Alte Iraki Stadt

BAGHDAD.

I just finished reading Eric Bennet's extraordinary work of fiction, A Big Enough Lie, published last year. I highly recommend it. Bennet is a very gifted writer, with a unique voice and remarkable talents with language. In particular, I was struck by his passing descriptions of the Iraq of a decade ago, where much of the most consequential action in the book, scenes from the U.S. occupation, takes place.

Within about 24 hours of finishing the novel, I learned about the Twitter account Old Iraqi Pictures, which also launched about a year and half ago, featuring photography going back over a century of the country's cities, archaeological sites, architecture, street scenes and people. The site has also posted photos from the U.S. Invasion itself. Scrolling through the account's posts brought Bennet's aggressive and dismal descriptions of the assaulted, occupied, threatening urban ruin to an even more poignant horror.

Here are a few of the most vivid passages, juxtaposed with a sampling of Old Iraqi's archives. Read the book and check out the Twitter feed (most of the images below link to the original Tweet).

Camp Triumph...filled an island on the Tigris where, until last year, an amusement park had entertained Ba'ath Party members and their children. Three months ago Iraqi mortars knocked the Ferris wheel flat on its side, crushing an E2. I had been there. Concrete cartoon mice, twice as large as men, grinned at the dead soldier. 

We were part of a convoy, three up-armor Humvees, one ahead, one behind...We also should have had a third man between us to watch the overpasses while I scanned the traffic and the storefronts. Abandoned Toyotas, charred and skeletal, lined the streets, the blood of enemies and friends blackening patches of ground every seventy-five yards, the power lines dropping and hanging and crackling and buzzing above the heads of feral children.

We passed modern high-rise with massive concrete flutes dotted with satellite disks like fungi on industrial logs The shops surrounding lay in ruins. I studied heads in passing cars. Boom. That's what you were always thinking, Boom. At intersections during the past few months the kids had stopped waving and smiling; the men had never waved or smiled. Boom. 

Baghdad in the darkness was a different city, empty and cool with stink instead of teeming and hot with stink It was ancient and modern and dead. Dark palms stood motionless like crestfallen giants, rounds cracked in the distance, and I have to say that war is most frightening in stillness and darkness. I watched the shadows of alleys for portents of violent death.

We reached the four-meter high walls that divided chaos from order, poverty from wealth, heat from AC, anarchy from democracy, the dystopia of Iraq from the utopia of the States, the streets of Baghdad from the Green Zone. 

When I opened my eyes again it was not because the sun was up. Outside the window a skyline of palm trees and biblical-modernist architecture loomed in dark indigo against dark-blue sky.

We drove down safe broad streets empty with dawn. We passed the Republican Palace, from each corner of whose magnificent edifice a head of Saddam survey his lost empire. "Saddam wrote novels," I said.

"In blood" Greep said.

"About reclaiming the glory of Babylon."

Inside the palace a turquoise dome gave the rotund an incongruous feeling of peace. Marble, sandstone, gilt, and ornament ascended, spanned and spiraled around us. It was beautiful as long as you craned your neck. Cubicle divers, power cords, office furniture, and spastic screensaver on new PCs congested things at eye level. Red marker on a whiteboard announced the day's business.

We drove around until we found the Al-Rashid Hotel...The dark atrium of the convention center exuded 1970s affluence, but that was transformed by two decades of war and impoverishment...In those years blunt facades, perpendicular lines, gold railings, square chandeliers, and sepia windows had struck Iraqis as the best possible instantiations of vast wealth...

The atrium looked like a student union at a declining state university in midsummer. Printed sheets of PowerPoint slides cluttered the square column and directed visitors to various offices: 'The Iraq Mine Action Center," 'The Dutch Liaison Office to the CPA," " The Iraqi American Friendship Council," "The Royal Jordanian Airlines ticket Office," "Office of Infrastructure" and so on. 

Our two tanks were heading solo toward a man we had never seen in an apartment we had never seen in a building we had never seen on a street we had never seen. A huge department store, gutted and pathetic, loomed above a row of houses including the target house. We squared the tanks against the door. 

The streets stretched before us in sick green. The hellishness of the city at nigh tyrannized your nerves. I never hated a place as I hated Baghdad. Sometimes I tried to imagine living here in a time of peace, to picture what kind of happiness you could hope for. The rank smells, the high heat, the oppressive architecture...the beleaguered palms and rutted streets, the angular meretriciousness of the 1970s architecture tarnished by twenty years of war—it was unbearable every aspect. 

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.

Other Prentices

CHICAGO, and elsewhere.

From Google.

From Preston, to Prentice.

Back in October, I spent a few days in Chicago. Under a chilly, grey skies, I saw the forlorn Prentice Women's Hospital, its sentence announced. While her broad concrete bosom still graceful and proud, but the black-glass clad underskirts of her podium had been ripped away.

©October 2013, Bauzeitgeist.

Prentice is an insightful contemporary preservation case in several ways, especially because there was little direct argument that the building was truly useless, or unable to continue performing its intended functions. It was only that other, more profitable functions would drive more money and attention into the institutional and civic situation. Goldberg's graceful ward was simply not big enough, and therefore did not justify occupying its valuable location—a very commercial argument for a university hospital.

Which is what stings: the disappointment that a mission-based institution occupying a prominent site in the center of an architecture-valuing community would pull down this unique building, and also proposed to replace it with such hideous buildings. There's even more back-story, which reeks of Chicago power-politics, and justified the destruction on the contemporary investment-and-jobs-vaguery.

So that building is gone, and Chicago is definitely the poorer for it, regardless of how cutting-edge the new research hospital would be or how many high-income doctors will work there—for there's little question that there were other locations for a research facility to go.

There is some small consolation, however: there are other Goldberg hospitals, Prentice's sisters, still standing today at the extreme corners of the continent: in Boston, in Tacoma, Washington, in Mobile, Alabama, and in Phoenix, Arizona:

 Brigham & Women's Hospital, Boston, MA, 1976-1980.  

 Good Samaritan Hospital, Phoenix, Arizona, 1978-1982.

 Providence Hospital, Tacoma, Washington, 1969-1974. 

St. Joseph's Hospital, Mobile, Alabama, 1982-87. All images from Google.

Mostly finished after Prentice, together they are remarkably similar in exterior appearance and interior arrangement to the now-dying building in Chicago. Indeed, especially in the use of the striking clover-leaf floor-plan, the Prentice's sisters are in most cases taller, larger, more expressive and more intricate; a furtherance of the architectural concept. Their quad-module towers meeting in a dramatically curving shoulder joint, as these last two images, taken from the excellent Bertrand Goldberg archive, show in the Providence Hospital in Mobile, Alabama:

Images courtesy Bertrand Goldberg Archive.

All is not lost? No, not all, just some.

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.