Archive for November 2009
Beijing Bye Bye
Building Number 10, Hu Jia Lou Public Housing Project West
Man and van der Laan.
The work of architect Dom Hans van der Laan (1904-1991) is more influential as a system than as a design. The Dutch Benedictine monk is acclaimed by those who embrace modernism as a style rather than as an outlook or philosophy. To the brick-ish modernists he is one of the truly original thinkers of 20th-century architecture. To those who believe in a democratic approach to architecture which embraces the technology of the day he is a throwback. Van der Laan sought a formal language for his architecture which could easily be compared to the catechism.
The Abbey at Vaals by Hans van der Hejden
“If you don’t eat yer meat, you can’t have any pudding.”
Jonathan Glancey repeated a few familiar myths about the Berlin Wall when he wrote about it recently. He wrote that ’what remains of it are a few graffiti-spattered stretches of concrete for tourists to snap one another by’. Certainly much of the actual Wall itself is gone. The East Side Gallery is indeed spattered with graffiti but then how better to treat the last long stretch of a structure designed to keep people apart? (There is surely a whole dissertation to be done about graffiti on the Wall and how it has influenced the art form across Europe.) I’m not trying to do Glancey down. His piece makes a wider point about walls in cities but the fact is there is more to the Wall today than a ‘ few graffiti-spattered stretches of concrete’.
