The Three Best Buildings in Ouagadougou

With all of the previous post's photographs, I'm splitting the post from Ouagadougou in two, this is the second part. In a city which overwhelms with astonishing architecture, here are what I thought were the three high points of the city's many intriguing buildings, in order of how I saw them.

I. Banque Commerciale du Burkina

Like many self-aggrandizing works of architecture, this astonishing office block is a chapel dedicated to the often-bizarre pseudo-colonial politics of the Trans-Sahara.

The Commercial Bank of Burkina Faso is one of the more prominent and permanent relics of Libya's Muammar Qaddafi's (however you like to spell it) various forms of intervention into Burkina, as part of a wider strategy to wield influence across Western and Central Africa at the height of his power in the 1980s and 1990s.

This resulted in this cartoonishly eloquent building, its body a pair of concave wings, tiled in two shades of greenish-blue, ribbed by an order of sharp-pointed fins which faces Ouagadougou's main commercial thoroughfare. The single most remarkable element is unquestionably the four robot-headed corner circulation wells, cubed where the rest of the building is curved, with protruding porthole windows where the rest of the façade is fronted in columns of tiny balconies, which are not not juliette-terraces off the offices but ornately-formed mechanical spaces to house external air conditioning units—this is not the only example such small external shelf-balconies without direct door access).

What's all the more incredible to contemplate is that this building was not designed or built in 1977 but was opened by Qaddafi personally in 2003, the chipped tiled exterior is barely ten years old(I find this still hard to believe and wonder if this building was built at the banks' founding in 1988 and that Qaddafi opened some other, newer building elsewhere in the city; such is the dearth of contemporary architectural history scholarship on the city that I haven't been able to work this out).

II. Grand Marche

One of the most important civic spaces in Ouagadougou is also one its most contrasting, and therefore all the more astounding. In a city which is characterized by pastel-painted pseudo-mud-brick post-modernism, one of the country's largest buildings is predominated by a magnificent brutalism: in its size, shape and material it appears straight off a state university engineering quad, from the fenestration orders shading tiny square windows, to the rest of the enclosed space articulated in the red brick of a community college library.

But most the space is not enclosed: the market's true triumph is the soaring girder spans, a section of highway overpass shading an upper-level trading floor, its ceiling height recalling the more inspiring atmospheres of brutal train stations or other civic architecture from other continents, yet with the benefit of the Sahelian climate; there are no walls.

I would have photographed more aspects of the structure but I was constantly mobbed by haggling craft dealers. I am not sure of the age of this building but while it also stylistically looks to be several decades old, it may be a replacement for the older market that suffered a devastating fire in 2003, and so may also be only about ten years old (but could also be the standing site of the fire; not clear). It also not the only brutal civic structure in the city: the main railway station also hoists aloft a soaring slab of concrete, but it was too difficult to try to photograph there.

III. Monument des Martyrs

Also known as the Monument to National Heroes, this is surely Burkina Faso's single most bizarre edifice, and for that reason the one that makes listicles like The Most Astonishing Space Age Buildings in Africa!, so it's conceivable that readers will have come across a straight-on shot of this mirrored-glass Eiffel Tower.

This was the grand-projet of Burkina Faso's president since 1987, not only glorifying the fratricide revolution that brought him to power, but the centerpiece of the brand-new planned quarter of the city that was designed for the turn of the century: Ouaga 2000 [French link], an elite diplomatic and residential area which sprawls in half-deserted, axial grandeur on the southwestern edge of Ouagadougou, like a French-inspired section of Tempe, Arizona. The Monument stands in the middle of a scrubby field, which makes its presence that much more strange and startling.

There is no more tired metaphor in architectural criticism as describing an ultra-modern building as looking like an alien spaceship has landed from another galaxy, and yet there is a certain effect of this bombastic quadruped that makes possible to imagine that a rocketship has descended from orbit as much as it looks ready for take-off.

For a third time, what adds to stupefaction is not just the form but the vintage: what is presumed to be a vintage 1983 structure was in fact ground broke in 2002.

Although still young in building-years, the Monument is hardly ready for take-off, as in typical fashion the elevators are defunct, and a visitor has to endure the stifling, twisting stare wells to reach the observation deck, and finally a regular ladder propped up against a ceiling hatch to reach the bellevue platform. There is an empty museum on the mezzanine level, but other than the old man who pockets $4 to escort you around, the place is deserted.

I was delighted by so many details: the plaid-legging effect of all that police-visor glazing, framed in smooth concrete, so akin to the stately slope of the Solow Building on 57th street; the under-side with its pizza-oven half-dome elevator lobby, ready to vacuum earthlings up to the mothership;  the engorged-to-bursting muscularity of the mezzanine level; the sharp flair of the fins on the tower's crown, a gesture like the tail 1958 Chevy Cobalt.

The building is both autocratically menacing and fancifully ridiculous: a cartoonish rendering of an world's fair tower built with the state resources of the world's third-poorest country to celebrate its own achievements. It is in this perspective that it becomes troubling to act merely as a tourist, and be amused or even aghast at the irony; it becomes necessary to reflect on the role of buildings and their architects in the furtherance and solidification of regimes. 

The Preservation of Miami Marine Stadium

Miami is known mostly for its high-rise condominiums and sleek little art deco hotels, not brutalist ruins. So what might be more surprising landmark than the shell of an old hospital is the powerfully-sculpted pavilions of the Marine Stadium, which sit derelict on a key just in front of Miami's downtown, on the road to its upscale suburb of Key Biscayne.

 Daniel Garcia/Little Gables Group, via Architect Magazine

A water-facing concrete review stand, built in 1964 for boating events, then later opened to concerts and other public gatherings, the stadium has been vacant and vandalized since 1992, but was saved from demolition and may now be renovated thanks to a dedicated social effort.

 Pancoast Ferendino Skeels and Burnham/Hilario Candela, via Architect Magazine 

 Credit: Friends of Miami Marine Stadium, via Architect Magazine

 Pancoast Ferendino Skeels and Burnham/Hilario Candela, via Architect Magazine

An article from Architect Magazine last October gives the full history of the stadium's revival, from derelict, condemned wreck to atop World Monuments Fund/National Register of Historic Preservation watch list. The success of the restoration drive has been driven by the well-organized Friends of Miami Marine Stadium: to look at the chronology on their website gives a sense of just how much effort has gone in to saving this structure. From an article from a few weeks ago about a graffiti artist selling his art to raise funds for the renovation:

Declared structurally unsound after the widespread devastation of hurricane Andrew, the abandoned stadium has been "off-limits" for nearly a quarter of a century. But graffiti loves a challenge, and "off-limits" means "perfect hangout" for fence hoppers, midnight drinkers, restless youth, skaters, and most obviously, taggers.Now, the stadium is on its way to a new life thanks to the Friends of Miami Marine Stadium. The group plans to renovate and reopen the venue, and that's expensive —$30 million expensive.

Its an especially nice story because the place will not only be preserved, but architecture will be revived to its original purpose. For now, the site is half-heartedly cordoned off, but it is still accessible from the waterfront. Check out the Friends of Miami Marine Stadium website for tons more information, historic and current photos, etc. 

 ©2014 Bauzeitgeist

©2014 Bauzeitgeist

Bewahrung, Erweckung

@Google.

CLEVELAND.

A more positive modern preservation story has appeared out of nowhere, in Cleveland, Ohio, after all hope had been lost.

Like Detroit and other rust belt cities, Cleveland is home to only about half as many people as fifty or sixty years ago; while its metropolitan area still holds about 2.5 million people, what was once the sixth largest city in the US in now something like its 45th most-populous municipality.

Photo courtesy of All Things Cleveland. 

In more prosperous days, Cleveland, an industrial capital, spurred the growth of many of the nation's largest banks, and boasting something of the Wall Street of Ohio, East Ninth Street: the only prospect in this midwestern metropolis where rows of business-houses formed colonnades along the boundaries of the boulevard, an effect more common in Manhattan or Chicago.

It was on the southern end of this arrangement that the celebrated architect Marcel Breuer's only built skyscraper was realized in 1971. And, more recently, where it was nearly razed.

The blogosphere and the architectural press covered the story in 2007, as the threat of demolition has hung over the Breuer building seven years ago. The tower, once the proud headquarters of a major bank, and the largest and most modern of one of half a dozen motley buildings that made up the Ameritrust's block-long headquarters complex, stood vacant, a victim of bank consolidation.

The County government took over the block and, in a typically-bizarre logic that is all too common with the reasoning that governs the destruction of many architecturally-significant landmarks, set about plans to pull down the Breuer skyscraper and replace it with one of several glassy, ersatz low-rise designs. One of the few outstanding modern features of downtown Cleveland would be lost, to make room for a suburban-style pavilion in a half-empty city.

But in the past year, this story has taken a remarkable turn, and it was a suburban element that came to the rescue. A construction and development firm from a distant county bought the complex from the county at a bargain price…and decided to painstakingly preserve the Breuer tower. Rather than level it, or strip it out of all recognition, the private company not only recognized the compelling power of the architecture, but has even publicly pledged to thoughtfully resurrect several of its signature features, such as Breuer's nave-like sunken lobby with its paneled-glass street wall, which were damaged during an earlier phase of asbestos removal.

While the plan features the typically-contemporary formula of upmarket hotel and condominiums, the programming seeks to utilize the building's unique aspects, such as the concept to transform the formally-off limits rooftop, home to Breuer's enigmatic oculus, a true sculpture of vacancy, into a roof deck. The ground-floor of the complex will also house a mid-market grocery in the middle of one of mid-America's urban food deserts. Between its public amenities and the population draws of its hotel and residences, the landmark will even be more positive for the city than ever before.

All the above photos except as noted ©2013 Bauzeitgeist.

Listing, Like A Ship

“God, imagine the last thing you saw on this earth was Preston Bus Station.”

That might be the wittiest remark in the hundreds of comments to Owen Hatherley's report in the Guardian about the listing of the Preston Bus Station by English Heritage in late September. The remark was made by a commenter who claimed to be a local Lancashire lad, and was in reference to the (perhaps-apocryphal) tales of repeated, or even regular, suicide jumpers who ascended to the top parking level of the bus station to leap to their deaths. If not directly driven to do so by the horror of the building itself, at least the depressed were driven by the misery-inducing place to their end.  Busses weren't the only things departing from the station, it seems. 

The gallows humor in the comments sections contrasts with Hatherley's own triumphant celebration of the Grade II Listing in the article itself. The commenters, especially those who reported to be from or lived in Preston, were nearly universal in their disdain for the misery-inducing Bus Station, although there were many who loved the building, echoing the lyrical celebration that rises in protest song each time demolition has been threatened—stretching at least as far back as Jonathan Gancey's typically-overdone “A Baroque Catherdral for Buses” passion from 2007.

What many of the disgruntled seemed to complain about was the disconnect between the non-local architectural enthusiasts, who appeared quick to defend any large building made of concrete in the middle of the 20th century. Others seems to judge simply on sight of image search results: mesmerizing photographs of a half-kilometer stacks of ribbed concrete panels, as elegantly imposing as an underlit steamship, or silently striking in its simplicity as Roman ruin. 

It is possible to find gorgeous photographs of the Preston Bus Station, of which the above might currently be the most familiar and the most exultant. But it is one of a class that focus on just a single, if most prominent, aspect of the building: the megastructural “swoop” of the parking levels— this is also the subject and styling of the close-in lithograph, below, celebrating the building as a modern monument of Britain from indie shop We Are Dorothy, along with the now-gone Tricorn Centre and the nearby Forton Services.


(Incidentally, these four upper levels actually don't have anything directly to do with bussing, but instead are for automobiles. The boarding and disembarking of busses occurs only on the building's ground floor. In this sense, the Bus Station has more in common with, say Paul Rudolph's Temple Street Parking in New Haven)

You will find few illustrations accompanying laudatory adulations for the building that exhibits the interior of the bus station. This is problem: a particular angle, revealing a uniquely-attractive visual circumstance, does not make a great building. A building needs to lend more to the heritage of architecture than it's exterior elevation, especially a municipal utility in an economically-blighted city. The question should not be whether the Preston Bus Station should be saved but, something more along the lines of, can Preston's circumstance be improved by saving the Preston Bus Station? Follow-up question: What does "Saving the Bus Station" actually mean? 

Several months before the Listing was announced, I happened to be traveling north across Britain, and was able to spend a half hour exploring this landmark (like many, I had long ago in my early architectural education seen a startling picture of the exterior). I knew so little about the building other than its place in brutalist history, I was excited to see it and curious about what made its so well-known.

On a very overcast, breezy afternoon, not a cold day but still drab, I arrived at the Preston Bus Station (not by bus). The bus station is ringed with concrete at its base, as either side is a wide tarmac for coaches to maneuver and park. In much the same way as an airport's apron can make for exciting viewing, the bustling of the departing motor coaches makes for momentary enjoyable viewing, although its not exactly watching jumbo jets hurtling down the runway and launching up into the sky, next to touch ground in Asia or Africa.  

I didn't have time to explore the town of Preston properly, but I can concur with the Guardian and Daily Mail commenters that this section of town is pretty depressing. With the bus terminal in the center of a vast plaza of asphalt, the arrangement nearly mimics the main square of a central European city, but this one ringed by exceedingly sad buildings, a half-dead shopping plaza with more surface parking, some abandoned buildings, and some contemporary 1970s mid-rises that constitute the Skyline of Preston, I suppose. 

The most proximate building is a truly gawd-awful Holiday Inn, the sort of lodging that causes the very word “hotel” to sink over the years from youthful associations with the adventuresome excitement of travel to the banal drudgery of lonely business trips of adulthood. The Holiday Inn's only acknowledgement of the Bus Station is as a sort of central dent between two wings of rooms, as if the long brutal battery had rammed the sad hotel tower.

Welcome!

To enter the building itself is a mean task. The above, I kid you not, is the ground-level entrance. At least, as I found it in May 2013. I have no idea if this a temporary condition due to some renovation, as there are bay numbers above the doors suggesting that busses formerly pulled up at this spot. I believe the only other way for pedestrians to access the station is a series of subterranean passageways or overhead bridges. Is there a more terrible space of modern life than an underground pedestrian tunnel to the bus station? 

Bridge of Sighs.

How to get…at…the building?

Inside the building was the grand finale of the slowly-increasing awfulness of the whole experience. I'll put aside whether traveling by bus is uplifting in and of itself or not; I only took a few pictures partly because the light was so low and partly because all these sad, creepy people were milling around with nothing to do but stare at me and my camera. 

What's Exit Town?

The interior hall is a preservationists dream, both in the sense that civilization has moved on from constructing spaces like this, and also it's hard to see anything that has been touched in decades, from the seating to the signage, the murky glazing to the worn wooden guardrails. The whole contemporary updates were the snacks in the smelly shop and the commercial branding of the private stagecoach companies. 

I left the building after walking through once: again, a surface-level crossing in which pedestrians have to mind that busses don't run them over. There wasn't any place immediate to go to; and the collection of strange street furniture, like the nearly art-deco white tiled abandoned taxi circus, and the landscaped berms, and all the fencing, made immediate interaction with the edges of the structure so unnerving. Also, there was nowhere to go outside building, except if you were unlucky enough to be booked at the Holiday Inn. 

Neighbors.

What enthusiasts’ emotions don't encompass, and precisely what the Listing does not address, are these very central and urgent problems of the building: that it is difficult and unpleasant to approach, to be in, to use, and to leave. Secondly, that it is in bad shape, and thirdly that it is surrounded by ugliness. The first fundamental set of issues aren't acknowledged by the pro-preservationists; the last two are cast off as outside the scope of the matter. But precisely because making any positive intervention in the maintenance of the building itself or its immediate setting is outside of the bounds of Listing is precisely what is wrong with Listing. 

If the building is truly worth preserving, and if that preservation has any value, it should be accompanied by the launch of a campaign to maximally increase the pleasant aspects of itself and its environment. That so many types of Listing in fact do much the opposite, it forbidding interventions, shows how paradoxically unsuitable Listing can be, and why preservation loses so many potential sympathizers, who are baffled that an edict which seeks to restrict local options on spatial changes and which comes with no assistance or resources to make necessary improvements. 

The shabby, revolting Preston Bus Station could be an opportunity reinvigorate this megastructure into the glorious Temple to Transport that shines not only from rows of glossy Google jpegs, but at the centerpiece of a beautiful section of a revitalized city. This would prove the naysayers wrong by bringing forth the merits of the building, which if it is indeed a successful work of architecture, should be widely accessible to the general public. Instead, the only message seems to be a baffling and condescending dispatch from the capital: we know better than you.

All photos except 2nd & 3rd ©2013 Bauzeitgeist.

Bauzwangsvorstellung: Holiday Inn London

Of London's tall buildings, the best, the strangest, the most admirable are the decades-old, concrete chess pieces of West London, solitary sentries guarding these residential quarters. They make a striking juxtaposition in shape, size, height, and material, contrasting with the cream-colored terraces and garden squares. 

I spent a lot of time in London during the middle of this year, and could see the Holiday Inn Kensington from the window of my bedroom. It is startling and hideous, a massive wall of crummy, soulless hotel rooms, the largest building of the tourist-lodging district of busy Cromwell Road, which deposits foreign tourists from Heathrow Airport into ‘posh’ West London. 

The building makes an even more striking contrast nearby, as the hotel looms over the large and surprisingly quiet garden square nearby, Cornwall Garden. If the area had more tall buildings, the effect would be diminished, but this westernmost hotel high-rise of West London stands by itself.