The baby train and other lusty urban legends. (El tren de los bebés y otras simpáticas leyendas urbanas)

He estado sin tiempo para postear pero no por ello interrumpo mis lecturas.

Y este libro del profesor Jan Harold Brunvand lo tenía pendiente. Aclaro ante todo que la traducción del título en el post es mi versión libre, no creo que el libro esté traducido al español.

Cuando lo encontré en la biblioteca, no estaba segura de comprarlo, el diseño de tapa me pareció bien feo y antiguo, sin ánimo de crítica al bebé, sin embargo, adoro las leyendas urbanas y no pude dejarlo.

Su lectura resultó sumamente placentera y es por ello que la palabra ¨lusty¨ en todas sus acepciones (fuerte, vigoroso, feliz, etc) preferí traducirla como ¨simpáticas.¨ Cada capítulo está separado en temas, y en cada uno de ellos no podemos evitar reír o sonreír, más cuando nos damos cuenta que nosotros mismos, alguna vez, hemos sido víctimas de creencias que no son más que leyendas urbanas.

En principio yo desconocía que el estudio de leyendas urbanas es una carrera en sí misma, y también hay congresos e intercambios profesionales. El profesor Brunvand, investigador preciso, ha escrito este libro antes del furor de Internet y sólo conseguía material a través de Intranet, una red privada de universitarios, cartas de sus lectores y oyentes (tenía un programa de radio), investigaciones en bibliotecas, diarios e intercambios con colegas.

Con respecto a las leyendas, la que más me causó gracia es la de la pareja que encuentra un perrito chihuahua en la calle, en un viaje a México. Lo adoptan, lo llevan al veterinario y resulta ser una rata enorme.

Hay otra que me ha inquietado, porque la he vivido personalmente, allá por los ´90, solía estar aterrada de llevar mis chicos al shopping mall; se decía que había personas que los secuestraban, los llevaban al baño, los adormecían, les ponían una peluca, y luego los llevaban a la frontera para vender sus órganos. Brunvand dice que esta leyenda es conocida en muchos países, sin comentarios al respecto, para mí era verdad.

Y ahí reside la cuestión, los lectores que le han escrito cartas están convencidos que los sucesos son verdaderos. Hay más, por ejemplo, el cactus que se compra en Home Depot u otro vivero y al cabo de unos días se agita, pues estaba lleno de arañas; pero lo mismo sucede con un peinado de peluquería; otra leyenda, doy fe que ha sucedido en la familia de mi esposo, los niños que se tiran de las ventanas creyéndose Superman. Otras, planos cambiados del lugar de construcción, situaciones laborales insólitas, asesinos y ladrones en shopping mall con el mismo modus operandi en distintos países.

Y el título del libro: un tren que pasaba por un barrio de EEUU (no recuerdo el nombre) a las 4AM, y la bocina de la locomotora despertaba a la gente del área que rodeaba las vías; como era tarde para volver a dormirse y temprano para levantarse, las parejas aprovechaban el tiempo ¨fabricando bebés.¨ Su conclusión es que esta práctica es muy dudosa, pero el profesor siempre deja una cuestión abierta.

Brunvand está retirado, y ahora recibe emails en vez de cartas. Desconozco si continúa su investigación, pero lo hecho en su campo ha sido sumamente interesante.

Libros de niños para intercambiar en la vía pública

Ya he mostrado en este blog, algunos ejemplos de países donde se dejan libros para intercambiar.

El ejemplo más interesante, lo he leído desde Israel:

http://theclubofcompulsivereaders.blogspot.com/2011/08/books-at-bus-stops-in-israel-libros-en.html

En España y Argentina, también hay algunos días donde se permite dejar libros en la calle, al azar. La gente que selecciona un par de ejemplares, debe reemplazarlos por otros, que a su vez serán leídos por otras personas.

Estas fotos las saqué en la calle 2nd, que es la entrada a Long Beach, California, una calle comercial muy pintoresca. Como ven, se ha abierto un espacio en este contenedor de diarios y revistas, para que la gente lleve y traiga libros para niños. Es la primera vez que veo el ¨evento¨ en persona, y fue una grata sorpresa.

Hill Country Fossils. By Katherine L. Hester

Wahrmund-Ahrens Road at Willow Creek, Texas. [Photo by Matthew High]

Maybe these limestone hills
contain the bones
we were built on,
but we can do anything now,
can create our own bones
through deliberate science —
the rebar and scaffolding
poking through a skin of caliche,
beer cans left bleached in the cedar,
sucked empty of marrow;
old tires furtively tumbled into the creekbed.

Being ours, they are better.

Here in these lovely houses newly built on the hills
are windows we've learned how to lock,
putting our trust
in the mechanism of their delicate springwork.
Here is the shotgun purchased at K-Mart
stood up in one corner; the cell phone
to be carried at all times
as insurance; the things
that would keep us safe
from a world
we no longer know how to be part of.

Out there in the hills
lie the bones we would prefer not to remember.
Their disorder says only
that we are not
what we would like to think we are.
They insist
there will always be something left that is stronger:
the gouged and knobbed fossil
that is record and remembrance; the skeleton of some animal
found in the October brush, scattered and dragged.

The more that we build, the easier it is to forget:
these limestone hills will always be
the bottom of a sea that is no longer, and sunk
somewhere within it
are cabins chinked with stone; cold,
with rattlesnakes waiting
to wake beneath their raised wooden floors.

We are not the first purveyors of violence;
there will always be
someone waiting in a doorway
for someone else
who might not ever return.

Here in these hills, behind the subdivision rising,
is a graveyard notched high above the elbow of the creekbed,
and there in the family plots,
shells from the ocean that used to exist
have been left, as testament to grief,
in reluctant recognition
of that slow pilgrimage
toward the embrace of these bones
we were each of us built from.

Beneath these jerry-built houses
lie tendon and rock and the spine
of these ridges.
This well-gnawed hank of land is our joy,
and all that is left us.

Shared from:

http://places.designobserver.com/feature/hill-country-fossils/27958/

Installations by Architects

¨Installations by Architects: Experiments in Building and Design, by Sarah Bonnemaison and Ronit Eisenbach (Amazon USA and UK.) Publisher Princeton Architectural Press says: Over the last few decades, a rich and increasingly diverse practice has emerged in the art world that invites the public to touch, enter, and experience the work, whether it is in a gallery, on city streets, or in the landscape. Like architecture, many of these temporary artworks aspire to alter viewers' experience of the environment. An installation is usually the end product for an artist, but for architects it can also be a preliminary step in an ongoing design process. Like paper projects designed in the absence of "real" architecture, installations offer architects another way to engage in issues critical to their practice. Direct experimentation with architecture's material and social dimensions engages the public around issues in the built environment that concern them and expands the ways that architecture can participate in and impact people's everyday lives. The first survey of its kind,Installations by Architects features fifty of the most significant projects from the last twenty-five years by today's most exciting architects (...) Projects are grouped in critical areas of discussion under the themes of tectonics, body, nature, memory, and public space. Each project is supplemented by interviews with the project architects and the discussions of critics and theorists situated within a larger intellectual context.¨

Excerpt from:

http://we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2009/10/book-review-installations-by-a.php#.UMZo24NX1WL

And here´s some of my favorite installations: walking in the park and Sky ear.

Asher DeGroot, David Gallaugher, Kevin James, and Jacob Jebailey, Walking in the Park. Photo credit: Andre Forget (via)

Usman Haque, Sky Ear, 0n September 15, 2004 at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich Park, London

Three books about lives at the urban margins

From publicbooks.org, three books that I'd like to read:

July 18, 2012 — “Every great city,” wrote Friedrich Engels, in The Condition of the Working Class in England, “has one or more slums, where the working-class is crowded together. True, poverty often dwells in hidden alleys close to the palaces of the rich; but, in general, a separate territory has been assigned to it, where, removed from the sight of the happier classes, it may struggle along as it can… The streets are generally unpaved, rough, dirty, filled with vegetable and animal refuse, without sewers or gutters, but supplied with foul, stagnant pools instead.” More than a century and a half later, the subproletariat still inhabits treacherous, dreadful grounds in today’s megacities. With close to a third of the world’s population living in informal settlements, many of them mired in misery and violence, the need to understand and explain their lives is as imperative as it was when Engels first wrote these words. Three recent books here under consideration take up this task in two very distinct cities, Buenos Aires and Mumbai, dissecting the material and symbolic dimensions of life on “the other side.” These vivid portraits convey the external and internal forces that shape and sustain the slum’s challenges, its struggles, its relentlessness, and its cruelty. A dexterous combination of detailed, in-depth reporting and crisp, dynamic writing heeds the calls that urban ethnographers have been making for the past three decades: calls for capturing the viewpoint of those living under oppressive conditions, calls for thick descriptions of their lives and circumstances, calls for narrative writing that appeals to larger publics and politics. These are not only engaging books to read, however. While teaching about the trials and tribulations of residents of stigmatized territories, these three texts provide elements to outline a much-needed political sociology of urban marginality. They describe many of the ways in which the state is deeply implicated in the fate of what sociologist Loïc Wacquant calls “territories of urban relegation.” Privileging the showing more than the telling, authors Boo, Hacher, and Licitra not only allow readers to make the connections between structural forces (such as informalization of the economy or deproletarianization or changing labor markets dynamics) and the lives, behaviors, and beliefs of those at the bottom of the sociosymbolic order. They also demonstrate how the state regulates poor people’s lives sometimes overtly (in the form of police repression, forced evictions), other times covertly (through extortion and intimidation) reproducing much of the precariousness, vulnerability, and violence that define them, and ultimately keeps the dispossessed in their (to a large extent) invisible place.

Read more:

http://publicbooks.org/nonfiction/lives-at-the-urban-margins

¨Bookyards¨ in the park

(...) On a platform atop what amounts to a faux-construction site stands "Hotel Ghent," a temporary, one-room structure created by Japanese artist Tazu Rous. At its center is the station’s massive, four-faced clock, wedged into the room from floor to ceiling. This "hotel" is actually part of a city-wide exhibition called TRACK: A Contemporary City Conversation. Organized by Ghent’s contemporary art museum, S.M.A.K., the exhibition features work by 41 international artists in a variety of mediums including film, sculpture and performance art. (...) 

Italian artist Massimo Bartolini uses his installation to spotlight hidden-away places. For TRACK, Bartolini created "Bookyards," a series of 12 green bookcases in a vineyard near the University of Ghent. The shelves are filled with books and arranged alongside rows of vines so that one ends where the other begins. Bartolini’s pop-up library is only a short distance from the university Book Tower. In contrast to the university library, however, access to "Bookyards" is unrestricted — anyone can browse or borrow books, free of charge.

Excerpt and pictures from

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/arts-and-lifestyle/2012/08/why-cant-entire-city-be-museum/2892/

Journal of Biourbanism

Journal of Biourbanism (JBU) is a peer-reviewed international online journal of architecture, planning, and built environment studies. The journal aims at establishing a bridge between theory and practice in the fields of architectural, design research, and urban planning and built environment and social studies. It reports on the latest research findings innovative approaches for creating responsive environments, with special emphasis on human aspects as a central issue of urban study and architecture.

http://www.biourbanism.org/544/

La leyenda de los mil escalones

Escalinata de Saxamani. De stonek.com

He leído el interesante artículo de Federico Abuaf para La Nación, ¨Lago Titicaca: las aguas mágicas,¨ y de él reproduzco la leyenda de la escalera de Saxamani, con mil escalones:

Escalinata de Saxamani. De redpizarra.org

Escalinata de Saxamani. De lilinatural. http://www.flickr.com/photos/24704763@N04/3451923598/sizes/z/in/photostream/

Saxamani es el principal puerto de la Isla del Sol y está en el sector sur. A escasos pasos de allí se encuentra una escalinata empedrada con mortero de barro (técnica milenaria perteneciente a los tiwanakus) de aproximadamente 60 metros de altura, rodeada de bellos jardines. Al ascender a su punto máximo se encuentra la Fuente de las Tres Aguas, donde confluyen tres chorros de agua que representan la purificación, la vida y la juventud. Los lugareños afirman que quienes beben de ella sanarán su alma y prolongarán su vida eternamente.

Cuenta la leyenda que el líder inca era subido por seis sacerdotes del imperio hasta la cúspide de los mil escalones de Saxamani, en un trono de oro, para beber el agua sagrada. Por esta razón es común que algunas interpretaciones señalen que la fuente representa las tres leyes máximas de los incas: ama sua, ama llulla y ama khella, que significan no robes, no mientas y no seas flojo.

Gordon Cullen's The Concise Townscape (El Paisaje Urbano)

If somebody asks me which is my favorite book on urbanism, I won't think it twice. I love Gordon Cullen's The Concise Townscape, that I've read in Spanish as El Paisaje Urbano.

I must have been 18 years old when I bought the book, and today, it could seem simple, without impressive scientific theories -as we read today-, but Gordon was so clear, that you'd never forget the basic concepts of urban design.

And the sketches, beautiful, even today in the era of the computers. I'm sharing some of them that I've downloaded from Google images. 

Thomas Gordon Cullen (b. 9 August 1914, Calverley - 11 August 1994, Wraysbury) was an influential English architect and urban designer who was a key motivator in the Townscape movement. He is best known for the book Townscape, first published in 1961. Later editions of Townscape were published under the title The Concise Townscape.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Cullen

Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War

A German poster printed in the Netherlands, 1943: "Atlantic Wall: 1943 is not 1918"

This is an excerpt of Martin Filler´s review for The New York review of books: 

 There has long been a tendency to see the most important innovations of Modernism as arising directly from progressive causes. War, in this view, was considered a limiting if not wholly destructive force that stymied civilian architecture in favor of retrogressive military structures. But in his groundbreaking recent book Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War, the French architectural historian and architect Jean-Louis Cohen establishes one big, awful, inescapable truth: the full potential of twentieth-century architecture, engineering, and design was realized not in the social-welfare and urban-improvement schemes beloved by the early proponents of the Modern Movement, but rather through technologies perfected during the two world wars to slaughter vast armies, destroy entire cities, decimate noncombatant populations, and industrialize genocide. It is hard to come away from Architecture in Uniform without the same feelings of profound horror and lingering dread that overtake readers of recent books on World War II by Max Hastings, Timothy Snyder, and other historians who continue to reveal with terrifying immediacy just how horrific that catastrophe was. And yet it also had paradoxical consequences for architecture. High among the major misconceptions that Cohen addresses in this heroic project—which included an eponymous exhibition he curated at Montreal’s Canadian Centre for Architecture last summer—is that World War II brought the building art to a veritable halt. Although non-essential commercial and residential construction were indeed banned for the duration of the war in the US, architecture and engineering proceeded apace in the military sphere. Urgent contingencies spurred the rapid development of new synthetic materials (especially plastics of all sorts) and imaginative technical solutions (including lightweight and portable structures as well as new forms of prefabrication) that would have taken far longer to emerge under less pressured peacetime conditions. Now a professor at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts and the University of Paris VIII, Cohen was himself touched by the immediate legacy of the war in the French capital where he grew up. Although he recounts such inspiring feats as the wholesale retooling of American manufacturing for the all-out war effort—which spelled certain doom for the Axis once our industrially invincible country entered the conflict in 1941—darker episodes predominate. Impelled by the saga of his mother (the wife of a leading French Communist Party official), who was a slave laborer in the greenhouses appended to the Dachau concentration camp, Cohen recounts how design concepts devised for human betterment were most effectively reapplied by the Nazis to the vilest ends: 

 It was a kind of sadistic radicalization of the research on the minimum habitation that had been conducted under the Weimar Republic by architects in Berlin and Frankfurt, whose purpose was the large-scale production of affordable modern housing for large urban populations. The concentration camp version of the Existenzminimum was compressed beyond any imaginable limits.

Fritz Ertl: Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, detention sheds, November 1944

KEEP ON READING:

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/jul/17/modern-architecture-dark-side/

Urban Composition. Developing community through design

Sharing from asladirt: 

In Urban Composition: Developing Community through Design, Professor Mark C. Childs, who teaches architecture at the University of New Mexico, declares that “settlements are not just the sums of their parts; their poetry and vitality comes from their collective composition – the interactions among multiple designs.” In other words, it’s the way multiple individually-designed pieces work together that leads to the overall success of a place. These pieces include buildings, parks, streets, and works of public art. Each of these components is individually crafted by an architect, landscape architect, or artist. Childs argues that good urban design occurs through a concinnity of these components. He defines concinnity as “the skillful and harmonious adaptation or fitting together of parts to craft a whole.” He writes “great places emerge from the concinnity of incremental acts of design. Existing work frames new projects, which in turn inspire future works.” Each designed element should innovate while still drawing from the existing cultural, environmental, and physical context. In this way, the components of a city can be individually interesting and part of a coherent larger whole. 
Childs describes these individual acts of design as falling within a design hierarchy. He gives the example of a building, which is located on a lot, which is part of a block, which is part of a larger pattern of blocks and streets, which is in turn influenced by the topography of the city. Each of these layers becomes progressively permanent: a building is more likely to change than the lot boundaries, which are less permanent than the underlying topography. Additionally, a building creates new spaces for interior design, from the division of rooms to the arrangement of furniture. These layers of design define how different design professions interact with each other. The interactions between multiple designers operating at different scales leads to a rich urban composition. However, the precise distinctions within this design hierarchy aren’t always clear. Childs writes, “when do architects place buildings in landscapes versus landscape architects place designs around buildings?”  

 Keep on reading:

http://dirt.asla.org/2012/07/03/cities-are-more-than-just-buildings-and-parks/

From "Marginalia: Little Libraries in the Urban Margins"

 

 " The last few years have seen the emergence of myriad mini, pop-up, guerilla and ad-hoc libraries, which are part of the phenomenon that Mimi Zeiger, in her Interventionist’s Toolkit series for this journal, calls “provisional, opportunistic, ubiquitous, and odd tactics in guerilla and DIY practice and urbanism” — to which I might add, librarianship. Nowadays we have libraries in phone booths and mailboxes, in public parks and train stations, in vacant storefronts and parking lots. Often these are spaces of experimentation, where new models of library service and public engagement can be test-piloted, or where core values can be reassessed and reinvigorated. They are also often an effort to reclaim — for the commons, for the sake of enlightenment (or does this term now carry too much baggage to be used without scare quotes?) — a small corner of public space in cities that have lately become hyper-commercialized, cities that might no longer reflect the civic aspirations of a diverse public. As DePauw University librarian Mandy Henk puts it, “They ... show the power of self-organization and what people can build working together, outside of traditional institutions. Building and using them is a form community empowerment.” These new library projects might seem to emerge from a common culture and uphold a common mission — a flurry of press coverage in late 2011 represented them as a coherent "little library" movement. But in fact they don't. They have varied aims and politics and assumptions about what a library is and who its publics are; their collections and services differ significantly; and their forms and functions vary from one locality to another. I want to attempt here to identify a loose, and inevitably leaky, typology of "little libraries" — to figure out where they’re coming from, how they relate to existing institutions that perform similar roles, and what impact they’re having on their communities." 

 Read the full essay by SHANNON MATTERN

http://places.designobserver.com/feature/little-libraries-and-tactical-urbanism/33968/

Straphanger: a book about urban transportation

The automobile has encouraged obesity and social isolation, destroyed public space, encouraged fossil-fuel driven foreign wars, and undone the fabric of once great cities. Those are some pretty heavy accusations, but Taras Grescoe makes the charges stick with a compelling mix of reportage, cutting humor, and historic research. But Straphanger isn't just another screed against the car. In this timely and persuasive book, Grescoe joins the ranks of the world's straphangers-the growing number of people who rely on public transportation to go about the business of their daily lives. In North America, the perception of transit is often unflattering-it is too often seen as a squalid last resort for those with one too many drunk-driving charges, too poor to afford insurance, or too decrepit to get behind the wheel of a car. Indeed, a century of auto-oriented culture and bad city planning has left most of North America with transit that is underfunded, ill maintained, and ill conceived. But as the demand for oil fast outpaces the world's supply, a revolution in transportation is under way. On a journey that takes him to New York, Moscow, Paris, Copenhagen, Tokyo, Bogotá, Phoenix, Portland, Vancouver, and Philadelphia, Grescoe gets the inside story on the world's great transit systems, going beneath the streets to see subway tunnels being dug, boarding state-of-the-art streetcars, and hopping on high-speed trains, along the way uncovering new ideas that will help undo the damage a century of car-centric planning has done to our cities. Ultimately he envisions a future with convenient, affordable, and sustainable urban transportation-and better city living-for all.

From:

http://www.tarasgrescoe.com/straphanger/about.html

And from Atlanticcities.com:

"This book is, in part, the story of a bad idea: the notion that our metropolises should be shaped by the needs of cars, rather than people," he writes.

Grescoe recently took a break from his platform hopping to give Atlantic Cities readers a view from his strap. "I've really focused on the urban experience in my travels," he says. And away we go.

What compelled you to write a whole book about urban transportation?

I've been exploring cities around the world for almost 20 years. I spend a lot time getting oriented to cities, and walking around cities, and exploring them by public transit. When you do that, you realize that cities are formed, to a certain extent — not inevitably, but often — by their transportation systems. I wanted to draw on my experience of urban exploring and put together a book that looked at which cities were coping best with congestion and sprawl, and which were using transit to escape from those things.

The book is as much about cars and cities as it is about public transit.

I see a lot of problems facing cities going down the road in terms of highways, cars, and sprawl. There's a certain point where I was thinking of writing just a black book of the automobile, which involved the negative impacts they have on cities. But it occurred to me that you can take a positive approach to cities too. Really the way out of the negative is the positive of public transit.

Photo by Erin Churchill

Read more:

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/commute/2012/06/confessions-straphanger/2354/

Paper for Emerging Architectural Research P.E.A.R

Matthew Butcher with Tom Noonan, courtesy of P.E.A.R.
A perspective section of “The Filter House” by Matthew Butcher, printed in the December issue of P.E.A.R. magazine.

From the article by Elias Redstone, at NYTimes Magazine on line:

The last few years have seen a new generation of alternative publications and editorial talent emerge, and London is very much a part of the scene. This month saw the release of the fourth issue of P.E.A.R. (Paper for Emerging Architectural Research). Printed on newspaper stock, this zine (included in “Archizines,” a show I curated at the Architectural Association School of Architecture) was started by the editorial collective of Rashid Ali, Matthew Butcher, Julian Krueger and Megan O’Shea, with the designer Avni Patel, in 2009. A few issues in, they have really hit their stride. “The paper aims to re-establish the fanzine as a primary medium for the dissemination of architectural ideas, musings, research and works, and to present the complexity and variety of architectural practice,” O’Shea explains. “We actively seek to publish thinking that wouldn’t ordinarily be seen in the mainstream architectural press, and we are interested in showing that the architectural is concerned with more than just architecture.”

Accordingly, they asked a variety of architects, artists, academics and writers to contribute texts and images relating to notions of dwelling, both as a physical and psychological space. The paper also sometimes comes alive through curated events. “While the paper is concerned with the relationship between architecture and publishing, and particularly with making tangible conceptual architecture, the events are more about thinking through performance,” O’Shea adds. “They activate the research and put the research into action.”

A city's memory through the wind. In the words of Italo Calvino

Portsmouth flood. From metro.co.UK

Too much has been said about cities and memories. But to relate them to weather's memories, it's not common. Though, I'm always missing my beautiful Buenos Aires and every time I think of it, I remember terrible cold and hot days, huge storms and even snow there was a few years ago.

This story by Italo Calvino, author of the great book The Invisible Cities made me think about it. Its name is Wind in a City, from the book Dark Numbers. Here, my favorite part, enjoy!:

Storm in Puerto Madero, Buenos Aires, 2010. Posted by Sebastián López Sánchez. Flickr.com

Something, but I couldn’t understand what. People walking along level streets as if they were going uphill or down, lips and nostrils twitching like gills, then houses and doors in flight and the street corners sharper than usual. It was the wind: later on I realized.

Turin is a windless city. The streets are canals of motionless air fading into infinity like screaming sirens: motionless air, glassy with frost or soft with haze, stirred only by the trams skimming by on their rails. For months I forget there is such a thing as wind; all that’s left is a vague need.

But all it takes is for a gust rising from the bottom of a street one day, rising and coming to meet me, and I remember my windblown village beside the sea, the houses ranged above and below each other, and the wind in the middle going up and down, and streets of steps and cobbles, and slashes of blue windy sky above the alleyways. And home with the shutters banging, the palm trees groaning at the windows, and my father’s voice shouting on the hilltop.

I’m like that, a wind man, who needs friction and headway when he’s walking, needs suddenly to shout and bite the air when he’s speaking. When the wind lifts in town, spreading from suburb to suburb in tongues of colourless flame, the town opens up before me like a book, it’s as though I could recognize everybody I see, I feel like yelling, ‘Hey there!’ to the girls, the cyclists, like shouting out what I’m thinking, waving my hands.

Personalization of the sick city of London in Daniel Defoe’s words

Illustration of the city of London and the plague. From http://www.learningcurve.gov.uk/images/great-plague/plague-illustration.jpg

I came across with this book, and though it does not have the psychological sense and spirituality of The Plague by Albert Camus, the story is interesting, considering it  has a remarkable fabric that gathers fact and imagination.

In the prologue, Maynadier says that the Journal is probably the writer’s own recollection. It seems to have been established that Daniel Defoe (1659-1731) was five or six years old during the Plague Year, instead of four as has been previously supposed, and therefore of an age to receive a pretty distinct impression of the gloom which overspread the city. During the next years of his childhood, he would naturally hear from the city people of his acquaintance many a tale of the pestilence, the most appalling experience they had known. The plague that stroke England in 1665, was the same disease that more than three hundred years before, drove Boccaccio’s gay Florentines to the villa where the stories of the Decameron were told. The spots on the skin were formerly common tokens of the disease. Another symptoms are fever, vomiting, the frightful aches and pains, the swellings or buboes in the neck, armpit, or groin. Rats are supposed to be carriers of the pestilence.

The text I reproduce below, is Defoe’s reflection of how he feels or understands the city. Here, we see the personalization he makes of it, London is a suffering haptic city, it  has a face, composed by all the faces of the citizens that express the anguish, that is also shown in the public buildings, in the closed houses. There is no way we can imagine the sick physical city separated from its inhabitants.

Mural at the Eyam Museum. From http://www.eyammuseum.demon.co.uk/mural.jpg

A tear sheet from a newspaper. From http://faculty.up.edu/asarnow/images/MUTABIL2.GIF

 “The face of London was now indeed strangely altered, I mean the whole mass of buildings, city, liberties, suburbs, Westminster, Southwark, and altogether; for as to the particular part called the city, or within the walls, that was not yet much infected. But in the whole the face of things, I say, was much altered; sorrow and sadness sat upon every face; and though some parts were not yet overwhelmed, yet all looked deeply concerned; and as we saw it apparently coming on, so every one looked on himself and his family as in the utmost danger. Were it possible to represent those times exactly to those that did not see them, and give the reader due ideas of the horror that everywhere presented itself, it must make just impressions upon their minds and fill them with surprise. London might well be said to be all in tears; the mourners did not go about the streets indeed, for nobody put on black or made a formal dress of mourning for their nearest friends; but the voice of mourning was truly heard in the streets.”

REFERENCE

Daniel Defoe, Howard Maynadier. The works of Daniel Defoe. Volume 9. A Journal of the Plague Year. Written by a citizen who continued all the while in London.

Department of English, Harvard University. Thomas Y. Crowell and Co. Publishers. New York. Copyright 1904 by the University Press.
Read more about Los Angeles plague in 1924:
http://myriammahiques.blogspot.com/2009/10/urban-consequences-of-1924-plague-in.html

House and body: Sir Rabindranath Tagore’s dream of Calcutta

Calcutta. Image from http://boudoir.files.wordpress.com/

Calcutta street. Image from http://www.timwu.org/Calcutta%20Street.JPG

I had a most extraordinary dream last night. The whole of Calcutta seemed enveloped in some awful mystery, the houses being only dimly visible through a dense, dark mist, within the veil of which there were strange doings.

I was going along Park Street in a hackney carriage, and as I passed St. Xavier's College I found it had started growing rapidly and was fast getting impossibly high within its enveloping haze. Then it was borne in on me that a band of magicians had come to Calcutta who, if they were paid for it, could bring about many such wonders.

When I arrived at our Jorasanko house, I found these magicians had turned up there too. They were ugly-looking, of a Mongolian type, with scanty moustaches and a few long hairs sticking out of their chins. They could make men grow. Some of the girls wanted to be made taller, and the magician sprinkled some powder over their heads and they promptly shot up.

To every one I met I kept repeating: "This is most extraordinary,--just like a dream!"

Then some one proposed that our house should be made to grow. The magicians agreed, and as a preliminary began to take down some portions.

The dismantling over, they demanded money, or else they would not go on. The cashier strongly objected. How could payment be made before the work was completed? At this the magicians got wild and twisted up the building most fearsomely, so that men and brickwork got mixed together, bodies inside walls and only head and shoulders showing.

It had altogether the look of a thoroughly devilish business, as I told my eldest brother. "You see," said I, "the kind of thing it is. We had better call upon God to help us!" But try as I might to anathematise them in the name of God, my heart felt like breaking and no words would come. Then I awoke.

A curious dream, was it not? Calcutta in the hands of Satan and growing diabolically, within the darkness of an unholy mist!

Reference.

Glimpses of Bengal. By Sir Rabindranath Tagore. S.R.Ellison, Eric Eldred, and the Distributed Proofreading Team. 1885-1895. The letter selected belongs to the Shazadpur series and it’s dated 1891

Reading the Islamic City: Discursive Practices and Legal Judgment

Prince and scholars in a garden. c. 1615-20 watercolor on paper. Image from

http://daseinthinker.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/prince_scholars_garden.jpg

This is a book that has just been published by one of the members of ACS (Architecture, Culture and Spirituality, Dr Akel Ismail Kahera, director of the Texas Institute for the Preservation of History and Culture. Being part of the group myself, I find it useful for my research on urban morphology.

Here´s the book´s description from Amazon:

Reading the Islamic City offers insights into the implications the practices of the Maliki school of Islamic law have for the inhabitants of the Islamic city, the madinah. The problematic term madinah fundamentally indicates a phenomenon of building, dwelling, and urban settlement patterns that evolved after the 7th century CE in the Maghrib (North Africa) and al-Andalusia (Spain). Madinah involves multiple contexts that have socio-religious functions and symbolic connotations related to the faith and practice of Islam, and can be viewed in terms of a number of critiques such as everyday lives, boundaries, utopias, and dystopias. The book considers Foucault’s power/knowledge matrix as it applies to an erudite cadre of scholars and legal judgments in the realm of architecture and urbanism. It acknowledges the specificity of power/knowledge insofar as it provides a dominant framework to tackle property rights, custom, noise, privacy, and a host of other subjects. Scholars of urban studies, religion, history, and geography will greatly benefit from this vivid analysis of the relevance of the juridico-discursive practice of Maliki Law in a set of productive or formative discourses in the Islamic city.

Beyond Shelter: Architecture and Human Dignity

Architecture is not always related to wonderful, artistic buildings. Sometimes this is the real architecture.

A book I´d like to have, and here the review from:

http://www.metropolismag.com/story/20110811/beyond-shelter-architecture-and-human-dignity

Across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the United States, groundbreaking work is being done by small teams of outstanding professionals who are helping communities to recover from disaster and rebuild, bridging the gap that separates short-term emergency needs from long-term sustainable recovery. Questions about the role and responsibility of architects in disaster recovery have been circulating since the Indian Ocean tsunami killed more than 200,000 people in 2004. In the last decade, 200 million people have been affected by natural disasters and hazards. Ninety-eight percent of these victims are in the developing world, where billions of dollars in aid are absorbed annually by climatic and geologic crises. Those in the developed world are not immune, as extreme temperatures, intense heat waves, increased flooding and droughts expose vast numbers of people to the experience of the eco-refugee. Beyond Shelter is a call to action. It features 20 generously illustrated reports from the field, written by the founders of some of the world’s most provocative architecture and engineering firms and studios (Arup, Estudio Teddy Cruz, Urban Think Tank); accomplished nonprofits and research centers (Architectes de l’Urgence, Article 25 Development and Disaster Relief, the Institute for Sustainable Solutions at Portland State University, Development Workshop France); and leaders of such prominent organizations as the Red Cross, UN-Habitat and the World Wildlife Fund. All of these people are on the frontlines of disaster prevention and recovery, in rural and urban areas alike. Beyond Shelter presents projects in such diverse locales as Manila, New Orleans, Gujarat, São Paulo, rural Vietnam, Kashmir, the Gola Forest in Sierra Leone, Greensburg, Kansas and the village of Soba, outside Khartoum. Together they illustrate the reality that evolving risk requires new ways of thinking, and that architects have a leading role to play.

Edited by Marie J. Aquilino. Published by Metropolis Books

Le Corbusier, Homme de Lettres by M. Christine Boyer

Excerpt from Noah Chasin's review for archpaper.com:

A massive undertaking initiated in 1993 and finally published 18 years later, M. Christine Boyer’s Le Corbusier, Homme de Lettres comprises nothing so much as an attempt to work systematically through the most significant output of the legendary 20th century Swiss-French architect, namely his written works. While his completed buildings scarcely number 60, he managed to write 50 books and thousands more letters, articles, and lecture notes. This is not to count his artistic output, which when added to the aforementioned represents an astounding creative and intellectual achievement, one more than worthy of his reputation. Boyer chose to focus exclusively on the 1907–1947 period, claiming debatably that the architect’s postwar writings were largely repetitive and derivative of his earlier work. Surely, given that Boyer needed 781 pages to examine those forty years, we can all be thankful (perhaps as was the author herself) that a limit was imposed.

COVER OF THE FIRST ISSUE OF THE JOURNAL L'ESPRIT NOUVEAU (1920).

Homme de lettres, most easily translates into English as “Man of Letters,”a nomenclature rarely chosen by the individual himself but more often bestowed upon an individual who is commonly regarded as a public intellectual. Nevertheless, Homme de lettres is the occupation that Le Corbusier chose to emblazon on his French carte d’identité. If one knows one thing about Corbusier, it is that he had no lack of confidence in his architectural acumen, so the refusal to identify as merely an architect was less limited by “either/or” than it was an expression, to paraphrase Robert Venturi, of “both/and.” Clearly he saw his vocation as one that went far beyond design and into the more metaphysical realm of the intellect, and, perhaps of greater importance, that this intellectual practice had a resolutely public dimension. Perhaps his desire to participate in a public discourse might even be termed a calling, given the fact that he chronicled his life (seemingly for posterity) from a very early age, largely through correspondence with a close group of friends and above all with his mentor and teacher from his school days in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Charles L’Eplattenier.

Seven sketches by Jean Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier). Princeton Architectural Press

Boyer makes a great and most valiant effort to construct a narrative from the hundreds of thousands of words Corbusier spilled, and slowly but surely, common themes emerge. They are not surprising for those who have scrutinized Corbusier’s oeuvre, but here these matters are given larger context. As a representative example, Boyer helps us see the relationship between the development of Corbusier’s ideas about the individual and society by uncovering his friendship and correspondence with George Henri Rivière, assistant director of the Musée d’Ethnographie. Through Rivière Corbusier learned of the work of legendary sociologist Marcel Mauss and of Mauss’ insistence on the importance of looking at everyday objects in order to discern the more elusive details of the society under investigation. Boyer demonstrates how Corbusier’s writings from the mid-1930s when traveling in South America reflect Mauss’ dictum, describing them as “inquiries into the lyrical materiality of objects and the magical mise en scène of cities.” We might extend Boyer’s analysis to Corbusier’s groundbreaking 1923 volume entitled Vers une architecture, in which Corbusier famously juxtaposed images of automobiles and steamships with classical temples so as to underscore his belief in the crucial yet delicate relationship between form and function.

Keep on reading:

http://www.archpaper.com/news/articles.asp?id=5585