ishtar gate

Babylon's Ishtar Gate at Berlin's Pergamon Museum.

I asked a brick what it wanted to be. It replied: "A LION!"

Dutch Embassy, Berlin

OMA's Dutch Embassy. Detail showing different approaches to wood as a material.

H+dM's Cottbus University Library

Interior of Herzog & de Meuron's Cottbus University Library (Germany)

The exterior (not shown) is an image comprised of overlaid letters... accumulated to the point where the letters are unintelligible, yet still recognizable as typography. The floor plates are overlaid/pained with the pure tones of a tv test-pattern, which serves several goals:

1. The mapping of the tv image onto the floor could be seen as a highly conceptual architectural move, encouraging the viewer to examine the relationship between the image (tv) and text (the facade / the stacks). Note that the facade is an example of text-becoming image. Is the coloring of the floor an example of image-becoming-text?

2. The color mapping / supergraphics of the tv-test pattern seems at first to be quite arbitrary, yet it could be understood as an overcoding - an additional organization system that exists outside of the organization of the stacks, and outside the organization of the building, yet can serve to reinforce both in unexpected ways. First of all, the floor plan of the building is rather amorphous, and there is little differentiation in the architecture itself. These ordered bands of color add order via experiential narrative -you enter (blue), take the stairs (purple/lime), find your book (orange), then retrace your steps, using the color as an aid.... perhaps it's not that complicated, but merely having one stair core in one color zone and the second in another helps the confused visitor orient himself.

(photo by Tyler)

Shalachet

“Shalachet” (Fallen Leaves), installation in the Jewish Museum's "Memory Void"

Possibly the best space/moment in Libeskind's Berlin Jewish Museum, a tall room/void filled with these metal faces. Visitors walk on the these, creating an eerie clanging.

Zaha Hadid at Wolfsburg

this is an example of the beautiful concrete at Hadid's Phaeno Science Center in Wolfsburg, Germany. The building itself leaves much to be desired (pales in comparison with her BMW plant in Leipzig), but the concrete, showing the imprint of the carefully-crafted wooden formwork, is a work of art.

Unfortunately...

finding an internet cafe that's capable of flickr uploads proved difficult in Berlin, so I'm writing from Praugue. This photo is from neither of those places: It's Walter Gropius's Bauhaus in Dessau.

Jewish Memorial

IMG_0565, originally uploaded by tyleroguy.

The first photos from the Europe trip have started hitting Flickr - this is Tyler's photo of the Jewish Memorial in Berlin, designed by Peter Eisenman.