PLACEBOOKObservations on Contemporary Urbanism

by Nikolaus Knebel

I do not like selfies. I am not on facebook. I have never kept a diary. So, I am probably the least like-ly person to be writing a blog. And yet, I happily accepted the out-of-the-blue invitation from Georg Diez to write this text for his long-form journalism blog „#60pages“.

I had always wanted to summarise my observations of cities over the past years of working and travelling around the world, because I felt privileged to be exposed to so many very different urban situations within a short period of time. So, the idea of wri-ting a book about places became - placebook.

Nowadays many people travel with cameras directed at themselves. I still prefer travelling without a camera and actually looking at places. But the memo-ries are fading, and the task to write sixty short pieces, seemed overwhelming. The first few places that I wrote about came to my mind immediately, then it became harder and harder, but finally I could reach into memories of places that I had long for-gotten about and in one way or another had meaning and formative power for me. So, in the end, this is not only a book that is portraying contemporary ur-ban situations, but it actually turned into a self-portrait, the selfie that I never took.

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* * * Tianjin, China.

The food looked delicious in the ice bowl. Knowing it would melt away soon stimulated our appetite to enjoy it right here and now. The mayor of the city of Tianjin who treated us for this feast lifted his glass and expressed a toast. We replied and wished him and his city well. Later the translator said he had spoken about the conservation of the old city of Tianjin. We were all too ready to congratulate him, for after all, our tour was part of a conference programme on managing world heritage sites. In the afternoon, we were guided through the brand new mu-seum that exhibits paraphernalia from the old city. All pieces were originals, stone carvings and wood-works that used to decorate the historic buildings. The main exhibition piece, however, was a large, meticulously made model of the historic premises of Tianjin covered under a polished perspex lid.

On the way back to the hotel I stared unfocussedly out of the bus window, still tired from the heavy meal and too many rounds of toasts to the mayor. We drove past a vast area covered with fresh lawn and young trees, seamed by newly built high-rises. The new city centre this must be, I thought, or, hang on, wasn’t this where the old one was supposed to be? Was the greenery just the patch over the „scar“ as the Europeans call such voids in the city? Was that why there were so many original pieces in the exhi-bition? Was the museum the tomb and the model the mummy inside it? The old city seemed to have served its purpose and could thus disappear. Just like the ice bowl.

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I skipped the next conference session, and spent the morning walking around the Summer Palace in Beijing. From dawn onwards the park was filled with people en-joying the blue hour, strolling through the gardens, practicing tai chi. Near the lake, an artist showed his skills in calligraphy. He dipped his large brush in water and swung it over the pavement. Beautiful compositions of lines and dots appeared. But with the water drying up, the beginning of his text would already vanish before he had reached the end. His art could not be conserved. It had to be appreciated here and now. And then vanish…

* * * Johanneskirchen, Germany.

The house I grew up in is at the edge of town. A few steps down the street there is a road sign that demarcates the border of the city. On one side of the sign there are some old farmhouses, a medieval chapel, villas, row houses, a local train station. On the other side of the sign, there is open land, fields with different crops, tree-lined narrow roads, hedges, and groves, but no buildings except for a few scattered barns. Munich’s suburb of Johannes-kirchen is an unspectacular arrangement of mediocre buildings with an average landscape that is more pragmatic than picturesque. What is spectacular is that the nature of this border between city and countryside has not changed over the past thirty ye-ars, even though each sides of it did so, massively.

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On the city side, almost every plot that was empty a generation ago, is now built up. The new residences cater to all strata of society, from social housing to single-family homes. New shops and restaurants opened. New schools, new tram lines, new bicycle tracks have been built for the growing urban popula-tion. The suburbian became urban.

On the rural side of the border, the fields are still fields and the farms are still farms, but their usage and users are not the same anymore. When we grew up we could fetch fresh milk in the evenings directly from the small farms and pick up left over potatoes from the fileds in autumn. Over the years, the crops changed with the supply of subsidies and demands of fashion. First it was golf, and the fields were turned into driving ranges. Now the suburban bour-geoisie is no longer into hitting the ball but into tilling the earth themselves and the fields are con-verted into small lots for urban farming. What the farmers are now harvesting is solar power generated from the subsidised photovoltaic panels that are installed on the large roofs of the former stables and barns.

Whatever changes occurred on either side of the road sign, the border between city and countryside remai-ned unchanged. The city of Munich managed to absorb a significant population growth over the last thirty years, but always stayed within its demarcations. It had a vision to become “green, compact, urban”. And achieved it.

The suburb of Johanneskirchen is certainly not worth an architectural tour, but it is a grand example of

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wise urban planning. The road sign that demarcates the end of the city since three decades is a monument against urban sprawl. It shows the fantastic quali-ties of life that can occur, when the city’s borders stand firm and city and countryside coexist.

* * * Shivajinagar, India.

Every so often another “house of the future” comes on stage. Papers and presentations, biennales and triennales bring up new catchphrases garnished with images of shiny, happy people using the latest tech-nical gadgets. The echoes of these projects, how-ever, don‘t last for very long and they certainly never reach out to where housing really matters: to the slums, shacks and shelters that dominate our new urban world.

For the millions, or even billions of people that are hoping for a better future despite their poor living circumstances in the ever growing cities the-re is one kind of building type that occurs as a model solution everywhere around the world. When housing development is not hindered by slumlords, not hindered by governors, not hindered by capita-list ideologies of forced or socialist ideologies of forbidden homeownership, when people are left to do what they deem best, no matter in which culture, climate or city, they eventually build some kind of a shophouse.

Shivajinagar is such a place, a “zopadpatti” or so-

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called slum area in Pune, one of the fastest growing cities in the world. Through this rapid urban expan-sion Shivajinagar is no longer at the periphery of the city, but located rather in the center, which offers opportunities for survival to the inhabitants that none of the many marginalized relocation sett-lements could ever provide. Slums, of course, belong and must remain in the center of the city.

Shivajinagar shows qualities that are desperately sought after in any top-down driven suburban housing project. Narrow alleys lead into the quarter, slow traffic, mainly pedestrian, some three-wheelers, some bikes, handcarts. Land titles might or might not exist, but in any case, people have built what they felt was appropriate for themselves. Two- to three-storey houses on narrow, and deep plots, shops on the ground floor, direct access via a ladder or stairs to the residences on top. At different times of the day, commercial or residential activities spill out onto the streets. Streets full of life. Shivajinagar felt safe, proud, and homely.

Without romanticizing people’s poverty, this place striked me as balanced. Here, in Shivajinagar, housing is not a noun, not a countable unit of a housing programme. Here, housing is a verb. Housing is the life in and around the houses, a means for survival on a level of decency. If only people would be left to build more of these kinds of shophou-ses - the real houses of the future; given that the current global urban expansion is an expansion of slums.

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* * * Florence, Italy.

Florence was the first city I visited on my own when I was just about old enough to get through passport controls at the borders by myself. Needless to say that this trip left a deep impression on me. Twenty-five years later, unlike on my first trip, my budget was a bit more generous and I no longer had to look out for benches in the city to sit down for simple picnics or to spend the night on.

However, on this recent visit the city life in Flo-rence that I had soaked up with so much appreciation back then felt completely different now. The little tabacchis: gone. The stinky piaggios: gone. The wild ragazzi: gone. The old gazetto dello sport readers: gone. The elegant avvocatos: gone. The laundry han-ging over the narrow streets: gone. The city seemed to be evacuated of all people other than tourists or those serving the tourists. In the area between Piazza della Signoria and Palazzo Pitti the picture book urban form had not changed, but the urbanity was totally different.

My old instinct for spotting the good benches was still switched on, but I realized that there were no benches in the city anymore. Instead the public spaces were all upgraded with sophisticated materi-als on the ground, smooth details and well-designed lighting, - but no more benches. People sitting down in public space could potentially clog the pedestri-an flow through the narrow streets now filled with vi-sitors only. People sitting down would perhaps leave behind some waste that needs to be cleaned up. And

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they might not eat in one of the restaurants and thus reduce their profit. Offering benches in public space would probably spoil the new concept of Florence as a duty free shop.

* * * Hatsudai, Japan.

In Japan, all dimensions are extreme: what is big is huge and what is small is tiny. Except for the areas around the train stations where the gigantic skyscrapers are concentrated, the cities are com-posed like a pointillist picture with millions of small dots. Detached houses, the size of garages, small gaps of perhaps half a meter between them, and narrow alleys, cluttered with potted plants. Surpri-singly, the megacity of Tokyo, for example, feels like a village.

In my neighbourhood in Hatsudai, this village-like urbanity was so comfortable that private activities, which in other cultures and places all take place within the boundaries of a house, are externalized into the city. Since the minihouses are so limited in space the whole neighbourhood eventually becomes part of the house. The ubiquitous convenience stores („konbini“) make up for a kitchen; the many food stalls substitute the dining room, the many small public baths („sento“) replace the bathrooms; the living room for entertaining friends is in the sepa-reé of the karaoke bar; and finally the love hotels are used as externalized bedrooms. The house is emp-tied out, a room devoid of any other function than

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shelter. All that remains for the house is to serve as a neutral retreat, a space without programme. The house is like an archaic tent pitched up in the hypermodern urban field. A paradox without tension; very Asian.

* * *Casablanca, Morocco.

At the end of my high school years I got a book award and chose a title on modern architecture. The co-ver image showed a building that looked different to anything I had seen before: an abstract composition of cubes, no windows visible from street level, all life hidden behind walls. It had absolutely nothing of a house, I thought. But it turned out to be a housing estate. In fact, the image showed one of the modern housing blocks built by French architects in Morocco in the 1950s as part of the housing program-mes set up under colonial rule in North Africa that were meant to “civilize” the bidonvilles, and “do good” for the inhabitants of the slums of the gro-wing cities.

When tracing the inspirations and consequences of these projects of the 1950s backwards by half a cen-tury and forwards by half a century, a remarkable back-and-forth of inspiration and adaption between the building cultures of Western Europe and North Africa becomes apparent. In the early 20th century the first generation of modern artists and architects sought inspiration beyond the bourgeois European culture of the fin-de-siècle and travelled to the

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nearest “exotic” places they could reach: North Af-rica. For the creative class of that time a “travel to the Orient” became what a “travel to Italy” was a century earlier: a lifetime source of inspiration collected during the formative years of a creative career. Thus it is no surprise that white undeco-rated cubic forms and low-rise high-density housing clusters became part of the modernist canon. But, there was significant resistance against this formal language in Europe, and thus the colonial housing programmes in North Africa were a chance for ar-chitects to roll out modernist ideas in an environ-ment that could not resist it. In the mid-20th cen-tury, the second generation of modernist architects exported back to North Africa what the first genera-tion had imported from there.

Once the new housing estates were built, for examp-le, the “Habitat Marocain” in Casablanca, it turned out that the formal references to the images of the built heritage did not meet with the dynamics of the social life of the place, and thus, the buildings underwent adaption from on the very beginning. Over the years these buildings were changed so much, that when I visited the housing projects I had seen on the cover of my book award it was almost impossible to recognise the original version. But still the images of the original buildings are icons of modernism, and the place is frequently visited by architecture tours. On site, I met some architecture students from the Netherlands. To my surprise they had come to study the adaption process of modernist housing estates by the Moroccans in order to develop con-cepts for how to transform the large housing estates from the 1960s, which today accommodate a large part

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of the Moroccan population in the Netherlands. What they were up to was the export of the import of the export of the import.

* * *Johannesburg, South Africa.

Having a tennis court in the garden of our company-sponsored villa was something of an embarrassment for my parents (or at least they pretended it was). It was too obviously a sign of a privileged life-style among a society that was utterly unjust. It underlined that politically we were – willingly or not – on the wrong side of the system in the then still existing apartheid system in South Africa. So my parents made it clear to us that there was no question of us children playing tennis on our own tennis court. On the contrary, we were rather encou-raged to misuse the tennis court, to scorn the pri-viledge of having a tennis court. A statement, which we as children, of course, did not fully understand at that time.

But once the tennis court was “desecrated” or „un-programmed“ it was free to become anything we wanted it to be. We laid out a whole system of streets on it in order to practice cycling. We organised a flea market on the court. We flooded the area and created a gigantic mudslide. We used it as a kennel when the dog had to be locked away. We practiced football on it for days on end. We built a gigantic play city out of real bricks and tiles. We could do anything on the tennis court, but play tennis. The privilege

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was that it was nothing; only a void in the garden that we could fill at our wish and will. This place was the best place of my childhood.

Non-defined places such as this are hard to find in children’s environments nowadays. Rather, many play-grounds are over-determined places, stuffed with too many toys, too many good intentions, too little nothingness, and no space left for imagination. Children, however, are best in making something out of nothing.

* * *Madrid, Spain.

After over a year away from Europe it was a welcome change of scene to travel to Madrid. From the air-port I took a metro and then ascended from the stati-on onto a street. I was about to say aloud to express my joy about where I was standing: „A pavement!“. What a unique urban element, so hard to find anywhere else in the world, something that purposely, and not randomly, connects or rather mediates between the streets and the houses.

In most cities there are no pavements at all and this strip of urban land is no man’s land. In cities where poverty rules the houses‘ activities spill right out onto the street. In cities where luxury dominates, traffic extends all the way to the perimeter walls. But in Madrid I enjoyed walking along the houses of the city without either being run over by cars nor being followed by beggars. I enjoyed passing by shop

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windows without being caged into a mall. I enjoyed entering a house without having to pass a barrier and a guard. I enjoyed sitting in a café on the pa-vement and having a drink in the midst of the flow of urban life or in other words I felt safe in the midst of strangers. Pavements are an expression of respect in an urban society. Pavements are an indicator of civility and civilization. In German they are there-fore called „Bürgersteig“: the citizen‘s path.

* * *New York, USA.

I grew up in a bookish house, and cannot remember ever having gotten a present from my father other than a book. Everywhere in the house shelves filled up with volumes of all sorts surrounded us. One book, however, always stuck out: Reinhart Wolf‘s photoes-say on New York. The oversized format never fitted into the shelves and was always in the way somehow. I looked at it often and remember that I had to ly flat on the floor to read it because this was the only way I could handle a book that was half my height.

Even though I haven’t opened this book for thirty years now, the series of large-scale photos of New York skyscrapers is still clearly in my memory. Whe-reas New York‘s skyline is usually shown from far away, or in perspectives from street level, Wolf limited his view of the city to the top ends of the famous skyscrapers only. The skyscrapers appear in frontal elevation and quite impressively, but also unforgivingly show details that cannot be seen from

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the ground. The pictures of the building‘s heads are like portraits of well-known people that suddenly reveal the traces of real life, the wrinkles, the pimples, the scars in the faces, or accordingly, the screws, the folds, the dents of the facades. Wolf took the photos such that the buildings are viewed in isolation with no other background than the sky. Thus the weather with its ever-changing light tones reflects on the built surfaces and that is what sets the scene.

When Wolf took the pictures in the late 1970s focus-sing on the sky over the city, New York actually de-cayed on the ground. I clearly remember my (perhaps unjustified) fear when walking through New York‘s streets during our visit at that time. My father then took us on a helicopter flight around Manhattan to look at the city from the sky - apparently using the same escape route from the urban crisis that Wolf had shown us.

* * *Bahnhof Blumenfeld, Germany.

For this year‘s Christmas we built up the famous made-in-Germany toy train set from the Maerklin Com-pany. For our bi-lingual, bi-national, bi-religious, so-called „third-culture-kids“, this is a bit of a bizarre exercise, because the Maerklin trains, and the corresponding Faller houses are the embodiment of an ideal German town in a miniature version. An environment that our children haven’t ever seen and a kind of Germany that probably cannot be seen any-where anymore.

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Unlike the minilands that show collections of fa-mous monuments of a city or a country in miniature size, the buildings of the Maerklin / Faller set are a collection of average and mediocre everyday ar-chitecture. Places with generic names, and anonymous designs. “Bahnhof Blumenfeld” is one such place. In this imaginary world, the trains are still punctu-al, and children want to become Lokführer, and the Bahnhofsvorsteher is a public servant with a state pension. Everything is good. (Note: there is also a cargo train with politically incorrect advertise-ments like “Bier macht den Durst erst schön.”) Ma-erklin caught the essence of the place and produced a crystallization of clichés about what the good life in Germany ought to be like. Bahnhof Blumenfeld is the Germany that many are missing nowadays: a community based on Familienunternehmen, Ortsverein, Mitbestimmung, Berufsschule, Verkehrswacht, Stabi-litätspakt, – all without Migrationshintergrund.

Beyond miniland, however, things have changed. The trains are no longer on time - recently, a whole train station of a mid-size town in Germany had to be closed down for lack of personel. And the Maer-klin Company, itself a typical family-run quality-oriented company, had to be sold to new investors.

Setting up the toy trains with our children this year actually meant building up a model of a Germany that is hiding from globalization. A place, where until today non-issues of global life like double citizenship are still a really difficult political question. A place, where growing up in two langu-ages, two cultures, two religions is still seen as out-of-the-world. A place, where the idea of nati-

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onhood is still framed in the 19th century view of cultural unity. A place, where the self-image is still that of a tightly-knit community, and not of a loosely-bound society. So, when you happen to meet Herrn Johann Gottfried Herder at Bahnhof Blumenfeld don‘t be surprised. Please send him my best regards. Unfortunately, the train has already left the sta-tion.

* * *Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Living outside of Europe makes me realize that in most places of this rapidly urbanizing world the ci-ties are younger than the people who live in them. In Europe, cities are always older than their in-habitants; history has been accumulated in built heritage, and cities store collective memories. But it is hard to see this happening in the fast growing cities of Africa or Arabia, where half the populati-on is underage and the cities where all these kids will live in are not even built yet.

Addis Ababa is such a city. I went there often, at times for weeks, for months, and finally for two ye-ars. With every stay I witnessed the city growing and changing with breathtaking speed and scale. The village-like fabric of small sheds is being bulldo-zed to make way for big building blocks, and the bor-der of the city is constantly shifted further into the hinterland. The only consistent elements within this rapidly and violently changing city seem to be the buildings that were built during the 1960s.

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These buildings are special, indeed. Half a century ago, Addis Ababa became the capital of Africa. By being the only African country that was never co-lonized or founded by colonizers Ethiopia naturally played a leading role in the African independence movement of the post-war era. And, consequently, its capital city was chosen as the permanent seat of the African Union headquarters. A building boom started, and for one decade Addis Ababa became a playing field for architects from all around the world.

In the 1960s a new generation of modernist architects emancipated themselves from the rather narrow and homogenous canon of formal features set by the first modernists in the 1920s, and in many countries se-parate discourses on modern architecture developed. It is from these divergent sources that the modern architecture of the 1960s in Addis Ababa was infor-med. Architects from various countries and cultural backgrounds like France, United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, Israel, Russia, Austria, Greece, Finland, Bulgaria, Italy, Yugoslavia, the United States, and last, but not least, also the first architects from Ethiopia, all contributed with individual designs to modern architecture in Addis Ababa. Their works were inspired by the new isms of the 1960s: brutalism, structuralism, critical regionalism, futurism, mi-nimalism, expressionism, modern classicism, pragma-tism, tropical modernism, monumentalism.

Addis Ababa is certainly a rather unexpected place for such a rare collection of modern architecture in one particular spot. Of course, not all buil-dings are masterpieces, but in total they represent the varied discourses on modern architecture of the

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1960s. Today, these buildings can be sources of in-spiration for the current building boom in Addis Ababa where the showy images of modernization often overpower the more modest attitudes of modernity.

These special buildings are part of the still very young history of the city. Whether or not they are its heritage, however, is not up to me as a foreig-ner to decide.

* * *Cottbus, Germany.

A century ago, Cottbus was a thriving mid-size town in the middle of Germany. A city with industries and upper class citizens who had no difficulties to afford building one of the most outstanding art nouveau theatres. The city was nice, even beautiful in some places, and proud for good reasons. Then post-war history changed the map and the city suddenly lay in socialist East Germany on the border to Poland. Open-pit coal mining became the main source of em-ployment until eventually the coal ran out. After the fall of the wall, Cottbus was propped up with a newly founded university to change the city’s focus from industry to innovation. So far, so good. It seemed.

But then came a force that is stronger than any his-toric wind, political will, or wishful thinking of a better future. Demographics hit in. Today, there are simply not enough children being born. No incen-tive programme of any government seems to be able to change this trend towards an aging society; there

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now seem to be more pharmacies that restaurants in Cottbus. Nothing can stop the hard facts of demogra-phy transforming the face of this city.

The shell of the city is still there, but the life inside of it is dying out. On my regular walks from the train station to university and back, I experi-enced what it means to be in a shrinking city. The theatre was on the route, and funded by subsidies there are still very good shows produced in this architectural jewel. But many of the urban villas along the way that once accommodated the local bour-geoisie are no longer occupied. The trees in the front gardens still go through the seasonal cycles of budding, blossoming, and carrying fruits. But there is nobody left to harvest them. Nature lives on, but human life is no longer there. While the rest of the world takes on the challenges of rapid urban-zation, some parts of Germany are experiencing the opposite. Too many buildings. And apples for free.

* * *Taman Negara, Malaysia.

Walking in a jungle is the ultimate experience of non-spatiality. The jungle surrounds the hiker with a similar colour range in all directions as well as a constant and even soundscape. When walking it is impossible to anticipate the path ahead and so every move becomes questionable and doubtful. Since neit-her the sky nor the horizon are visible, there is no distant feature to look at, and it is therefore useless to measure a path in spatial dimensions. Time becomes the only sensible way to measure dis-

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tance. But even time is hard to grasp since the light in the jungle remains constant throughout the day, and no other periods than lightness and darkness can be distinguished.

The feeling for space, which is absent in the to-tality of the tropical forest, is overwhelmingly present when entering a cave. The movement of the own body, the steps on the ground are no longer dam-pened, but are reflected from the cave’s enclosure. Receiving an echo of one‘s own steps is reassuring. Moving on into the cave creates a sequence of diffe-rent images depending on the spatial dimensions of the void space. There is meaning in moving forward, or backward, inwards or outwards, into the dark or into the light. It is in the cave that we start to grasp spatiality, whereas the absence of spatiality in the jungle questions the possibility of exis-tence.

Cities in the jungle, or in places that used to be covered with tropical forests, must – I guess – so-mehow have a subconscious resistance against this overwhelming wilderness. It was through my hike in the jungle of Taman Negara in Malaysia, that I felt I could understand Singapore much better than through approaching it by plane. When departing for Singa-pore from a European airport one can see the tamed, regulated landscape from centuries of cultivation on the ground. Here, the urban jungle as a metaphor for creative chaos in the city has a positive connotati-on. But when approaching Singapore from the jungle the latent presence of the untamed wilderness is not necessarily positive. Entering Singapore from the land casts a different light on the sometimes-cramped

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sense of control of life on this tropical island.

* * *Dresden, Germany.

Inauguration day: pictures of people happily wal-king over a newly constructed bridge in their city. No cars on the road yet, but soon this new piece of urban infrastructure would make life in the city ea-sier. No more detours to cross the river, but shor-ter commutes, less pollution, and less time wasted in traffic. People seem to proudly take ownership of a new element of the city, which they had been awai-ting for a long time. Everyone happy?

Not everyone. The scene is from Dresden, a city of myths. Myths that are made up of the stories of baroque beauty, of self-provoked utter destruc-tion, of ideological tabula rasa after the war, and of conservative reconstruction after reunification. Nothing much is left of the once coherent cityscape of Dresden that had inspired painters and poets three centuries ago. Dresden is now a puzzle of its own history. But the city still lives its myths and claims of bygone fame.

Today, a city’s claim to fame is to have achieve the status of a UNESCO world heritage site. Dresden played this card, perhaps in desperation, in hubris, in denial of its real situation. With the city in pieces, Dresden could not present to UNESCO anything intact other than the terrain along the river Elbe, a few frilly castles, neatly terraced vineyards,

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wide green riverbanks, and a collection of bridges from all periods of time. All of this was defined as a cultural landscape, a new catchword in the heri-tage scene, describing a non-finite assemblage of cultural and natural elements. Dresden’s claim found a positive response, and the city’s riverscape was labelled as a world heritage site. Despite all the lost beauty it could portrait itself as part of the selected few, the unique, and the authentic cities of the world.

But then the dream collapsed. The city wanted to build yet another bridge over the river. Something it had done every so often in its history. Building bridges was actually part of the process of crea-ting the kind of cultural landscape that was now so praised. But the city was no longer free to act as it thought was right. Not as a world heritage site. UNESCO objected to the building of the bridge. A referendum had to be called. The people of Dresden had to decide: world heritage status, or a bridge. The people wanted the bridge, no matter what. And UNESCO consequently withdrew the world heritage sta-tus. What had gone wrong?

In hindsight, one can say that the utterly scarred city wanted recognition for the beauty it had long lost, then played a faked card to achieve what it could not otherwise get, and got away with it for a while until reality hit in and the city needed real improvement rather than imaginary fame. In the end the people wanted the bridge more than the label. The connection counted more than conceit. Superficial city branding can be a poisonous potion for any en-vironment that is alive and seeking development.

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* * *Berlin, Germany.

Berlin was supposed to be all built up in a “Berli-nish Style” by now. At least this was the expectati-on twenty years ago. After the fall of the Wall an almost bloody battle emerged between conservative and progressive architects, about the question of how the capital of Germany should be reconstructed. While the progressive camp developed feverish ideas about the next city of tomorrow, the conservative camp saw a chance to cool down such attempts by ri-gorously looking back at the historic city. The fight was about glass-covered versus stone-clad facades. Glass was supposed to be progressive – and democra-tic. Stone was supposed to be historic – and “Ber-linish”. From today’s point of view the debate seems ridiculous, also because this feature actually does not define more than the first few millimetres of a building‘s appearance.

What happened ever since? Berlin has not become the metropolis that it had dreamt of. It has just about kept up the number of inhabitants. Economically, it barely survives on the services demanded by the federal government that was relocated to the city. Otherwise there is no real commercial drive that is fitting and appropriate to a capital city of one of the leading economies of the world. Yes, there is a creative industry, but that benefits from exactly the absence of any other industries. What is flou-rishing in Berlin today are small progressive initi-atives. For example, so-called building groups that

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run ambitious self-owned projects, or other groups that occupy empty lots and engage in organic urban farming. The many initiatives of this kind revolve around the topics of community, sustainability, par-ticipation, or ownership. It’s all about urbanity, not urban form. No need for the envisioned architec-tural canon at all.

Does anyone remember that there once was this gang of Berlin architects (like all Berliners they were actually not from Berlin) who declared a “Berlinish Style” in architecture and enforced it for a couple of years through occupying the relevant positions in the system. I doubt it. The idea that the “urban wounds” had to be “healed” with a narrow conserva-tive style that defined the proportions of windows and the materials of the building’s surfaces seems so far away now. What brought the turn-around? It is actually hard to say, when exactly this movement disappeared. Time has done its part to end the “Ber-linish Style”, but more than that, it prooved that it is simply impossible to invent a tradition. In-vented traditions vanish with their inventors.

Berlin is a very robust city that shrugs off any claims to define its tradition and identity from the outside. It is a robust beast after all. And that is why I love it.

* * *Chandigarh, India.

When India and Pakistan became independent from the United Kingdom the state of Punjab was divided bet-

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ween the two countries. Since its main city, Lahore, remained on the Pakistani side, there was need for a new capital city on the Indian side. Nehru, the first prime minister of India, seized the chance to prove the newly independent country’s modernity by commis-sioning a new model city, and selected Le Corbusier, the first global hero of architecture and city plan-ning, to develop the plans. These two men discharged their creative energy and will power into forming a completely new kind of settlement. The outcome was a city on which all Indians I have met agree that it is very non-Indian in its look and feel. Whether this is good or bad always stirs controversial dis-cussions.

However, ten years after the completion of the new capital, the state of Punjab underwent another par-tition, this time not along religious, but along linguistic lines. But since Chandigarh is located exactly on the fault line of this conflict, it re-mained the capital city for both states. And the buildings were divided in two, one part occupied by each of the two administrations. What was meant to be a celebration of the people’s legislative, execu-tive and judicative powers cast in concrete is now a high-security district without any urban life.

The security measures require that every visitor needs to get written permission to enter and ano-ther special permit to take photos. Obtaining the latter is an adventure in itself. Entering the sec-retariat building on one of Corbu’s characteristic ramps already slows down the speed of walking. Ha-ving reached the first floor after this decelerating approach, the light inside the building is dim. The

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officer handing out the permits is waving us into his large office with a silent hand gesture. Inside his room there are a dozen desks facing his, with one lower-ranking officer on each desk, dozing and day-dreaming. The boss silently orders one of them to take a copy of our passports making sure that this action does not wake up the others. After he returns one copy is filed, or rather thrown on the paper com-post at the back of the room. We are handed over our copy of the permit, and can now visit the famous buildings.

The legislative building is a large sculptural block, shaded by a brise-soleil, Corbu’s characteristic deep sunshades. To keep up with the dozy atmosphere set in the secretariat building it is no surpri-se that inside each unit of the concrete grid that forms the facade lies one dog, snoozing in the sun.

On the other side of the large ceremonial square is the Palace of Justice. A raw but radiant piece of architecture, a big chunk of a building crowned with an elegant flying roof. On the open terrace under this roof there is an enormous pile of discarded of-fice furniture: desks, chairs, shelves from the last five decades. For whatever reason these items cannot be ejected from the bureaucratic system that this administration has grown into, and thus this sculp-ture of stagnation has arisen.

What started as a creative engine for the new India, and for modern architecture, has become completely dormant. Chandigarh is the capital of snooze and in a state of somnolence.

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* * *Muscat, Oman.

There are two things I miss in Muscat: public spaces and exhibition spaces. Where would be an urban out-door place for temporary events that is accessible for all?

We were looking for such a place in vain, when we wanted to exhibit some delicately constructed models that students had built in a workshop. For lack of any other option we decided to turn the small foot-ball pitch outside of the university into an exhi-bition ground. The concreted surface was elevated just one step above the parking lot that surrounded it. A subtle, but suitable ground for an exhibition. However, the finely built models would have vanished unless they were set off against a strong background. So we went to buy red paint, and found out that any colour that was not in the range between white and cream was not to be used for any outside wall in Mus-cat. With promises to only use it on the ground we finally managed to buy the colour and turn the foot-ball pitch into a temporary exhibition space. Lights for the outdoor event was to come from cars arranged around the field.

The sun went down behind the petrol station. We started the engines of our cars and switched on the headlights. The first visitors that arrived were asked to park around the “red square”, keep the en-gines running and beam up the lights. The student’s models and the visitors cast multiple shadows over the red ground. The sound and smell of the cars made

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it a very Muscat experience. Mixing and mingling began. For one hour that night we managed to create both, a public and an exhibition space in Muscat.

* * * Sanchinarro, Spain.

I had a few hours to spare before my return flight and took a tram to see Sanchinarro one of the large urban extension areas at the periphery of Madrid. Along the way out of the city I sensed that the tram became less and less noisy, because the tram was no longer running in the middle of the street, but got its own tracks. Accordingly, the street became wider and wider, and the tram‘s sound no longer produced an echo. Then all the way out in Sanchinarro the tram was silently floating over tracks embedded in green grass. And between the tram and the street there was a hedge, and between the streets and the pavement there was a flowerbed, and between the pavement and the walls of the houses there was yet another strip of greenery. Every element for movement in the city was nicely divided. And on the ground floor, the hou-ses‘ walls were all solid and opaque. No openings, no functions and no activities. There was nothing to do on the streets, except maybe to look after all the annoying greenery that seemed to have substituted the presence of urban life!

“Build blocks!” said the mantra of conservative ur-banists throughout the 80s and 90s. This would re-suscitate the European urbanity. Sanchinarro, how-ever, is all built of blocks, but still no city is created. The blocks are so far apart that they

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remain objects and do not form a fabric. The parts don’t make a whole. It is an architect’s city, not an urbanist’s. The latter’s secret is easy to find out. Just take the next tram back.

* * *Sendai, Japan.

In my first weeks in Japan I spent hours sitting on the floor of an old temple in my neighbourhood. Li-terally, spaced out. Never before had I experienced such a limitless space within a small compound. A solid wall surrounds the temple ground, but the ar-chitecture of the light wooden building within the yard dissolves the feeling of enclosure. Everything is horizontal: a lifted platform, a low roof. The view does not go very far though. Rather, the space evokes a different kind of seeing. There is no per-spective. No focal point. No gravity. No back. No front. No up. No down.

Later I visited the newly built Mediathek in Sendai designed by the Japanese architect Toyo Ito. Both spaces, the one traditional and the other futuris-tic, felt the same.

Ito’s Mediathek is easy to grasp: Plates, tubes, and skin. Seven square plates are stacked up in diffe-rent heights and kept in place by thirteen irregu-larly placed tubes. These tubes are geometrically slightly distorted and structurally reduced to a minimally necessary netlike pattern. Since they are hollow, the building appears lightest where it is heaviest. Gravity disappears. The immediate surroun-

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ding is unpretentious, a mid-sized hotel, a fuel station, small houses. All four facades are transpa-rent skins of different kinds. The building seems to merge into its surrounding, despite it huge size. It is anything but monumental. Rather it dissolves into its context. Toyo Ito’s Mediathek in Sendai offers a space that is specific and neutral at the same time. A space of buoyancy rather than gravity. A defined space, however, without a center, beginning or end.

The temple and the Mediathek reflect the same idea of space, which is suggested by the meaning of the Japanese word “Kukan”. It consists of the signs for air and interval. This is the opposite of the idea of the German word for space. “Raum” etymologically derives from the activity of making a clearance in the forest, of cutting out a void from a solid. In Japan, space is experienced differently. It is not an enclosure. It is not against, but within its con-text. Space is merely an interval in the infinite.

* * *Wakan, Oman.

Experiencing the landscapes of the Arab peninsular it is no surprise that it was here in these barren lands that monotheistic religions were conceived. There is barely anything between the treeless earth and the cloudless sky. Where should the trolls, the spirits, the ghosts, or the goddesses of the po-lytheistic religions live, if there is nowhere to hide?

The Hajjar mountains in Oman are one such harsh

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landscape. The mountain range is of a scale that is almost inconceivable because there are hardly any elements to reference against. The way the landscs-pe appears could be a microscopic as well as a te-lescopic view. Just rocks, and more rocks. Once in a while, however, there are almost invisibly small villages. Like Wakan, for example. A cluster of not more than a handful of houses tucked away on the steep slopes at the end of Wadi Mistall. No place to go to usually. Except for the few days in February when the apricot trees are in full blossom.

The blossom of these trees is such a powerful proof of life in an otherwise lifeless landscape that is seems almost supernatural. The white petals on the hundred or so trees glow in the sunshine and look like they themselves are emitting light. These trees form the otherwise missing link between the earth and the sky. They seem to be rooted in both sides.

* * *Sarbet, Ethiopia.

Colloquial names of places always indicate the signs of the times. One of the main traffic junctions in Ad-dis Ababa is called “confusion square”. Seven roads from different directions intersect here and the one and only train line of the city crosses all the other traffic lines. For a smallish, provincial city that Addis was until ten years ago, this place was the maximum of modernity, and yes, modernity is confu-sing, thus the name.

Over the last decade, however, the name evolved.

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After an unconstitutional rigging of votes and the following weeks of political uncertainty the traffic intersection that confused everybody reflected the public feelings and was renamed as “constitution square”.

Then, after years of paying lip service to Western values in return for payments of Western aid and money, the Ethiopian government had shown its true face. Ethiopia declared itself a “developmental sta-te”, the political speak for abandoning democracy until development has reached a certain level. In other words, the Chinese model of authoritarian ca-pitalism. African governments can now chose between receiving money from the West or from the East, the one with, and the other without political condi-tions.

From „constitution square“ one road leads to the headquarters of the African Union, a political con-struct that originates from the proud beginnings of the independence movements in Africa in the 1960s. In the original compound of the African Union the buildings are simple, and pragmatic. A long slab for offices, a tiny tower, and an auditorium. Not inap-propriate for a chronically underfunded institution without real influence. Now a new building for the newly established Peace & Security Council is under construction, financed by the German government. It took years to get the project going: careful diplo-macy, stakeholder involvement, contracting firms wi-thout corruption, respecting the heritage value of the surrounding buildings, support for local compa-nies to be involved in the construction process, in short – the whole package of soft factors of susta-

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inable development advocated by Western aid.

The hard facts, however, are created on the plot opposite from the original African Union compound. Here the People’s Republic of China demonstrates the new era of the African power game with a present to the African nations. A brand new tower, conference center and five-star hotel rose from the rusty roofs of the slums of the Sarbet neighbourhood. The pro-ject took less than two years from planning to com-pletion. An all-Chinese team did the job, without any involvement from the African side. Simultaneous-ly, the Chinese built a traffic system of flyovers and underpasses to unravel the confusion at the square. Reflecting the new imperialism of China in Africa, people now call it “Confucius Square”.

* * *Halban, Oman.

Since the bubble of technocratic hubris in architec-ture burst in the sixties, the self-image of modern architecture as a morally and culturally superi-or discipline collapsed. Architects could no longer just be architects, but had to lean on other disci-plines as a source of justification for their works. In the seventies, architects had to be accompanied by sociologists, otherwise they would not have sur-vived the dynamics of participation processes that replaced the design of form at that time. In the eighties, there was no way forward without a French philosopher friend who could deconstruct anybody‘s attempt to compose a holistic form. In the nineties, working together with an artist was de-rigueur. Af-

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ter the turn of the century, the architect’s crutches became more obscure with anybody from ethnographers, geographers all the way to software programmers gui-ding the way. But now finally, in recent years, the pendulum has swung fully back into engineering. Now we lean heavily on climate engineers. Can’t take a step without them, it seems.

Recently, I saw an article, a home story, about an eco house in the Netherlands in which the architect posed not in the living room, but in the technical room. He was hardly able to stand upright in this narrow chamber, crouching in between water tanks, batteries, manifolds, valves and ducts, but seemed to be immensely proud of his achievement: creating the maximal comfortable indoor environment with only the minimum of resources used.

This is a paradigm shift. Technology is back. But this time technology is no longer hailed as such, and not misused as an image of modernism, but has become a tool for modernity. For creating living spaces, comfort zones. Rather than objects and forms.

At the moment we are building an eco house on our campus in Halban, Oman. A small villa with the who-le set of so-called active and passive design stra-tegies. While it is still under construction it is fascinating to see that what used to be a mental image during the design process is actually materi-alizing into reality. This, of course, gives every architect a high. But what really counts in the end will be the capacity of the building to create a pe-culiar indoor climate. The success will be measured in degrees Celsius and percentage of relative humi-

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dity, in kilowatt hours per square meter and year. All of this is invisible. We are creating a building that can be evaluated with eyes closed. The para-digm in architecture has shifted from appearance to performance.

* * *Rotterdam, Netherlands.

In the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, there are portraits of burgers with earnest looks, dressed in black clo-thes sitting before black backgrounds, painted with meticulous attention to detail showing every wrinkle of the face and fold of the collar. There are un-dramatic landscapes, which mainly show the sky, and reflections of the sky in the water. There are still-lifes of meat and vegetables; bread freshly cut, with crumbs spread all over the table; occasionally a fly nibbling on a fruit. This is, what Zbigniew Herbert described so well in an essay, „het non-he-roisch motief“ of the Dutch paintings of the Gouden Eeuw. According to him the peculiar absence of war scenes in historic paintings serves as a metaphor beyond art, and describes a national psyche in which the banal is celebrated rather than the brutal.

For the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, built by Rem Koolhaas in the early 1990s, it is not the art that reflects this motive, but rather the building itself. It stands unpretentiously along an urban freeway on one side and faces a small park on the other. The buil-ding is a thoroughly honest expression of its budget limitations, and makes no secret of what was pos-sible, and what not. One corner, for example, shows

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that the travertine cladding that gives a rather decent face to the park was just cut off and not con-tinued around the edge. Instead the blank concrete is shown, and even more rough is the quickly brushed on, black bituminous coating that is usually never shown. Like the crumbs and the flies in the still-lifes, and the wrinkles and moles in the portraits, the attempt at beauty is countered by the brutality of the banal.

While the portraits in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam show a certain realism in painting, the building of the Kunsthal in Rotterdam demonstrates dirty realism in architecture.

* * *Ang Mo Kio, Singapore.

While in the nineties, branding became an issue in architecture and urban design and every project had to be loaded with image-driven themes, there were also places, which were seemingly untouched by de-sign intentions: underdetermined, open and neutral. Places of pure pragmatism.

Singapore is, without doubt, the capital of pragma-tism. It is the only country that I know, in which the prospect of political independence was seen with fear, because Singaporeans thought they could not survive as a nation, having nothing, no resources or infrastructure, only people and location. In this mood Singapore approached its challenges in a so-metimes violently simple, unsentimental, and highly pragmatic manner.

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For the housing question, for example, a one-size-fits-all concept was developed, and hundreds of mo-dernist high-rise slabs were spread over the island. From afar these estates look like what was taught to us European architecture students as the horror scenario of modern Western architecture. But when actually going into these housing estates and taking a closer look they turned out to be the opposite. There are people practicing tai-chi, playing mah-jong, carrying singing brids in cages, street kit-chens with delicious food, tents for funerals, tab-les set for wedding parties. In short, street life is in full swing, only that there are no streets in the modernist designs. Tradition is kept alive in this highly untraditional environment.

The key to this paradox are the so-called void decks. The ground floor areas under the housing slabs for which the engineers who built these units had no real idea what to do with it. While the apartments on the upper floors are all systematically, and pragma-tically designed for certain residential functions, the ground floors of the slabs have neither a func-tion nor a meaning. They only consist of rows of columns, a blank concrete floor, stairs and elevators that lead up. The void decks have the charm of an em-pty parking garage, but are the most valuable asset in today’s image-driven design world, where such raw spaces are no longer provided. They prove how libe-rating it is to strip off the straightjacket of bran-ding and trust in people‘s ability to appropriate their environment beyond any designer‘s imagination.

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* * *Lake Tana, Ethiopia.

It took the plane three attempts to get off the run-way. Not a nice way to travel, but rewarding, once you actually make it from Axum to Lalibela to Bahir Dar in Northern Ethiopia. These places are age-old cultural sites, but our understanding of heritage, conservation, and musealization does not grip here.

In Axum, for example, it is not only the grand and mysterious obelisk that is to be visited. The guide took us down a shabby road and around the corner from a shack and pointed at a rusty corrugated iron roof. Beneath it was a hole hewn into the rock. And after some attempts of further communication and sign lan-guage, we understood, that we were being shown the tomb of Bathazar, one of the wise man who came from Africa to Bethlehem as one of the three kings to ho-nor the infant Jesus. In other places, take Cologne for example, a whole cult of heritage and monument is built over the (apparently fake) relicts of the bones of the three kings. In Axum, it is just part of history.

In Bahir Dar, or rather on the islands within nearby Lake Tana, the source of the Blue Nile, the ascent to the monasteries leads through a forest of coffee trees, and half way up there is a tukul, a round mud house with a thatched roof worth stopping at. Here, someone has collected the household items used for centuries in this place, and put them up for display. A valuable and authentic collection that in other contexts would be a full scale Museum of Applied Arts. Further up the way in the monastery,

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the monks are proud to show their treasures. A ma-nuscript of the bible with coloured illustrations, handed down since generations, page-by-page folded over many times. Heritage still in use, and thus protected. In other places such a collection of old books would be worth a museum of its own. Once the visitor shows interest, the monks bring out more. They opened a shelf, and brought out a crown, that was fully decorated with precious stones, and fab-rics. From one of the old kings, they said. And then they brought out another crown. From the old kings father, they said. And on and on it went, generation by generation back in time. In other contexts this would be The Crown Jewels.

At any of these places in Northern Ethiopia, the past is still present, and history is so continuous that there is no need to bend it into definitions of heritage. At first sight, these places and items look so unprotected, on second thoughts, they are fantas-tically safe, because they are in use. This might be the most important aspect, and the one that is often the point where our modern attempts at conservation fail.

* * *Hong Kong, China.

With a bit of wit and luck we managed to get an in-vitation ourselves to participate in a culture fes-tival between the cities of Berlin and Hong Kong. While the pavilion that we built on Tamar Square ce-lebrated the void spaces of Berlin, we invited stu-dents to go on a search for the void spaces in Hong

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Kong. Where in this seemingly overfull city could we find emptiness?

Despite or rather because they were first year stu-dents, they came back with a surprisingly wide array of places, which are voids in one way or another. Abandoned houses, infrastructure projects on-hold which leave bridges sticking out into the sky half-completed, atriums in rather generic housing blocks that are sixty storeys high, the still empty old airport site, mezzanine floors that were forgotten during construction, and the like. One student found the voids between the skyscrapers to be most impres-sive. Especially when not looking at the facades, but when walking into the narrow side lanes, where the windowless facades stand at a distance of only a few meters from each other and stretch out over hundred meters in height. She guided us to one such place and took out her trumpet, making the void even more present through creating an echo. Another student, however, contested this approach by just handing over a piece of paper saying: “Once you say silence its gone.” Hong Kong to our surprise is full of voids, even though this is just another of these paradox descriptions.

Seeing a place through its opposite, however, is a helpful way to understand them. In Hong Kong we also met the artist Young Hay whose works are about highlighting the essence of places. His technique is to put a blank canvas on his back and walk with it through different cities. Through this he highlights a place by contrasting it with his canvas, which, of course, remains empty, while the essence of the place becomes clear.

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* * *Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Blaming Dubai for its vulgarity is an all too easy target. Of course, it is ridiculous to see copies of buildings from other cities around the world. There is a copy of Big Ben, but this time its really big! There is a copy of the elegant Chrysler Building, but now built as twin towers! There is a copy of the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank by Foster, but without the trick of suspending the floors instead of stacking them! There is an Arc de Triomphe, and some kind of Jin Mao Tower, and a version of the Empire Sta-te Building! Actually, Dubai looks like a miniland in real size. And skiing in the desert doesn‘t seem very appropriate either.

But is Munich, for example, not the same? The Feld-herrenhalle is a copy of the Loggia Dei Lanzi, the Residenz is a copy of Palazzo Pitti, and the Hofgar-ten is then the Giardino Boboli – all modelled after examples from Florence. Copies from Paris include the Siegestor as yet another smalltown version of the Arc de Triomphe, as well as the innocent Karo-linenplatz that tries to imitate the urbane Place de la Concorde with its Obelisk. Further, creating exotic indoor climates has always been a thrill for rulers and their botanists. All these monuments in Munich were built under the absolutist regime of Ludwig I., ruler of the small kingdom of Bavaria in the early 19th century.

Why does Munich earn admiration for its urban beau-

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ty, while Dubai is being bashed for ist vulgarity by Western critics? Perhaps we should view Dubai, this city that boasts itself as a model for the 21st century, as what it really is - a city of the 19th century.

* * *Oslo, Norway.

There are many examples of urban places, which are devoid of any people. Some exist on paper only, luckily. But others are for real. Unfortunately, there are too many of these kind of places where one feels like one has slept through the evacuation call. Spaces without people. And then, there is the opposite. People without spaces. Or so it seems at first, when seeing Peter Handkes play “Die Stunde, da wir nichts voneinander wussten”, which was brough on stage in Charlottenburg‘s Schaubühne.

The title is also the script. There is no further text. And there is no stage design either. There are just people crossing the stage. Some faster, some slower. Some limping, some jumping. One is standing, one is falling. One is waiting, one is gazing. Some are together, others not. And so it goes on for over an hour. Its just like life on a well-made urban square is. Only, the urban square is not visible. But because of the intense normality of the acting it becomes imaginable. You start to get a feeling for the dimension of this urban plaza. For the kind of facades it might have. The path and zones of the square. The views and accesses to the place. The shops around it. The trees, the birds, the materials

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on the floor. The sound of walking over it. The place is there, even though it is not. The people made it real.

A real place that comes close to the ficticous scene on stage is the Opera in Oslo. It is located on a peninsular, within a bay. So the square that usually goes along with such landmark buildings in cities is not in front, but on top of it because the building is surrounded by water. Therefore, the opera cannot be seen like a monument, it can only be used as a platform. The façade is no longer representative, but active. There is nothing to look at, but only something to do with: picnics, open-airs, perfor-mances, shows, seeing people and being seen, or just the everyday life. And this makes it a truly modern public building – or rather a place for people.

* * *Al Hail, Oman.

The week around national day is fireworks season in Oman. The celebrations of the country’s remarkable progress over the last four decades take place not on the ground, but in the sky. Through the spec-tacular show of fireworks in the sky everyone can participate in a communal event without having to leave the private sphere of home. In other places, such celebrations would be all about getting out onto the streets with enormous crowds gathering in the largest open spaces of the cities in order to share the experience of getting together. But since privacy seems to be the leading motive of the Omani lifestyle, it is through the fireworks that what is

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otherwise kept apart is eventually connected.

On the ground, and in the everyday, it therefore hard to find places of encounter in the city, the places where strangers meet randomly to interact peacefully, or in other words, the place of the pu-blic. However, with a closer view to urban life it appears that the places that come closest to this description of public space are the petrol stations. In a car-dominated city, this is the place that eve-ryone needs to frequently visit. And not surprisin-gly, it is here that functions that would otherwise be around public spaces are accommodated.

In Al Hail, for example, a suburb of Muscat, the usually rather informal gathering of shacks around the petrol stations has evolved into a more formal spatial arrangement. While filling up, you are now surrounded by proper, pristine white buildings, al-most like on an urban square. There is a fashion shop for “the modern woman”, a coffee shop for truck drivers, an upmarket tea-house next to a car wash, a delicatesse butcher, a beauty salon, and – most surprisingly – a kindergarten. Initially only plan-ned as part of the urban infrastructure, the petrol stations in Muscat are transforming into social no-des. Places of identity. Places of the public. For lack of any others.

* * *Baldham, Germany.

Browsing through a box of books from my early child-

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hood, I realized that quite a few of them were writ-ten for children in order to get by with the expe-rience of living in the newly built suburbs of the 1970s. “Wir ziehen vor die Stadt” (We are Moving into a Suburb) is one of them. It summed up all the advantages of not having to live in a city anymo-re, and how much better it was to live in a world of high-rise towers and slabs spaced far apart from each other. Only “Der Maulwurf Grabowski” was more critical, and told about the problems of a mole who had to flee from the expanding city.

These books quite accurately described the place in which I spent my early childhood years, Baldham. In this suburb, some 30 kilometres outside of Munich, life was predictable. We lived in row houses, ar-ranged such that no cars could drive into the sett-lement. The surrounding apartments buildings were pre-fab concrete constructions, distinguished from each other by such innovative colour schemes as using blue, red, or green. A controlled, neatly or-dered world.

That it was also a world without street life, wit-hout offices nearby, without working fathers during the day, without corner shops, without people from other income groups than ours, was something I dis-covered only much later. Even in the early 1990s when I started to study architecture, there was still a remnant of this time and thinking at the fa-culty. There was no chair for urban design, only one for “Siedlungsplanung” (planning suburbias). It took another decade to finally revert to focus on building cities and not their antithesis.

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Our children love looking at Ali Mitgutsch’s books, for example “Rundherum in meiner Stadt” (Out and About in my city), or ” Unsere grosse Stadt” (Our big city). There is so much going on in these drawings, that they are called “Wimmelbücher” (Hustle-and-bustle-books). They are truly urban. And, other than the books from my early childhood, they are full of uncontrolled, contradictory, pulsing city life.

* * *Soweto, South Africa.

We were not supposed to be there. By definition of the apartheid regime in South Africa, whites were not to go to the black townships. Why should they? Well, to visit friends, for example, or watch a football match. On very few occasions we went, and I can still remember these trips to Soweto, because I felt awk-wardly displaced there with the neighbours of our friends staring at us children like aliens.

He was not supposed to be there. By definition of the apartheid regime in South Africa, a black person was not permitted to stay for more than 72 hours in a white suburb. During one of the riots our gardener did not feel safe going back to his hostel in Soweto, and asked whether he could stay at our place. No is-sue, we thought. A big issue, thought our neighbour, and reported to the police.

Well, she herself was once not supposed to be where she was. That is why our neighbour in Johannesburg went to exile to South Africa during the thirties –

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from Germany. But that seemed to play no role any-more in the endless game of excluding people from places.

* * *Mussafah, United Arab Emirates.

I had seen these faces before. But only in the cosy environments of art history classes or museums. Kä-the Kollwitz or George Grosz drew the faces of wor-kers in Germany in the early twentieth century: hag-gard, empty faces, too exhausted to protest their exploitation. And here I saw them for real, in Mus-safah Industrial Area of Abu Dhabi.

Worn out buses transport the workers about. They stare out into nowhere in the mornings as in the evenings. Too tired for conversations. To exhausted to react. The dorms, the streets, the factories, all filthy and forsaken places. People as numbers: repla-ceable. Places as numbers: interchangeable.

Later that day I went to Yas island, the shiner side of Abu Dhabi. Here, another Frank Gehry building is planned to create yet another Bilbao effect and resuscitate a place from the dead. And, yes, Jean Nouvel and Tadao Ando and Zaha Hadid are also do-ing their things here. But until now there is only a showroom that announces the great future of this place. Branding, of course, comes before building. The place is so empty that the guards spend all day in front of the gigantic mirrors looking at them-selves.

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The fuck-face of global capitalism. Here it is.

* * *Munich, Germany.

In the eighties there was an apocalyptic mood in Germany. Whether or not the environment was trea-ted better or worse than today is hard to say, but certainly the take on the situation was much less optimistic than now. The world was seen as being ka-putt. Hence the title of a book that I remember from my teens: „Grün kaputt – Landschaft und Gärten der Deutschen“ (The German’s Landscapes and Gardens), written by Dieter Wieland together with Peter M. Bode, and Rüdiger Disko. Grün kaputt was an alarm bell ringing about the society’s loss of a sense of place. The loss of being able to simply and approp-riately accommodate people in everyday environments. The loss of creating such basic places like a com-fortable garden, a lively street, a respectful ce-metery, a stimulating playground. All of that – one would imagine – should go without saying. Apparently it was not. And „Grün kaputt“ put it in your face with powerful images and sarcastic texts. And it was not only the landscape that was perceived as kaputt, the cities, too, were described as dead. I remember other such books lying around at home, for example: Mitscherlich: Die Unwirtlichkeit unserer Städte (The Unhomeliness of Our Cities). Brolin : Das Versa-gen der Modernen Architektur (The Failure of Modern Architecture). Siedler/Niggemeyer: Die gemordete Stadt (The Assasinated City). Being an architect at

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that time must have felt like being a public enemy.

Thirty years later, we went to the „birthday party“ of a river, as our children called it. Actually it was rather a re-birth that was celebrated as a big public event, because the river Isar was re-natu-ralized within the urban area of Munich. The river Isar is an element of the urban landscape in Munich that runs from South to North through the whole city. Many of the cycling path are in some way or the other connected to this green strip. On my way to school I cycled along the riverbank every morning. It was one straight path for kilometres. I took this shape of the river for granted, concrete walls on each side, a solid piece of water engineering, a ca-nal more than a river. However, once every so often a sudden melting of snow or heavy rainfalls in the Alps caused the water level to rise and brought se-vere damage along the concreted riverbanks. In these events the Isar broke free from the straightjacket that it was put into for a few decades in its long geological history.

Now this struggle is over. The city decided to give up the attempt to control the river. The canal walls were taken down and the river was put back into its original bed. Due to the slower pace of the stream and smoother transitions along the river banks peo-ple can swim in the water again. The revitalized flora creates a habitat for the old fauna that is slowly coming back. Similar efforts are now being made in other parts of Germany where floods have had equally destructive impacts. Suddenly, engineers are searching for old maps and geological traces in or-der to find the original riverbeds. The idea of a

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critical reconstruction has spread from architecture to nature.

* * *Paris, France.

In a typical Parisian street in the fifteenth arron-dissement there is a house that people enter knowing that this is the last place they will live in. The hospice is located in an old, but slightly run down building. Behind it is a small garden with some old trees. The foundation that runs the hospice planned to extend the services in a new, larger facility on the same plot, and invited a handful of famous ar-chitects to carry out a design competition.

When working in Toyo Ito’s office this task happe-ned to be the first project that I was involved in. Since I was the only team member speaking French the competition brief landed on my table for the preli-minary studies. I had expected Ito to stress on the topics he is famous for: futuristic designs, ephe-meral spaces, but it turned out that he stressed on the most humane issues: Can the patient lying in bed see who is entering through the door to his room? Are the relatives and friend arriving by taxi dropped off in such a way that they can enter the building directly?

When it finally came to writing the design descrip-tions for the presentation panels of the competition there were three versions, one in English, in French, and one in Japanese. Even though they described the same project, they revealed completely different ap-

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proaches to the task. My version was the beginner’s version that was playing it safe by neatly referring to the conditions on site and the requirements of the programme. Clean, but not catching. The French partner architect’s version was all big words about the grandeur of the task of building a house for the dying. Philosophical, but too monumental. Toyo Ito’s version was different. It was about how he strolled around the old hospice’s garden, the dignified pre-sence of a tree in front of the window, the worn out, but cosy armchair. It was all about the place, and the people there. Personal, and to the point. He had grasped the essence of what this place and what the task of building there was all about.

* * * Madinat al Sultan Qaboos, Oman.

Every morning when I drop our children to school, I am happy about the place where they spend an im-portant part of their day. Their school is neither the typical overwhelming big brick box from the late 19th century, nor is it the underwhelming low-rise over-conceptualized carpeted learning environment from the late 20th century. Rather it is an accident of architecture.

The school is a conglomerate of temporarily-planned-and-everlasting-since simple, cheap, small buildings spread over a steep slope. It is an ensemble without a face, no significant silhouette, no representative entrance, and it also doesn’t have a large assembly space, neither indoors nor outdoors. It is the op-

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posite of what an architect would build or what a school committee would want.

But it is exactly what the children need. A small-scale city with tiny paths, nooks, and crannies. No building is special, but every corner is unique. None of this was planned. The school was built in-crementally, and rather accidentally. It looks as if it was rubbed into the place. Like felting. Many other schools nowadays look like built organisati-onal charts of the educational programme. Modular systems, neatly woven together. For the children, I prefer a felted place.

* * * Gleisdreieck, Germany.

What a name for a place. Couldn’t be more generic. Probably thought out by an engineer. Without bad intentions, of course, like always. “Gleisdreieck”, the name means “traintracks” and “triangle”, how innocent. But in Berlin, nothing is innocent, his-torically. “Gleis” and “Dreieck” – these two words do not resonate well with our past. And Gleisdreick, when I visited it in the early nineties was defini-tely a place from the past. A huge area of railway infrastructure, abandoned since the war, after which this once central location became one of the in-ner peripheries of the divided Berlin. Gleisdreieck is a silent space full of echoes. It was here that Berlin’s holocaust memorial seems to have existed long before one was built. Gleisdreieck is Paul-Celan-Land, the place where his words grew into this world.

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* * * Pirmasens, Germany.

In a landscape of dark forests and narrow valleys, a landscape that could not be a more picturebook scene of a German “Wald” lies the smalltown of Primasens. Here in the back of beyond, my great-grandfather practiced as an architect and was head of the mu-nicipal building department in the late twenties and early thirties of the last century. Although I never met him, I always felt a connection to my great-grandfather just for the mere fact that he was also an architect. Our profession has the ad-vantage (or disadvantage) that the works stay on longer than their creators; we can thus create a heritage through our buildings. But this in only one side of the dilemma to be constantly lingering between illusions of omnipotence, when it comes to the impact of one’s works, and a regular experiences of impotence, when it comes to the realities in the building process. A zig-zag between immortality and irrelevance. So, in Pirmasens, I traced the works of my great-grandfather, and was curious to see what he left behind.

As an architect for the municipality he built public buildings, a housing estate, a vocational school, a chapel on the cemetery, a primary school, and the public pool. The style of these buildings could be described as modern conservative. No frills, but also no experiments. Clean surfaces, and elegant proportions. Warm-hearted in some ways. An attribute that is not always found in modern buildings.

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The public pool is probably his best work in Pir-masens. But it is also puzzling. Inside, the main hall is decorated with a large mural that depicts in quite a realistic style Germanic looking boys and girls exercising. I remember my grandmother telling me about the painter and his Jewish wife, and the latter’s exile in England. How does this fit together: the modern building in a style that was later decla-red “un-German” by the Nazis, the rather Nazi-style paintings by a painter married to a Jew, who went into exile? Probably, the lines that cut the puzzle into pieces are only apparent in hindsight.

* * * Tennessee, USA.

This book is my only inheritance from my maternal grandfather. It is charged with questions. „Johann Wolfgang Goethe: Faust – Eine Tragödie. Published by Frederick Ungar, New York.“ On the title page of this edition it is stamped: “Censored. Office of In-telligence & Censorship. Prisoner of War Camp. Camp Forrest, Tenn.” On the last page is another stamp: “Sold by PW Canteens Fort Niagara, N.Y.”. The con-tent of the book I know, of course. The stamps make me cutious.

Why were German WW II prisoners of war taken to a place as far as Tennessee, USA? Why were they al-lowed to buy books? Why did they get permission to perform a drama on stage? Who was this group, only upper class officers? Did they choose to play Faust? Did playing Faust reconfirm their identity? Did it

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make them question their most recent past? Was the play distraction or reflection? Who was in the au-dience when they played? How do former “Herrenmen-schen” look in striped prison bird clothes? Why did uncle Sam treat his cousins like this? Where were the Japanese prisoners of war at the same time? Were the other fascists from the East also treated like this? Why did we get a trial, and the Japanese get the bomb? Nuremberg is in Germany, Nagasaki is not.

* * * Miyajima, Japan.

The last ferry had left for the mainland. I had missed it on purpose. The place was just too beau-tiful to leave, and I wanted to spend the night on the island. Except for a few monks in the monastery, I was probably the only person staying in Miyajima that night. I found myself a park bench to sleep on with view of the large tori, a vermilion coloured wooden gate that is built into the sea.

When I woke up – like always when sleeping outside you wake up just before sunrise when it is coldest – I saw the silhouettes of deer standing around me. Calm and relaxed creatures. From the nearby monaste-ry the sonorous humming of the morning prayer began. Deep and even sounds. I looked at the tori’s balan-ced proportions, its symmetry of elements, and the reflections of it in the water. I waited for the sun to rise and the mist over the water to vanish, and then I rolled up my sleeping bag and took the ferry back from this paradisiacal spot to the mainland, to

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a nearby city that was once the most hellish place on earth. Hiroshima.

* * *

Le Havre, France.

Memories return unexpectedly. Often triggered by words, sounds, smells, feelings, or looks, they can eventually bridge between one place and another. I had only spent a few hours in Le Havre on the way to embarking on a ferry across the channel. The city left an impression of light modernity mixed with some grandeur, reinforcing the general mood of France that was transferred to us through the French classes we had in school.

I sensed a similar look-and-feel when visiting the French school in Addis Ababa, the Lycée Guebre Ma-riam. The school consists of three long rectilinear slabs arranged in a U-shape so that a well-proporti-oned courtyard is created. The design of each of the three buildings is based on the same construction grid, which is clearly visible in the expressive vertical columns on the facades. The walls between these columns are either glazed or filled in with ma-terials of different kind. What is striking are the nice proportions that range from the small scale details all the way to the overall arrangement of the ensemble. Overall, a pragmatic and disciplined, however, elegant and playful way of building.

Given the few modern buildings in Addis Ababa, I could soon detect a dozen more of such kind of buildings. They were all based on the same grid, but differed in

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materials, infills, proportions, and arrangements. The architect it turned out was a Frenchman, Henri Chomette. He not only left his traces in Ethiopia, but also built the Central Bank building in Braz-zaville, the French Embassy in Cotonu, a market and town hall in Abijan, and back in Addis Ababa again, a police academy which later became the headquarter of the African Union. Again, the same formula for building was clearly visible, but nevertheless each project had its own unique feature.

Henri Chomette began his career as an assistant to Auguste Peret, the old French master, who was in charge of the rebuilding of Le Havre after the Second World War. Peret came up with a concept of rebuilding the city on a standard grid that would run from the urban design level all the way to the planning of the construction details. A systemic ap-proach, that fitted to the cultural, as well as the socio-economic situation of post-war France, where labour-intense and job-creating low-tech construc-tion was needed to get the industry on its feet, as well as the fast reconstruction of cities, a process that needed to be controlled aesthetically through a straight-forward set of rules rather than complica-ted regulations. Today, Le Havre is one of the few modern cities that have the World Heritage status.

Henri Chomette pursued a long-lasting career and built in many African countries. The lessons from Le Havre seemed to fit very well with the African con-text. And they would still do today.

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* * *Ahrenshoop, Germany.

A holidayhouse is not a townhouse. Enclosure is not called for, instead: exposure. To the landscape, the trees, the wind, the sky, the clouds, the ever-changing light. Our holiday house is located on the Fischland, a narrow peninsular between the Baltic Sea and an inland lagoon in North Germany. The land is flat; the sky is high and is amplified by being reflected in the water bodies on both sides of the peninsular. In this context, any house that tries to rise up is bound to look small.

We wanted to live fully within this landscape. So the house is built as a continuity of the natural space. In order to embed the A-frame house into the landscape a trellis was built over the roof allowing the garden to grow over it from both sides. Now that it is fully overgrown, the house vanishs into na-ture. And in order to unify the space before, within and behind the house a thirty meter long continous wooden platform was run through it. This platform remains an empty space as all functional furniture modules were built in along the two lengths of the house. The platform can easily be used differently according to the occupancy, the time of the day, the season, the mood. In contrast to the openess of the main space a small private room accessible by ladder was built into the central one-third of the upper floor leaving the space on either side of it open to the full height of the gable. This leaves ample space for looking into the sky for hours at a time. From inside the house, one has an unimpaired view of the surrounding landscape to the front and to the

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back, and from the outside the house appears to be organically integrated with the landscape around it. Rather than an enclosed house this is a marked place within and exposed to the landscape.

* * *

Siegen, Germany.

At the last funeral in our family one of my relati-ves half-jokingly, half-seriously entered the burial vault to find out how many places were still available in our family grave. This ornate little building on a graveyard in the German town of Siegen was built by my great-grand parents, and every generation since followed sooner or later. They established a power-ful place that is a focal point for the extended and scattered family. Would I, too, one day be buried there, and my family as well? Why in a city where I have not spent even one night of my life? Why migrate back to a place that is generations away from me? Why a permanent place at all?

On the other side of my family, this question does not occur. In the Hindu religion there is no such thing as a last resting place. The dead body is cremated, and the ashes then spread into a river. The one such occasion that I attended left a deep impression on me. After a minute or two it was all over. The ashes were dissolved into the water. All gone. No traces left. The river flows on. So does life. No fixed place here, in the middle of a stream.

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* * *

London, United Kingdom.

By pure coincidence, I spent one evening together with five people who I met at five different places and times before: a classmate from Johannesburg, a col-league from Berlin, a friend from Singapore, my flat-mate from Japan, and my brother. It felt like home, even though I have no further relation to the place where we actually met. Home is not a place anymore. Home is people.