to demonstrate that the German Democratic Republic was here to stay, as well as to demonstrate their loyalty to Stalin, who had carried out a similar mutilation of the center of Moscow. The East Germans at last filled the gap in the city's fabric with the orange-mirror glass glitz of the monstrous Palace of the Republic, the D.D.R.'s Parliament, with bowling alley and Op Art bar attached. As if to prove that it is the victors who make architectural history as well as all the other kinds, Germany's reunited government recently decided to demolish the building, bowling alley included, and replace it with a replica of the royal palace that had been there before. For once, Berlin's iconoclastic youth and old left were united in their bitter opposition. To tear down the great kitsch Parliament was to destroy history and to waste money, all for the sake of making an empty architectural bow to the past. (NYtimes magazine today)
.: Jonas 7:17 AM
20060501
Today I received my Greencard.
.: Jonas 10:03 PM
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