Brand Avenue

Greeting Card to the World

Once the "glittering center of East Berlin," the Palast der Republik, the former home of the lower house of the East German Parliament and "East Germany's greeting card" to the rest of the world, will be torn down in coming months amid extreme controversy:

Germany's lower house has approved the demolition of one of communist East Germany's ugliest, but best-loved buildings. The vote to tear down the Palace of the Republic concludes a heated debate spanning over a decade.

Last-minute efforts by two opposition parties to save the Palace of the Republic have failed. The Bundestag voted by an overwhelming majority to tear down the building, which opened in 1976 to house both the East German parliament and an entertainment complex that was unparalleled behind the Iron Curtain.

Unique among government buildings throughout the world, the bronze glass Volkspalast, constructed on the site of the German royal family's Hollenzollern palace (which was demolished by the East German government in 1952), embraced multiple dimensions of East Germany's public realm:

Many eastern Germans have fond memories of the palace, with its giant dance floor on hydraulic lifts, bowling alleys, a wine bar, a theater, cafes and an international list of concert headliners including Harry Belafonte and Carlos Santana.

Some East Germans nicknamed it Ballast der Republik ("Ballast of the Republic") or Erichs Lampenladen ("Erich's Lamp Shop", referring to East German leader Erich Honecker and the 1,001 lamps hanging in the foyer).

Since Reunification, the building's vast, crumbling interior has housed a succession of art installations, concerts, and other cultural events. Architects attempting to stave off the Palast's demolition note that its severe form might be seen as benign if it had been built in West Germany, but that its location in Berlin--and therefore its "historical complicity" with the politics of the GDR--make its preservation impossible:

According to Dagmar Richter, today’s architectural decisions are motivated first and foremost by a need actively to erase traces of East Germany. Since 1989, urban planners have been acutely aware that banishing the city’s communist legacy is a matter of both psychological and physical transformation....

“Architecture here is much more about politics than aesthetics,” she said, explaining the drab, minimalist look of many 1950s East German buildings. “That always meant architecture had less of an opportunity to be expressive than in a highly consumerist society like the US.”

Meanwhile, a chorus of urban planners and conservative politicians believe that it's time for the building to go. The current plan for the Palast site is to replace the building with a replica of the Hollenzollern palace, despite complaints that the Prussian kings were no more lovable than the Communist leadership.

The Palast manifests the 60s-era theories lately being resurrected everywhere in all of its multipurpose glory and eerily utopian mixing of functions. It all reminds me of the kind of urbanism present in Koolhaas' recent work. (Coincidentally, he likes the Palast.)

And it's only 30 years old. I wish I could find photos of the dance floor.

Area Code Allegiance

This article from yesterday's NYTimes demonstrates a modern way to display place-based allegiances: through your area code.

In a city known for its revolving door of young professionals, graduate students and eager-eyed Hill staffers, many a mobile phone number proves that home is where the cell is.

Like a rear-windshield decal or an old college T-shirt, a cellphone number has become as much a part of an identity as a Social Security number. It represents a hometown, a college or a first job, and such memories are not casually thrown aside for a few good years with a 202 romance. For these area-code clingers, those 10 little digits provide a constant in the face of changing locations and uncertain futures.

Certain area codes--also zip codes--have become the envy of others, because of demand but also the relative "buzz" of a place:

Samantha Test, 27, is the proud owner of the Cadillac of area codes, San Francisco's 415. Like its East Coast rival, New York's 917, it is has enormous cachet. A Californian who attended Berkeley and lived in the Bay Area after college, Ms. Test says she just "feels more like a 415 than a 202."

Face Value

An interesting take on "active facades"--those that move, or are covered in video screens, etc:

With the highest-tech or more mundane means, a few architects are synthesizing edifice and communication in startling ways. Marshall McLuhan anticipated this development long ago, well before he died in 1980. So if the medium is the building—what's the message?

One answer is that architecture for our time cannot afford to be static. Another is that ornament has once again escaped the architect's clutch. On the former point, consider the robotic envelopes on the lab bench at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and under production in Europe, energy-saving arrays that stir collectively as do fields of sunflowers and, like frog skin, respond instantly to changing cloud cover and ambient humidity. Regarding the latter, who expected that Blackberry-wielders would one day play Pong, the antediluvian bar game, on the face of the French National Library?

Along those lines: Spotted here, a building called Metropolis (the "battle tank of commerce") that will soon stand at one of Toronto's main downtown intersections.

Architecture becoming media...icons and celebrity..."design cities"...architecture as "event planning" and "tourism magnet"...

Not My Old Kentucky Home

Unveiled this week: plans for a 61-story skyscraper to be called Museum Plaza in Louisville, KY. Its enormity either threatens or promises great changes for Louisville, depending on your point of view. The images are startling (it's on the right in the first two, below): (via)

Watch the video.

Brought to you by AMO, the American branch of OMA, Rem Koolhaas' office. And, in case you are wondering: yes, there would be big issues integrating such a thing into the cityscape (note the lack of context in the vaguely Star Wars-esque "sunset" rendering), and yes, city elders actually think the market could absorb the new space.

Visitors to Museum Plaza would ride a diagonal elevator to an "island" 22 stories in the air that would house an art center. The rest of the building would be mixed-use:

"I fully expect people to be shocked by the building," said architect Joshua Prince-Ramus, 36, who will formally unveil and discuss the project for an invitation-only audience at 2 p.m. today at Actors Theatre of Louisville. "I can't think of another building that looks quite like this. It's going to break convention...The structure has four legs below the island and three towers above it. All seven structures, each with varying functions, intersect on the island.

Think of it as a chair, Ramus said. One leg will contain the hotel, another lofts, the third a vertical elevator, the fourth the angled glass elevator. Two towers will have luxury condos, the third an office tower. The lofts will be in one of the legs and the museum will be in the "seat."

In Louisville, of all places.

Proponents note that it could become an icon of Louisville in the way that Calatrava's Milwaukee Art Museum or Norman Foster's new Gherkin in London both have for their cities.

The Next Detroit

The city of Detroit shone this past weekend during its Super Bowl close-up, thanks to nearly $100 million spent demolishing and refurbishing streets and buildings throughout its downtown:

The Super Bowl "is doing more to change the physical appearance of this community than corporate relocations, three casinos, two stadiums and the last three mayors have," Daniel Howes, a columnist in The Detroit News, wrote last week.

Regardless, Detroit will continue to look rundown to visitors accustomed to much more activity in an urban center. For one thing, there are no brand-name luxury hotels, meaning high rollers will stay at the Ritz-Carlton in Dearborn, 15 miles away, or at the Townsend, a boutique hotel in Birmingham, 30 miles from the city center.

Vacant houses line the embankments above major freeways, while empty factories, a reminder of the glory days, sit in every part of the city, as if mocking the determination to make downtown sparkle.

The mayor said that did not bother him. "Detroit is a gritty town with rough edges, and we love it, and we celebrate it," he said. "People have been trying to make us into something else for so long. It's better than Chicago or Philadelphia. People are going to be pleasantly surprised."

Once considered one of the most beautiful cities in North America because of its broad, tree-lined avenues and elegant hub-and-spoke street plan, the city better known for its crime, decay, and disappearing population was presented on television as a bustling metropolis, with twinkling lights and stately architecture. Motown became the "Paris of the Midwest" again for a few hours.

(via this great blog)

"It's an opportunity to present people with the next Detroit," Mayor Kilpatrick said.

A NYTimes article about the downtown Detroit's resurgent nightlife and music scene (from Motown to rock to techno) favorably compares Detroit to a very hip, formerly decrepit zone halfway around the world, also trading on parts of its cultural identity:

Passing those remaining empty storefronts and skyscrapers downtown to get to a place like Elysium, there is a lingering sense of melancholy, but also one of titillation, a bit like what one feels in East Berlin: it is not exactly lovely, and it's been battered and bruised, but the wellsprings of bourgeois abandon that are emerging on the other side of the hard times are exhilarating to experience, if simply for the unlikeliness that they exist there at all.

While it isn't quite like Friedrichshain just yet, one wonders about the possibilities, and whether the momentum for something like a Super Bowl (with its attendant civic improvements and influx of new retail and living choices) can really overhaul a place's "buzz."

Doors Closing

The sounds of a place are a central ingredient in its character. Whereas sight and touch, and even smell, are often integral to the design process, the way a place sounds (unless you're designing a concert hall) is largely incidental: rain falling against windows, the hum of machinery, voices of passersby.

Things are different when those voices are automated:

If our nation's capital had a hall of fame, Sandy Carroll would be inducted next week. When she intones "doors closing" for the last time, the city should respond with an equally soft: "doors opening." Ms. Carroll's decade as the voice of the Washington Metro gripped this city longer than any president has held the White House since FDR. Her velvet-voiced dominance seemed unshakable to thousands who glide daily through the elegant capital underground.

But Metrorail is looking for a fresh voice - with some attitude. With 5 million new riders each year, chaos in the cathedral-sized stations is overpowering Carroll's gentle nudge, says spokeswoman Cathy Asato. The familiar voice has become background noise, she adds, and Metro needs something fresh to "make riders take notice."

These recordings become part of the theatre of everyday life, and can take on a kind of iconic status. Voice recordings can impart personality to space. Every Bostonian can probably imitate a Red Line train ("The destination of this train is...ASHMONT"). New York City capitalized on this when it began commissioning celebrities to record announcements urging taxi passengers to buckle up a few years back.

For your listening pleasure, a recent NPR report on Washington's search for a new Metro voice.

Other automated voices here, and here.