City Notes — Reading the City

Mies and the City (in 1921)

Then, in 1921 Mies submitted a stunning entry to the competition for a high-rise office building near the Friedrichstrasse train station in the heart of Berlin.

UrbanismGabriel FeldMay 1, 2019Berlin, Germany, EuropeComment

Mies and the City (in 1922)

Shortly after his entry to the 1921 Friedrichstrasse competition, Mies produced a second project for a high-rise office building.

UrbanismGabriel FeldMay 1, 2019Architecture, Berlin, Germany, EuropeComment

Mies and the City (in 1923)

In the highrise projects of 1921 and 1922 Mies was mostly concerned with the relation between structure and enclosure and the properties of the glass as a skin.

UrbanismGabriel FeldMay 1, 2019Berlin, Germany, EuropeComment

If Richelieu won't come to the city...

Even after almost four hundred years, Richelieu's urban rectangle seems like an apparition amidst the vineyards and wheat fields of the Loire Valley.

UrbanismGabriel FeldMay 1, 2019Loire Valley, France, EuropeComment

Where is Vienna?

Where is, exactly, a city?

UrbanismGabriel FeldMay 1, 2019Vienna, Austria, EuropeComment

Wiener Linien

At a time when satellites and computers have accustomed us to the most detailed and accurate maps, transportation networks, particularly subways, seem to be one of the last refuges for an almost medieval mapmaking sensibility.

UrbanismGabriel FeldMay 1, 2019Vienna, Austria, EuropeComment

Conspiracy (Urban) Theory at the Ringstraße?

I'm not sure about this, but there may have been two competing visions at work when Vienna's epochal Ringstraße was developed in the second half of the 19th century.

UrbanismGabriel FeldMay 1, 2019Vienna, Austria, EuropeComment

Ringstraße Buildings

One way or another, all of the Ringstraße buildings are a little weird.

UrbanismGabriel FeldMay 1, 2019Vienna, Austria, EuropeComment

Mies and the City (in 1926)

In 1925 Mies van der Rohe was appointed by the Deutsche Werkbund as the director of a housing exhibition in Stuttgart, the Weissenhof Siedlung.

UrbanismGabriel FeldMay 1, 2019Stuttgart, Germany, EuropeComment

Mies and the City (in 1928)

This may explain the height differences in the projects themselves, a one-story terrace extending about half the facade in Berlin and a lower volume where the building turns the corner in Stuttgart.

UrbanismGabriel FeldMay 1, 2019Berlin, Stuttgart, Germany, EuropeComment

Mies and the City (in 1929)

The 1929 competition for the redesign of Alexanderplatz in Berlin finally gave Mies the chance to bring together at a truly urban scale the ideas about city and architecture that he had developed for most of the decade.

UrbanismGabriel FeldMay 1, 2019Berlin, Germany, EuropeComment

Urban Bestiary (1)

But walk just a few steps to the adjacent main square and you'll be in front of a much larger monument, a Renaissance fountain with the figures of Hercules and a dragon.

UrbanismGabriel FeldMay 1, 2019Klagenfurt am Worthersee, Austria, EuropeComment

Urban Bestiary (2)

(Talk about branding and rebranding!)

UrbanismGabriel FeldMay 1, 2019Venice, Italy, EuropeComment

Urban Bestiary (3)

One would associate dragons, griffins and other mythical beasts to antiquity or the middle ages, not to the modern city. But I am, coming to New York and suddenly it flashed through my mind: King Kong.

UrbanismGabriel FeldMay 1, 2019New York City, USA, North AmericaComment

Urban Bestiary (4)

Perhaps no mythical beast associated with a city, at least in the western canon, is more famous than the Lupa at the center of Rome's foundational myth.

UrbanismGabriel FeldMay 1, 2019Rome, Italy, EuropeComment

Sert's Urban Compendium

Between 1958 and 1973 Sert's office designed three major buildings for the university: Holyoke Center (1958-65,) Peabody Terrace (1962-64) and the Science Center (1973.)

UrbanismGabriel FeldMay 1, 2019Boston, Cambridge, USA, North AmericaComment

Urban Bestiary (5)

If King Kong was a product of the Great Depression, Godzilla embodied the worst nightmares of the post-WWII nuclear age.

UrbanismGabriel FeldMay 1, 2019Tokyo, Japan, AsiaComment

Superimposing Maps

In about 250 years, the city had completely reshaped its geography, turning what was virtually an island with an irregular perimeter and number of hills, into a regular and rather level urban mass almost three times its original area.

UrbanismGabriel FeldMay 1, 2019Boston, USA, North AmericaComment

Comparative Urbanism

This also reinforces my "theory" that we only know one city, the one we are from, and we simply extrapolate when we try to understand all other cities.

UrbanismGabriel FeldMay 1, 2019Istanbul, Buenos Aires, Argentina, Turkey, Eu, Asia, South America, Boston, USA, North AmericaComment

Dada City (Paris)

By the time René Clair completed his film "Entr'acte" in 1924, Dada had run its course, and the movie itself can be seen as document of both the art "wars" of the period and the death and burial of the movement.

UrbanismGabriel FeldMay 1, 2019Paris, France, EuropeComment