palácio do planalto.
architect: oscar niemeyer.
oscar niemeyer is 100 years old today. and alive. and working. I have been going through our old brazilian photos to find something typical of his work.
this is the palácio do planalto on the praça dos três poderes in brasilia. it's all there: the apparent weightlessness of the concrete construction, the formal monumentality achieved with shapes from mid-century pop art, the vast emptiness, the surrealism...
at 100, niemeyer has never been more busy which is hardly surprising - he is after all the father figure of a dominant trait in today's architecture, namely that we build monuments to brand cities, countries, companies rather than to improve the local community. anything to attract the attention, the tourists, and the investment from afar, anything loud and outlandish enough to be visible at great distance.
niemeyer did this 50 years ago when he designed the key buildings of brazil's new capital, brasilia. famously, brasilia was placed in the middle of nowhere, far from the two competing and corrupt urban centres of rio de janeiro and sao paulo. something can indeed be said in favour of moving government away from those places and also of niemeyer's ability to give the new brazil an architectural face, so to speak, a face which would need to be seen and remembered in the furthest reaches of an enormous, developing country.
but if that argument were true of brasilia, it cannot also be true of every other provincial town vying for coop himmelblau or frank gehry to drag them out of obscurity with some empty gesture.
more niemeyer here.
Tags: oscar niemeyer roberto burle marx lucio costa architecture brasilia brasil brazil modernism arquitetura brasileira arkitektur marble column arquitectura Architektur Architettura Architectuur brazilian modern modernisme palácio do planalto Praça dos Três Poderes brasilien bresil birthday centenary centennial anniversary building modernist mid-century gebäude haus gebouw bouw bygning batiment maison edificio huis casa jenskristianseier seier+seier creative commons CC
agnes looking at iran...this is our final upload from isfahan for now. thank you all for your comments and for stopping by :)
we recommend isfahan to everyone. it is an easy place to be a tourist and safe, apart for the traffic - something very disturbing happens when iranians get behind the wheel.
all the people we met were kind and a great many of them treated us with real warmth and interest - I have only ever experienced such hospitality once before, in damascus. (texas comes third).
agnes was the natural centre of attention and we were often asked why our daughter was japanese. only once did I succumb to the lazy answer, "its a miracle". the idea of foreign adoption is not well known in iran but always well received when explained. "the work of God", people called it and we had a hard time explaining that agnes was with us because we had longed for her and not out of charity. you try telling that, using only sign language and your school german.
back in copenhagen, agnes now waves to all women wearing scarfs. I can't help thinking that she has cast her vote in the ongoing and demeaning public debate about muslim dress code that we have suffered in denmark these past years.
the cartoon scandal that made us postpone our trip some time ago, well, the iranians are very cool about that. the demonstrations and the burning of the embassies were all arranged "from above", anyway.
the pan-islamic boycott of Danish goods, however, was a real, popular protest. once we stopped by a small shop to buy bottled water, the owner responded to our being Danish with the words, "ah denmark, I used to sell cheese from there", which I found was an elegantly oblique way of saying a lot without offending anyone.
I grew up in a part of denmark where jyllandsposten is the main newspaper. contrary to the picture they were allowed to paint of themselves in other media, it is a racist and islamofobic paper - sadly mirroring the general opinion in the area. the people jyllandsposten were up against were even more bigoted, the whole thing reminding me of george orwell's warning sometime in the 1930's, "the future belongs to the fanatics".
these days, the front page belongs to the fanatics and it shouldn't. it is the unholy marriage of greed-driven sensationalism and power-hungry fanaticism.
the "supreme leader" of iran stated at the time that a zionist conspiracy was to blame, which is ironic considering the anti-semitic past of jyllandsposten. but then again, how was he to know when no-one in denmark remembers any longer?
none of the above is to be understood as an endorsement of the current iranian regime, those people are crooks for sure; only as a reminder not to mistake the population for the dictatorship itself which seems to happen a lot in western propaganda.
if you are interested in what went wrong in middle east and central asian politics, I recommend robert fisk's brick of a book "the great war for civilisation: the conquest of the middle east", ISBN 1400075173. it is a lot easier to read than the laboured title suggests.
for pure weirdness, try the blog of iranian president ahmadinejad...you know, the guy with the lesser beard: www.ahmadinejad.ir/ - it must have the most liberal policy concerning comments in the history of blogs.
Tags: isfahan esfahan iran persia persian iranian jenskristianseier seier+seier
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palazzo dei congressi, E.U.R. rome, italy.
architect: adalberto libera, 1938.
we still underestimate the evil of italian fascism. I can't help wondering if the high quality of fascist architecture plays a part in this.
more words, yada, yada, yada.
Tags: rome roma architecture fascism rationalism libera palazzo congressi eur marble column stairs arquitectura Architectuur arquitetura Architektur Architettura fascismo rationalist razionalismo fascist razionalista building gebäude haus gebouw bouw bygning batiment maison edificio huis casa seier+seier creative commons CC
vor frue kirke, copenhagen cathedral, 1811-1829.
architect: c.f.hansen, 1756-1845.
looking down the nave towards the entrance from the apse.
layered space, filtered light tempered by skylights - c.f.hansen's monumental interiors...
Tags: c.f.hansen hansen architecture arkitektur vor frue kirke church katedral cathedral white interior columns classicism classicist neoclassicism neoclassicist copenhagen københavn denmark danmark nordic scandinavian scandinavia architektur bygning Arquitectura arquitetura Architectuur Architettura danish dansk arkitekt barrel vault coffered ceiling seier+seier creative commons CC
florey building, oxford, england 1966-1971
architect: james stirling, 1926-1992.
after the rain.
apologies for the forced perspective of this autostitch, but this is how close to the florey you come as you walk along the isis.
the fence suggests that stirling's ambition to make the courtyard an open, semi-private space has failed. is that because of crime rates in oxford, is it to keep out rampant architecture students, or is it rather an expression of the hostility of the owners to their own building, famously unable to keep out rain, wind, noise, cold?
the stirling set so far.
Tags: james stirling james stirling architect florey building oxford university Queen's College england UK modern modernism constructivism red tile glass architecture arquitectura architektur arquitetura Architectuur Architettura seier+seier creative commons CC