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Posts from the ‘Architecture’ category

Notes for an abridged spell

1st-quarter of 2024

A few things have happened since I last saw and spoke with you.

As the calendar transitioned from 2023 to 2024, I understood I would relive in part the trauma of living through and “surviving” my parents’ deaths. I knew the replay in mind, body, and spirit was entirely, critically, and consciously inevitable: one, two.

After some dawdling on my part (lasting months), my sister and I finally put up for sale the family house in Chinatown/East Vancouver. We listed the house in early-January with open-house viewing mid-month. According to our realtor, about a dozen groups of people passed through for a look. We received an offer, and after minor negotiations, we accepted in February the offer on par with assessment.

Over two separate busy sessions, we had the house emptied (“ruthlessly”) of all its items, leaving behind only appliances, light-fixtures, and very old drapes. On April 3rd, I handed all of the house-keys to the buyer’s realtor, ending in that simple gesture almost 50 years of our family’s presence within a simple but very functional 2-storey house. By the end of April 4th (“double 4, double death”), BC Hydro had cut all power to the house.

“Goodbye.” East Vancouver, 2 Apr 2024 (iP15).

The emotional impact wasn’t as difficult as I had imagined, despite my inclination to self-destruction. But typing this now in a basement apartment I’ve rented for a month in New Westminster, it feels a lot like I’m finally closing the doors to many things to the rapidly fading past. Am I going to look back? Perhaps. It seems unkind not to, but there is a growing sense there’s more “out there,” if I decide I’m brave enough to move forward, one foot in front of the other. But I don’t intend on going back.

(And yet, that’s what I said when I left for Toronto in 1994, never imagining my return in 2013. Funny how my eventual refusal to abandon the parents worked out after all …)

It is an enormous mixture of satisfaction and the bittersweet: a little sad it’s gone and out of our hands, but I’m also eager now to get out of this place.

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Friedhof Heerstrasse, Westend, Berlin, Germany, Deutschland, fotoeins.com

My Berlin: Minkowski space in Heerstrasse cemetery

Waldfriedhof Heerstrasse (Heerstrasse forest cemetery)

Is this a small park with plenty of trees, hilly terrain, and a small lake? Or is this simply a forest cemetery, a final resting spot for many prominent Berliners?

As part of an ongoing search for gravesites for physicists and mathematicians in Germany, I visited Berlin’s Friedhof Heerstrasse, near the city’s Olympic Stadium. Within the cemetery is Sausuhlensee lake, which settled into a former glacial gully, around which much of the cemetery came into being in 1924. Named after the early 20th-century Heerstrasse estate district whose residents were to be buried here, the cemetery stretches out over an area of almost 15 hectares (37 acres).

I found the grave for Hermann Minkowski, but there’s more among the “Promis” buried here.

Friedhof Heerstrasse, Westend, Berlin, Germany, Deutschland, fotoeins.com

Forested park, forest cemetery.

Friedhof Heerstrasse, Westend, Berlin, Germany, Deutschland, fotoeins.com

The calm waters of Sausuhlensee lake on an autumn afternoon.

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Vienna: Heinrich Ferstel’s architectural legacy

Above/featured: Entrance into the Ferstel Passage (Ferstelpalais, Herrengasse 14). Photo, 2 Jun 2023.

The following structures in the city of Vienna share something (someone) in common:

•   Café Central,
•   the University of Vienna,
•   Votive Church,
•   Museum for Applied Arts.

These buildings were all designed by Viennese architect Heinrich Ferstel. His architectural works left a deep and lasting impression on the city and her residents. What follows is a brief life summary and highlights from a number of his projects.

•   born/✵ 7 Jul 1828 – died/✟ 14 Jul 1883.
•   One of many architects contributing to the development of Vienna’s “Ringstrasse.”
•   1843–1847: student at Imperial & Royal Polytechnic Institute.
•   1850: completed studies at Architekturschule der Akademie der bildenden KĂźnste (Architectural School, Academy of Fine Arts) under Carl Rösner, Eduard van der Nüll, August Sicard von Siccardsburg.
•   1866: appointed Professor of Architecture at Polytechnic Institute; subsequently, dean 1866–1870; rector 1880–1881 after institute became the Technical University in 1872.
•   1872: founded the Cottageverein (Cottage Association) for the construction of English-style family homes in the Währing district.

… Prolific Austrian architect. He (Ferstel) designed the twin-towered Gothic Revival Votivkirche (1856–82) and various other Historicist buildings, including the vast Italian Renaissance Revival University (1873–84) in Vienna. Much of his important work (where the influence of Semper is often clear) was done for the area adjoining the Ringstrasse, but he also designed many buildings throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire. An advocate of housing reform, he admired English low-density developments, which influenced the Cottageverein (Cottage Association), Vienna (1872–4), responsible for building small single-family houses. Ferstel also promoted the laying out of the TĂźrkenschanzpark, a public park on English lines (from 1883) …

— from “A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture”

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Vienna Ringstrasse & Architectural Historicism

Above/featured: Examples of the “Ringstraßenstil” historicism style at Maria Theresa Square, with Maria Theresa Monument at left and the Museum of Natural History at right. Photo, 15 May 2022.

Can a street alone define its surrounding architecture?
Do the buildings themselves establish the street’s visual impression?
Is Vienna (un)fairly described solely by the Ringstrasse?

The answers, as always, are a little complicated.

I’m fond of Vienna’s Ringstrasse (Ring Road), as a kind of “hello” and introduction to the city after my first visit in 2002. At 5 kilometres in length, the Ringstrasse is one of the longest streets in Europe, longer than the nearly 2-km Champs-Élysées in Paris and longer than the 4.5-km Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg. The boulevard is surrounded by Prachtbauten (buildings of splendour), constructed in the architectural style of “historicism,” a big nod to classic “forms” reflecting structural “functions”. The late-19th century “Ringstrassenstil” (Ring Road architectural style) continued the practiced habit of choosing a historical style which best identified with the purpose of the building. For example, the Neo-Baroque architectural style is represented in the Civic Theater; the Neo-Classical style in the Parliament and New Palace; the Neo-Gothic style in City Hall and the Votive Church; and the Neo-Renaissance style in the museums, palatial mansions, Opera House, and the University.

On Christmas Day 1857, the Wiener Zeitung newspaper published an imperial decree written 5 days earlier (on 20 December) by Habsburg emperor Franz Joseph I. He ordered the demolition of the inner-city wall and the subsequent creation of a circular boulevard, bordered by grand buildings and filled with green spaces. The large outward extension of the inner city changed and influenced the urban development of Vienna, still seen to this very day.

It is my will that the extension of the inner city of Vienna should proceed as soon as possible, providing for appropriate connections between the city and the suburbs as well as the embellishment of my imperial residence and capital. To this end, I authorise the removal of the walls and fortifications of the inner city as well as the ditches around it …

– Emperor Franz Joseph I: 20 Dec 1857, published 25 Dec 1857.

On 1 May 1865, Emperor Franz Josef unveiled the Ringstrasse in an official ceremony, even though large areas remained under construction. Ringstrasse structures included the religious and the secular, as well as the public and the private. The Ringstrasse symbolized the power of the imperial state, and the growth of a new arts and culture scene with the increasing popularity of coffee houses.

It’s also important to note the architectural impact made by the Jewish middle- and upper-class to integrate within the Habsburg empire. For example, the families Ephrussi, Epstein, and Todesco commissioned architect Theophil Hansen to construct palatial mansions as visible manifestations and partial realization of the dream of many Viennese Jews: assimilation into and emancipation within Viennese society. (Viennese journalist and political activist Theodor Herzl might have had a different opinion about that.)

For residents and long-term visitors today, it’s entirely possible to fit into the unintended shape and mentality of the “modern” city: that the inner-city wall was simply replaced by a different wall of “economic class”, that the architectural callback to historicism “freezes” the inner-city in time, and that like many, I can live, traverse, and work in the outer districts and avoid entering the inner city.

For short-term visitors today, the Ringstrasse buildings form a golden shiny “ring” around the “fingers” of the U1 and U3 metro lines traversing through the UNESCO World Heritage inscribed inner-city. For these visitors, the inner city may be all that’s required or needed of Vienna.

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Grand Parade, City Hall, Cape Town, South Africa, fotoeins.com

Fotoeins Friday in Cape Town: Grand Parade

A couple of pedestrian bridges skip over the busy traffic on Strand Street, connecting the train station with the bus station. Beyond the hub-bub in the bus station the space unfolds and opens to the space of a public square, the Grand Parade, in front of Cape Town’s City Hall. A very famous speech occurred at City Hall on the evening of 11 February 1990.

I visited Cape Town for the first time during my year-long RTW. I made the photo above on 12 Oct 2012 with a Canon EOS450D/Rebel XSi and the following settings: 1/800-sec, f/8, ISO200, and 18mm focal length (29mm full-frame equivalent). This post appears on Fotoeins Fotografie at fotoeins DOT com as https://wp.me/p1BIdT-qF6.