Midway through our mini-trek into the Fjords, we stopped at the Kaupanger stave church, which dates from the 12th century. This is the largest stave church in the county of Sogn og Fjordane, which also includes the famous Briksdalsbreen arm of the Jostedalsbreen glacier.
While perusing the small gift shop, I discovered a set of postcards of watercolor drawings by architect and painter Franz Wilhelm Schiertz. Schiertz's command of watercolors lends itself to beautiful landscapes - his palette is decisive and he blends the colors smoothly. Pablo observed that the quality of the pencil lines (quick and light but precise) evidenced the use of a mechanical drawing aid, such as a camera lucida.
camera lucida (photo credits to vam.ac.uk)
The Schiertz paintings are all circa 1840, when mechanically-aided drawings were so prevalent that they created a style of drawing in which the artist sought to emulate the line quality and composition afforded by a camera lucida. One of the drawings depicts the stave church at Borgund against a mountain backdrop.
Borgund Stave Church by Hanz Wilhelm Schiertz (c. 1840)
The next day, when we indeed went to Borgund to view the stave church, Pablo and I traipsed around the church with the intent of recreating the scene as Schiertz drew it. Fences hindered our progress, but from the angle nearest to the original, we could see that something was fishy.
As close as I could approximate the view in the Franz Wilhelm Schiertz painting
Although the church sat in the landscape below as it had in the painting (the tower to the right of the church in the painting is behind the tree in the photo), the mountains behind were entirely different. The mountains as they actually appeared did not even closely resemble the formations in the painting. The mountain that slopes up to the right in the painting slopes down to the left in the photo. There can only be one conclusion: Schiertz made falsified the view. This didn't come as a surprise to me, but Pablo exhausted every possible angle to the problem, supposing that Schiertz used a mirror to reflect the mountains behind him, but since the painted mountains weren't even a conceivably accurate mirror of the actual formations, he eventually had to concede that the mountains in the painting were a fake.
I know that painters make things up all the time, or at the very least stretch the truth to fit within their desires, but never before have I been confronted with the contradiction. Rather, I've never been able to verify the physical truth of a painting. Does it matter that the artist altered reality for the sake of composition? How else can a man move mountains, if not with his hands? Does my understanding of the building change significantly between one or the other? The painting is already inaccurate since Schiertz is taking creative liberties with his watercoloring. Is a photo more real than a painting? Pablo would say that the painting in its falsity deceives the viewer as to the church's scale, siting and orientation. Schiertz does a further injustice to the vikings who, presumably, carefully positioned the church with respect to the surrounding landscape. I find it interesting that Schiertz found the situation as it stood to be incorrect, at least for the purposes of his painting. I trust the painter more than the reality, because while the reality is what's there, the painting opens me up to what could be there.
Several days ago, we visited the Utzon Center in Aalborg, Denmark. Jørn Utzon, by whom the center was designed and for whom the center is named, is most famous for designing the Sydney Opera House.
Sydney Opera House (photo credits: clarkvision.com)
This is his Center, as seen from the Bredning River.
Jørn Utzon Center (photo credits to the Utzon Center website)
Among the exhibits shown at the center, was the final projects of the graduating Aalborg University Architecture and Design majors. The program at AAU is also a five-year program, and the diversity and depth of issues tackled by the students in their final projects resembled that of the CMU fifth year thesis program.
The general consensus of our group of students was, that the work we saw on the walls looked like student work. It was easy enough for us to make that decision, but less so to determine what aspects of the work clued us in to its being designed by students.
This is a project that I felt particularly emblematic of the "student" type of final work.
Solar City Nørresundby by Helle Hejler Andersen and Mathias Lind Klogborg
Solar City Nørresundby by Helle Hejler Andersen and Mathias Lind Klogborg
The composition of the poster on the left is common to the work shown at CMU. From the conceptual elevations at the top to the renderings at the bottom, the entire board looks student-produced. Even the line separating the course number from the project name, I've seen in many projects at CMU, and seems to be a device employed exclusively by architecture students.
The accompanying model evidences a more resourceful student; I particularly appreciated the use of dried plaster mesh for the facade.
While the presentations boards did not strike me as particularly remarkable (although I appreciated that they were all in English), the consistently high level of quality shown in the models surprised me. As my year has progressed through the architectural curriculum, I've seen the emphasis in final materials shift away from the final model and more to the digital material. It's a twofold problem: students stop making models and professors stop requiring them especially as the digital model seems to be rendering the physical model obsolete.
I still see an important relevance to the physical model which was confirmed for me by the project at the AAU student projects. Physical models force the architect to consider materials in the way that a digital model does not. Digitally, it's dangerously easy to create a wall out of, literally, nothing. By building a physical model, the architect must consider how the building physically stands up and gets put together. It's much easier to identify design flaws with regards to construction in a physical model, and many students who omit them do so because that have not worked out these conditions. Students who work out these issues in their models successfully rise high above the rest.
SubDenCity by Nicki Holland Johansen, Susie Rosengren Nørgaard and Henriette Falk Olesen
SubDenCity by Nicki Holland Johansen, Susie Rosengren Nørgaard and Henriette Falk Olesen
I get very little exposure to student work outside of CMU, but when I do, I'm surprised at the similarities. If the similarities do not occur because students are sharing information, is it a natural inclination within the student? Or does language and technique get handed down by the professor, which would imply the professors are all gathering their information from a similar pool? Either some group of people at some higher level are sharing information and disseminating it to the architectural community, or, by random chance we're all tapped into a similar mode of thinking that expresses itself in our projects.
The amusement park is where architecture and tourism collide. Outside the realm of architectural tourism, where a student or practitioner of architecture makes a pilgrimage to a building or group of buildings, the amusement park is an environment constructed entirely for the enjoyment of the average person. One needn't be an architect to enjoy the buildings and, indeed, the park would never make any money if that were a requirement. As an aspiring architect, and a meta-tourist, I find the concept of building an alternate reality fascinating.
The amusement park is a purely touristic phenomenon. It's an entire landscape built purely for the enjoyment and spectacle of a visitor who may only spend as many as four hours. The park has a very specific goal and purpose: to immerse the visitor in fun. This is why theme parks tend to be in rural areas or, in the cases of parks in dense cities, to be entirely walled in. This is partly to control who enters, but it serves a more profound purpose: to hide the outside world.
Tivoli Gardens is one of the earliest examples of the amusement park as we know it. The original park buildings date to 1843. While it predates the first World's Fair by eight years, Tivoli shares the interest in exotic foreignness that pervaded European culture in the second half of the 19th century. With particular emphasis on the orient, Tivoli creates a magical paradise which immerses the visitor in foreign images and architecture to transport them to another place.
The park meets the city around it in a combination of wall and storefront. Some walls are simply nine-foot tall slabs of concrete and others are metal rail which allows the passerby a peek into a fantasy land.
Among the oldest buildings is the Pantomime Theatre, which opened in 1874. The Theatre, designed by the Dane Vilhelm Dahlerup, is a classic European interpretation of traditional East Asian architecture.
A fine detail in this theatre. which enhances the general exotic atmosphere is the unique stage curtain. The peacock's wings unfold to reveal the players on stage and the peacock itself, along with its wings, sink beneath the stage.
Most notably, Tivoli's design and atmosphere influenced Walt Disney's planning of his own theme park. In many cases, Tivoli feels like an older version of Disneyland. The park is broken down into a few different, unique areas. The transitions are a little sloppy but the architecture lets you know when you've reached another area by evoking a different world region, as in the case of Nimb, the Middle Eastern palace (with a dollop of Russian on top?)
Unique to Tivoli, or rather, not common in America, is the variety of people who enjoy the park. Beyond the young family, which is a staple of all amusement parks, I saw a surprising number of elderly and older people. These people were obviously locals and, unlike the busloads of tourists, visited Tivoli much as they would any public park. I saw a pair of elderly women sitting on a shaded bench just on the edge of a major point of intersection in several of the park's paths. They talked merrily and laughed easily, evidently two old friends who may have been engaging in a weekly routine of spending a warm summer's afternoon at Tivoli.
This piqued my interest, as their purpose for being at Tivoli was far removed from my expectations of my own experience, which were to see as much as I possibly could and photograph everything. The diversity of experiences and visitors that I saw at Tivoli, such as the middle-aged couples who came to spend an evening at one of to park's world-class restaurants, caused me to question my expectations of the "theme park" experience. The park can be a delight to both young and old.
