Samizdata

“Spectacular City – Photographing the Future”. Photographic exhibition at the Netherlands Architecture Institute, Rotterdam, until January 7, 2007, and then touring, to the NRW Forum in Dusseldorf and subsequently to further venues.

One of the great things about the internet is that it is possible to start on a familiar blog, and end up not much later at somewhere you would not have imagined being a couple of links before. And sometimes, the virtual world gets left behind, and you end up somewhere in reality you weren’t expecting to be.

For instance, on Tuesday of the week before last, I started at the blog of Willam Gibson (the famous William Gibson), and before I knew it I was simultaneously at the delightful Japan Probe and the website of the Netherlands Architecture Institute, which was apparently featuring an exhibition entitled “Spectacular City”, which was a phtographic exhibition of modern urban buildings, supposedly attempting to reveal things about cities through photographs of their less observed details. The blogged photograph on the immediate link, the Ministry of Transportation in Tbilisi in Georgia, made the exhibition look promising, especially given that I enjoy looking at modern uses of Soviet architecture at least as much as the next guy.

As I am also someone who loves few things as much as visiting suburban shopping malls, housing estates, and transport infrastructure in foreign cities, I was intrigued. I checked the location of the architecture institute in question, and was gratified to discover that it was not in Amsterdam but in Rotterdam. This is a fitting place for it. In the sense of modern architecture, Rotterdam is one of the more interesting cities in Western Europe, although one or two Spanish cities have been making a good claims recently. The combination of a city completely flattened by bombing, and a lack of the architectural timidity of London or the pomposity of Paris (and the perhaps not coincidental fact that Rotterdam post war became one of the key points of European transport infrastructure – more on that in my next post) led to a really interesting, experimental, and modern (in the best sense) city being created.

However, the real reason I was gratified was that it meant that the exhibition was relatively easy for me to visit. By a strange coincidence, I was planning on being in Antwerp a few days later, in order to go to the slightly naff Belgian/Dutch/German version of Night of the Proms, which is somewhat less musically rarified and much more poppified than the British version, but is none the less rather good fun. That took me up to Saturday night, and my train ticket back to London was for Sunday evening. My plans had been to spend most of Sunday pottering around in Antwerp – a nice city for it – but Rotterdam is only an hour north by train, and there was nothing stopping me from nipping up to Rotterdam on Sunday and having a look for myself.

(Quick summary of the Belgian Night of the Proms: given that Tears for Fears were a band with two strong vocalists who wrote and performed somewhat overblown songs with a huge instrumental backing, they are never going to be better than accompanied by a full orchestra, a 40 strong choir on the back of the stage, three aesthetically pleasing front of the stage backing singers, and assorted drummers, pianists, and other musicians. Given also that there are a band whose repertoire really only consists of three really good songs and about four or five good ones, not terribly much is lost through their sharing a bill with other performers. On the other hand Texas are a group of slightly more musically sparse Glaswegians, and are probably better by themselves with a full set: more songs, less embellishment, and fewer distractions. Also, when they were performing the three aesthetically pleasing backup singers had changed into the most interesting of their thirty seven different costumes for the evening: outfits consisting of rather tight jeans and red corsety things that were probably illegal in Korea until recently. Male weakness meant that I was distracted. But none the less, it was a fun evening. It may not have been as fun if it had been in London, but Belgium was the right place for it).

In any event, architecture. Rotterdam. If you are a building, being the Netherlands Architecture Institute is probably like being the Vienna Philharmonic if you are an orchestra. Everybody expects you to be the Vienna Philharmonic. This is probably a bit much on an evening when you have been to the pub and have had one too many. And the NAI is a decent building trying a bit hard, but nothing really special.

Walking into the building and into the exhibition the first thing I saw was an aerial photograph of Paris inside the Periphique: the Eiffel Tower, the wide Boulevards designed by Baron von Haussman, practically picture postcard stuff
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I steeled myself for disappointment with respect to the exhibit. Paris inside the Periphique is not a city that has grown from its lesser observed pieces. Paris inside the Periphique is a city in a corset, almost literally, although in this instance of a kind legal (and probably fairly common) in Korea. The city is full of legally protected buildings, height restrictions, prohibitions on selling newspapers in cafes, and worst of all, buildings owned and designed by governments. There is modern architecture, but it is monumental and government sanctioned. The city boundary corresponds with the aforementioned Periphique, an elevated motorway that surrounds the city, seemingly holding the picture postcard Paris within. The City is just a museum – it is full of governent but does not seem to have any sort of functional wealth generating economy within. It is beautiful, but it isn’t interesting.

Paris outside the Periphique is much more interesting. → Continue reading: In between