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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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Jewish Cemetery Berlin Weissensee

This is the Weissensee Jewish Cemetery in Berlin, the second-largest in Europe with 115,000 graves on 100 acres. There aren’t any graves of people who are at all well-known in the U.S. but quite a few names are well-known in Germany such as founders of major department stores and publishing companies, writers, artists and musicians. It is still in use. Weissensee is the name of the neighborhood in Berlin and means White Lake. I uploaded a short video here.

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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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“Paraphrase on the Finding of a Glove” – Symbolist and Surrealist artworks you don’t see every day

A few interesting and little-known works from the Symbolist and Surrealist movements.

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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””

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“Berlin: In Love with Failure” – Die Zeit magazine

When the editor of Berlin’s leading newspaper describes the city’s core defining ethos as “premeditated incompetence”, and surveys rank it as the Germans’ least-liked German city, and pregnant women are discouraged from visiting it altogether due to its deficient health care, and the pre-eminent LGBT world travel guide puts Berlin on its “Avoid” list due to its homophobia, it’s time to ask, are the auras of Cabaret and David Bowie alone really enough to constitute a great world-class, or even baseline functional, city? Because Berlin is still, in 2017, to a large extent living off the residue of this aura rather than moving forward and evolving, or even just tangibly maintaining it. For 30 years now since the fall of the wall, the city has been drawing down its figurative capital, running on fumes.

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Transparent Woman – the anatomical model that traveled from Dresden to St. Louis and back

 

I finally solved the thirty-year-running mystery of whatever happened to the life-size illuminated transparent woman model in the St. Louis Museum of Science and Natural History after it closed in 1988. When it reopened as a new hands-on discovery center a few years later – with the history, charm and occasional mystery sanitized away, as in most science museums since the 1980s – the Transparent Woman was gone.

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