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Tag Archives: Germany
Color film of Berlin in 1900
Although three decades had passed since the Franco-Prussian War and another decade and a half awaited World War I, the Berliners in this 1900 color film (with some 1914 scenes toward the end) of their city appear depressed. The elegance … Continue reading
Hamburg in the crosshairs
The annual G20 conference of the world’s major economies met in Hamburg last week, with leaders convening in palaces and demonstrators rioting in the streets. It brought to mind the cheerful violence that greeted me and my brother, Tony, on … Continue reading
Yale lecture: Krier on Speer
Léon Krier does not seem to dislike modern architecture as much as I do, but he may dislike it with much more passion. The architectural theorist, master planner of Prince Charles’s new town Poundbury, and practitioner of his own edgy … Continue reading
Posted in Architecture, Architecture History, Video
Tagged Albert Speer, Germany, Hitler, Leon Krier, Nazi Germany, Yale
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The good cheer of beauty
Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray, was published as a serial novel of 20 monthly parts in issues of Punch magazine from January 1847 to July 1848. So next month will be the 170th anniversary of its appearance in print. … Continue reading
Posted in Architecture, Books and Culture
Tagged Amelia Sedley, Beauty, Becky Sharp, Germany, Mozart, Opera, Rhine Valley, Thackeray, Vanity Fair
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Music and architecture, cont.
In October, Roger Scruton visited the belly of the musical beast, in Germany, to deliver a lecture against atonal composition. It was as if the superhero of classical architecture, Henry Hope Reed, arose from his grave to address the celebrants … Continue reading
Hitler’s revenge on America
The journal Places has published, as the inaugural installment in its Future Archive series of forgotten writing of the past century, a 1968 essay for Art in America by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy called “Hitler’s Revenge.” The essay is introduced by Despina … Continue reading
Posted in Architects, Architecture, Architecture Education, Architecture History, Art and design, Development, Preservation, Urbanism and planning
Tagged Ada Louise Huxtable, Bauhaus, Despina Stratigakos, Germany, Hitler, Jane Jacobs, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Marcel Breuer, Mies van der Rohe, Places Journal, Sibyl Moholy-Navy, University of Buffalo, Walter Gropius
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Epiphany in Stuttgart
My brother, his wife Sabrina and her two sons stayed a stretch in Germany for treatment of the two sons’ Lyme disease – successful treatment, by the way. They were in Stuttgart when Tony, a noted philosopher of the mind/body/nature continuum, … Continue reading
Fascism, modernism paired
Mother’s milk flowing from her gentle soul, a good friend expressed at lunch yesterday her dismay at the fascist tendencies of modernist architect Philip Johnson. She is no fan of his buildings (there are two in Providence), but she was … Continue reading
Posted in Architects, Architecture, Architecture Education, Architecture History, Art and design, Books and Culture, Urbanism and planning
Tagged Germany, Hitler, Ideology, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Roh, Modern Architecture, Naziism, Nazis, Philip Johnson, Politics, Psychology, Third Reich
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The Schwäbisch Hall cure
A German town of some 36,000 in population, Schwäbisch Hall was barely nicked by Allied bombing in World War II, and it shows. The medieval streetscapes in the photos here might well suggest the town as spa or cure for … Continue reading
Paying for Berliner Schloss
Audun Engh of INTBAU kindly noted, after reading my last post, that the figures next to architectural elements and statuary in drawings of a Berliner Schloss façade near the end of the Extrablatt PDF represented not the cost of those … Continue reading
Posted in Architecture, Art and design, Development
Tagged Audun Engh, Berlin, Berliner Schloss, Extrablatt, Germany, INTBAU, Penn Station, Schinkel
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