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Imagine Bauhaus meets Frank Lloyd Wright and Dr. Suess, but with Indonesian – The eccentric genius of the Amsterdam School, 1910-1930

Recently in Amsterdam I trekked out to a semi-remote nondescript residential quarter to visit the world’s first modernist apartment building, built in 1917, which is also one of the most important examples of a gloriously eccentric, little-known and absolutely unique style called the Amsterdam School. Lasting from the late-1910s up to World War II, it combined the austere, spartan functionalism of 1920’s modernisn with Art Deco’s geometric extravagance; Frank Lloyd Wright’s dramatic intersecting planes; and – curve ball! – traditional Indonesian styles; and – another curve ball! – a quirkiness that looks like  it could have come from Dr. Suess.

Click on images to enlarge and click again on the edges to jump to next or previous image.

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Florence

The most surprising and unexpected thing I saw on my trip to Florence wasn’t the Michelangelos, Botticellis and Da Vincis (photos at the end) but the train station, built in 1934 in a streamlined modern style with similarities to Frank Lloyd Wright and a bit of Flash Gordon futurism. It’s breathtaking, not least because it’s almost entirely intact and free of disfiguring renovations. There’s an uncanny feel of traveling backwards in time.

I’m pretty sure there are no major intact buildings in this style remaining in the US – if there ever were any to begin with, regardless of size -, nor in Germany. There could be a few in the Netherlands or Russia or eastern Europe. It’s too early-space-age to be glamorous Art Deco (such as Rockefeller Center, or hotels in Miami) or minimalist Bauhaus (which is much more austere and spartan; nothing here is painted white). But I believe Italy has quite a few, as they were among the earliest and most active adopters of modern architecture, a fact which has never really gotten much recognition. I wonder if it’s because the most prominent German Bauhaus architects fled to the US in the 1930s to escape the Nazis, who despised them and their modern architecture, and had long, flourishing, and widely influential careers in America; whereas in Italy the futurists stayed put. This could be why they made few  significant inroads into the mainstream of the Euro-American architecture world in the postwar era.

The original signage and many bronze fixtures are still there, which is extraordinarily uncommon even in the best-preserved buildings. Everything is marble, travertine, bronze and wood. Dramatic glass roofs seem to have no support.

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Magdeburg – modern architectural masterpieces in the Kansas of Germany

The city of Magdeburg, deep in Germany’s equivalent of fly-over states in the U.S. is an odd mixture: a few showstopper architectural highlights of truly global signficance, a few pockets of liveliness, a great deal of ugliness, and next to no charm. Here I will show the bucket-list essentials that every architecture fan needs to know about, plus a few fascinating odds and ends

Magdeburg was 90% destroyed in World War II which of course means only 10% of the buildings are from before 1950 or so. Walking around you would hardly know Magdeburg is over 1,200 years old and was gloriously, opulently beautiful and prosperous before the war. The oldest documentation of the city is from 805 (805, not 1805) and a few decades later it was a center of power of the Holy Roman Empire. Today, the Neonazi party has 14% of the seats on the city council and 25% in the parliament of the state of which Magdeburg is the capital, Saxony-Anhalt.

Nowadays most of it looks like this…

Whereas it looked like this before the war…

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“Unorthodox” miniseries, also, very bad architecture

Some parts of the miniseries “Unorthodox” about the woman who escaped from a Hassidic sect in Brookyln was filmed a block away from me, namely, the apartment where her mother lives. Incidentally it was designed by a really, really horrible architect  who also was one of Berlin’s most popular from the 80s to 2000s. He specializes in sharp pointy angles, awkward geometric shapes forced into screeching juxtapositions, an aggressive rejection of proportion and harmony, and railings made of thin metal rods bent into ugly forms with lots of gaps and protrusions for entangling limbs, purses, shoulder bags, and children’s heads.

Next to the apartment building is a school he designed which a newspaper called a “chronicle of scandals”: construction took eight years, leaving a trail of bankrupt  companies and water leaks and a bill almost twice what was budgeted. However this is normal for Berlin so it wouldn’t be fair to blame him alone. All that was years before they had any idea a wing would have to be completely shut down and barricaded in 2017 after less than 20 years of use, due to deterioration, holes in the walkways big enough for a child to fall into, lack of fire exits, and still more leaks, forcing the students to eat lunch in their classrooms and the cancellation of German-language classes for immigrants which were held there. The school is in one of the city’s most desirable and prosperous neighborhoods,  by the way, but it has armed guards due to intractable ongoing problems with violence.

Anyway… that all has nothing to do with the Unorthodox show. Here are photos showing the parts that were filmed just down the street from me. Click on the photos to enlarge. In each pair, the one on the left is a screenshot from the show and the one on the right is a photo I took myself.  These are all scenes from when she goes to visit her mother; it’s literally about one minute’s walk from my door. In the last one it’s a little less clear but you can tell by the awnings.

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The Art Nouveau artists’ colony at Darmstadt

The Darmstadt Artists Colony is one of the world’s most important assemblages of art nouveau buildings, or as it is called in Germany, Jugendstil  (“youth style” which got its name from an art magazine founded in 1896), consisting of exhibition halls, artist’s houses (mansions, really), a tower and various park features built from 1901 to 1914 on a hill in the western German city of Darmstadt. The architects were some of the era’s greatest such as Peter Behrens and Joseph Maria Olbrich of the Vienna Secession movement. They and the artists also designed objects such as furniture, ceramics, glassware, and printed matter and one of their principles was to integrate all the diverse media. They carried this out in the form of multidisciplinary exhibitions and built projects, most of which didn’t survive World War II or just changing tastes, such as cafes where they designed everything from the china and menus to furniture and wallpaper.

The whole thing was sponsored by a duke and the tower was just to commemorate his wedding. Each floor has one little room – top floor for visitors and receptions; lower floors for a marriage chamber and a registry office.

The surrounding grounds have a fountain, pavilion, tree plaza and so forth. Also there is an incongruous and unrelated Russian orthodox church which a czar built a couple years prior so he would have a place to pray when he visited. The site is under consideration for UNESCO World Heritage status.

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Berlin – “The ugliest, most desolate building in world history”

Below is my translation – with footnotes to explain important points that non-Germans won’t know about – of a hilariously and brutally dismissive article from May 2019 about a luxury condo building in Berlin by the star architect Daniel Libeskind, from the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Germany’s leading liberal-center-left newspaper (out of Munich; the only national newspaper based in Berlin is conservative, which is a good example of how Berlin’s progressive reputation is nowadays mostly a myth, which is one of the main points of the article, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves). The back story is that Berlin is undergoing gentrification at a hyperspeed the likes of which has never happened  in the U.S., not even in San Francisco or New York, and that German people, and architects everywhere, generally agree Berlin has the worst modern architecture of any major European city. I added footnotes for clarification.

“Berlin 2019”

Translucence – and raw pork for breakfast: A Libeskind penthouse in Mitte is for sale. A visit explains a lot about the current state of affairs in the capital

What was that Klaus Wowereit said about Berlin? Poor but sexy?(1) Now, centuries later, when you stand on the roof terrace of the Sapphire – which naturally is pronounced in English, like everything in Berlin that’s meant to not sound like Berlin and ends up sounding more like pickled eggs(2) than a precious stone – it fully sinks in how the expression belongs to a truly bygone era. Continue reading “Berlin – “The ugliest, most desolate building in world history””