PHOTO GALLERY: EASTERN SPRING
THAT SPECIAL TIME of year… when the pastels of the DDR Plattenbauten match the budding flowers.
Architecture
HANSAVIERTEL: THE SPIRIT OF ’57
The Interbau (International Building Exhibition) of 1957 was a bold attempt to not only rebuild but also re-modernize Hansaviertel, the bulb-shaped section of Berlin-Tiergarten that had been devastated by Allied bombs during the war. Designed by a team of modernist architects including Le Corbusier, Oskar Niemeyer, and Walter Gropius, the project presented its angular, geometric, and frequently colorful designs as a Western counterpoint to the grandiose neoclassical rebuild of Karl-Marx-Allee in the Soviet Quarter.
PHANTOM ARCHITECTURE OF THE AMERICAN SOUTHWEST: ONLY THE SIGNS REMAIN
Now I know why they call Main Street a drag
– Jeremy Gluck, Sorrow Drive
CIVILISATIONS ARE JUDGED by what they leave behind. Sometime around the beginning of the automobile age – that period in the post-war years when car ownership became not merely affordable but essential – it was determined that there existed a proportional relationship between the speed of travel and the size a sign needed to be in order to convey its information to the traveller. Simply put, as roads grew wider and faster, the signs grew larger.
THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF BERLIN TYPOGRAPHY
Berlin Typography is a project dedicated to celebrating the incredible range of sign-based type that proliferates throughout the German capital. It reveals an astounding range of typefaces, ranging from traditional blackletter to midcentury sans-serifs to a bewildering spread of outliers (with a particular soft spot for cursive neon, a signature Berlin aesthetic if there ever was one).
The project’s tagline, “Words and the City”, evokes the corporeal nature of urban signage, with numerous pictures revealing the particular detail given to punctuation, umlauts, and the uniquely German Eszett (ß).
PHANTOM ARCHITECTURE OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA: GHOSTS OF THE NATIONAL TRAIL
THE STRETCH OF road between Goffs and Amboy, California, has been around for over a hundred years, and in that time it has been known by many names. It initially formed a part of the National Old Trails Road, a primitive, mostly unpaved cross-country route that predated the establishment of the US highway system. In the late 1920s it was incorporated into Route 66 and under this designation it served for decades as the main thoroughfare through the Mojave desert.
PHOTO GALLERY: YOYOGI STADIUM, TOKYO
IN THE SUMMER of 2020, Yoyogi Stadium (also known as the Yoyogi National Gymnasium) will come full circle, playing host to the Olympics for the second time in half a century. Built for the 1964 Tokyo games, the stadium’s striking combination of viking-ship roof and brutalist concrete is the work of acclaimed architect Kenzo Tange, who also designed the Hiroshima Peace Memorial.