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. 

Frankfurt und Anderswo

FRANKFURT AM MAIN.

Journalists have employed the term "Mainhattan"regularly over the last two decades to describe Frankfurt, ostensibly due its thicket of high-rise financial towers that has risen across the west-end of the city. Frankfurt's American-style "downtown" skyline, began rising in the mid-1970s, never 'exploding' so much as growing bit by bit, as it does today. Frankfurt looked remarkably different from any other European city.

Although somewhat renown in the recent past as the most substantial skyline of continental Europe, this hyperbolic moniker's impact has diminished as European skyscrapers became less unusual, and especially as European skyscrapers have become more common, such as post-1990s Rotterdam or Warsaw, much less when considered against the hundreds of formally-flat cityscapes from Doha to Shenzhen which today appear as a shimmering walls of highrises.

Top: southeastern Frankfurt: The Romer, the Main Plaza, the ECB Tower

Bottom: Central-East Frankfurt, the Zeil Hochhaus and Jumeirah Hotel at Left, the ECB at far right.

©2012 Bauzeitgeist.

Not that anyone besides journalists and architectural enthusiasts have ever used the term "Mainhattan," But to at any point call Frankfurt's small cluster of not-particularly-tall buildings a peer to New York's miles-wide skyline was always ridiculously overblown. A more appropriate, if less cosmopolitan, reference would be to a similarly-sized and shaped American city. Frankfurt's skyline was never more substantial or impressive than the elevation of downtown Pittsburgh or Nashville.

 Left: Messeturm, Frankfurt, by Helmut Jahn, 1990.

Right: NationsBank, Atlanta, by Roche Dinkeloo, 1992.

Both images via Wikipedia Commons.

If the comparison should have always been more Mainneapolis than Mainhattan, then at least, in those years, American economic might was still the pinnacle of achievement, worthy of imitation and adoption. Architecturally, this is particularly manifest of that lengthy golden age of post-unification, pre-Euro Germany, when an optimistic Frankfurt embraced corporate American postmodernism as the face of its increasingly intra- and intercontinental financial district.

What had begun as a few German-designed glass boxes pre-1989 was joined by colorful, whimsical bank buildings rising up around the Bahnhofvertiel, of the same generation as the neoclassical office towers that became the tallest buildings in many American cities from Cleveland to Charlotte in the 1990s, as both continents reached the apex of transatlantic corporatism.

 

Left: Westend Tower, by Kohn Penderson Fox, 1993. Photo ©2003 Bauzeitgeist.

Right: US Bancorp, Minneapolis, by Pei Cobb 1992. Image via Wikipedia.

This resulted in such towers as the pyramid-capped Messeturm, which would not look out of place in Atlanta's midtown; KPF's Westend Tower, whose curving-white brise-soliel was, its hard to comprehend now, seen as daring when it was completed, spawned identical hundreds across the North America from Miami to Vancouver, later spreading to other continents. Yet Westend Tower completed a year after Pei Cobb's US Bancorp in Minneapolis opened in 1992, crowned with a similar fan.

Lastly, and while not copying so closely an particular tropes of American post-modernism, the strangely-crowned Trianon Tower has no closer kin than the Centerpoint Energy Plaza in Houston.

Top: Centerpoint Energy Plaza, Houston, with its 1996 crown. ©2003 Bauzeitgeist

 Bottom: Trianon, Frankfurt, built 1999. ©2003-2012 Bauzeitgeist

At least a few in Frankfurt seemed to take the city's gothamist nickname somewhat seriously. In looking at the architectural record, this is best supported by the extremely curious Main Plaza, on the south bank of the Main, a hotel tower which seems to directly copy Raymond Hood's 1924 Art Deco American Radiator Building in midtown Manhattan (and Chicago's Tribune Tower), which itself was inspired by gothic architecture: a transatlantic style boomerang; post-modern irony at its pinnacle.

Top: Main Plaza, Frankfurt, 2001. Photo @2012 Bauzeitgeist.

Bottom: American Radiator Building, 33rd Street, New York, by Raymond Hood, 1924.

Image via Wikipedia Commons.

On a recent visit to Frankfurt, specifically to view the exhibit at the DAM, two prominent additions to Frankfurt skyline show that Frankfurt's skyscraping continues on, but perhaps with new influences and inspirations. In the center of the city, just off the Zeil, the city's wide fußgangerzone, rises the stylish Jumeirah Hotel, the newest outpost of the Dubai-based luxury hotel chain.

Its highly-contemporary exterior, characterized by jagging and wiggling elevations and punched by stochastic slits of windows, employs two popular devices from the contemporary architecture kit of the last few years, which can be found in the United States as much as anywhere (such as the "curving" and "sexy" Roosevelt University Tower which has invaded Chicago's historic Michigan Avenue district. The Jumeriah takes the same jagged shape, while also being reminiscent of the Hilton Hotel in Houston.

 Jumeirah Frankfurt and the Zeil Hochhaus.  ©2012 Bauzeitgeist.

This new developed is adjacent to the historic Thurn und Taxis Palais, but the hotel does not utilize the older building for a substantial street presence or spacious lobby. Instead, a narrow corridor with lectern-sized front desks opens directly onto the ground floor of one the bustling, glittery, mid-market malls which dominate the pedestrian shopping precinct. While linking luxury towers to malls is a standard real estate cocktail around the world, its a formula which is waning in North America at the same time it is worshipped in Arabia, and it seems telling that luxury was conveyed in this particularly non-European fashion.

Hilton Hotel Houston ©2003 Bauzeitgeist.

The Jumeirah, part of the  Zeil Hochhaus I & II phase of the Palais Quartiel development, might therefore be best described as a Gulf hotel in a German city, programmatically, stylistically, and architecturally following the bland luxury development formula that is applied in cities everywhere nowadays.

What is therefore more remarkable both in scale and its peripheral location is the substantial European Center Bank Headquarters at the southeastern limit of the city center, at the Großmarkthalle, a vegetable market which also played an ignominious role in assembling deportees from the city during the Holocaust.

This huge complex rises outside the normally skyscraper-belt, and it is interesting to speculate on the meaning and impact of the ECB's new location, whether this move from the Bahnhofverteil to the Großmarkt marks Frankfurt's shift from its City to its Canary Wharf, especially when viewing central Frankfurt's distant cluster of skyscrapers from the riverfront, docklands-like construction site around the Großmarkthalle. German cities never shielded their centers from development like Paris, but its most skyscraper-strewn city may yet get its La Defense.

Frankfurt's Docklands: The Großmarkthalle site at a bend in the river, 

southeast of the city's center, with the existing financial district several miles distant. 

The Main Plaza is at mid-center left, behind the bridge. 

See Google Earth image at top of post to note how the oxbow bend of the Main echoes the Thames at the Docklands.

Above Image via Wikipedia.

The huge ECB premises, with twin towers pivoting toward each other at an angle connected by multiple, cantilevering sky-bridges between, is dashingly contemporary in its styling. This is the latest iteration of an emerging kinship of such twin-towers, most especially such supersleek developments as the World Trade Centre in Bahrain, which has been mentioned in this blog a few times before.

Bahrain's World Trade Center, c.2008. Image via Inhabitat.

A fable for our times, the ECB has been working on a substantial new building throughout a crisis which now impugns the very concept of a centralized Europe, which has lead no less than George Soros that Germany should either save or leave the Euro. 

While last week's announcement that the ECB development would be overbudget by 41% was met with exasperated derision and humor, that the ECB seems to be emulating new financial capitals much farther to the southeast from its old offices, the sovereign-wealth-fund federation between Doha and Abu Dhabi, with a glittering, Gulf-like financial center. Rather than recall a more rational and socially beneficial heritage of finance, the ECB's architecture reflects out to the flashy new centers of money.

Frankfurt has never been a large city, or at least, never larger by area or population than other German or European cities. Its markets and banks, the vast convention halls of the Messe, and its busy, centrally-positioned airport have made Frankfurt a global city. However, this isn't the same as being cosmopolitan, in the same way that its important book fair is not make Frankfurt a center for literature. As stated in the Guardian earlier this month, even as it has continued to persevere as a global banking center, Frankfurt has never grown into a metropolis.

Despite its under-rated museums and its pleasant quality of life, Frankfurt is only a cross-roads of trade and transport, without the overlay of romance and art that defines London or New York. Its central district holds the late-evening routes of lonely foreign businessmen, not the storied streets of a world capital. Frankfurt may so badly wish to be compared to these sophisticated cities, but it continues to grow by building upward with skyscrapers evoke those duller, more commonplace business districts that are its true peers.

The Business in Bahrain

My tweet above from February 18th might have only been a pithy, hyperbolic aphorism, but as the protests continue in the Gulf, I wanted to explore this thought a bit further.

The historic uprisings that have roared across the North Africa and the Middle East reached tiny, affluent Bahrain about a month ago. There, the protests bravely continue, with increasingly disturbing reporting in recent days describing an increasingly violent, militarized and sectarian confrontation.

From when the crowds first gathered in the streets of Manama in mid-February, the particular nature of Bahrain's ultramodern built environment gave the events there a different character from the previous events in Tunisia and Egypt or the simultaneous street marches in Yemen, Jordan and elsewhere; quite apart from what is now civil war in Libya.

Cairo, Africa's and the Arab world's largest city, is enormous; densely built-up and developed. Its dusty-brown concrete jungle was constantly on display, live from Tahrir Square; and a significant chapter in the Egyptian revolution involved a night-time urban battle, simulcast live on international satellite news, showing protesters and their foes squaring off among the overpasses and on-ramps that twist across the Tahrir Square area, passing enormous international hotels like the Hilton and Four Seasons as they link to the bridges over the Nile.

Image courtesy of Katu.com

However, Cairo, famously dilapidated, a faded Paris of the East, is a layered mix of centuries-old warrens of side-streets, long, wide boulevards, and public plazas (for a more detailed essay on how Cairo's plan facilitated the uprising, I recommend this great essay and the super-excellent blog Mammoth also has a spatial essay on the Tahrir Square revolution).

Al Jazeera Live, 19 January 2011

Little Bahrain, on the other hand, has one of the greatest concentrations of wealth within any nation, and for decades has used this capital to constantly upgrade itself into an international business destination. In the past decade, it has redoubled its efforts, as part of a regional trio with its larger neighbor, Qatar, and of course, Dubai, of which, like so much global urban development over the last decade, it sees as its model (Dubai itself being a derivative of the high-rise enclaving and luxury spatial products of the American sunbelt).

Rendering of Bahrain Financial Harbour, courtesy of Cluttons Bahrain.

Recently, Bahrain answered these emirates' burgeoning urbanization and financial marketing with a building boom of its own, complete with glossy marketing campaign: Business-Friendly Bahrain. Broadly speaking, the architectural icons of this phenomenon, the face of this transformation, have been the vaguely-unique outlines the matching, sail-shaped pairs of Bahrain Financial Harbour and its twin, the Bahrain World Trade Centre, both built in 2007-2008.

In the past month, the tagline has been morbidly modified by dark humorists to Bullet-Flying Bahrain. In the background of broadcast footage of tear-gas assaults and water-cannon advances stand the gleaming new (and even unfinished) skyscrapers of Manama's ready-made financial district and waterfront leisure zone. [Update 20 March: for more on Bahrain's bruised business reputation from Wall Street Journal and Businessweek]

Previous images from Bahrain.com. Note, words embedded in script at top, including "Gold" and "Upgrade"

Less soaring, but no less signature, are the massive enclosures of Manama's many, many malls. A country with only slightly more people than greater Hartford, Connecticut, has no less than six huge shopping malls. Even in this mature stage of global consumerism, the array of North American and European brand-stores within them is remarkable.

Instead of ancient casbahs or labyrinthine souks, much less colonial-era boulevards or squares, Manama has acres of air-conditioned bazaars, connected to shiny office towers and luxury hotels--a model of sun-belt aspirational overconsumption catering not only to the minority population of moneyed native Bahrainis, but aimed squarely at the expense accounts and expat compensation packages of defense contractors of Loudon County, energy technicians from Laredo, and bankers from London. These malls and skyscrapers are supposed to attract and retain these orgmen.

An online advert for United Airlines inaugurating non-stop service from Washington-Dulles, aerotropolis of the military industrial complex, to Bahrain, home of the US Navy 5th Fleet and major staging area for ongoing wars and defense-contractor nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan. ©2009 UAL Corp.

Warfare has long since moved from grassy battlefield to the built-up city. Two decades ago, in Bosnia, the novelty of CNN operating a de facto broadcast base from Sarajevo's Holiday Inn, immortalized in popular culture, was a sad reminder of the city's previous promises of prosperity during its Olympics, and highlighted the peculiar interconnectedness of the planet, including its factional violence. Americans were challenged to imagine a mass grave, but not a chain motel.

Reprinted from NY Times Nick Kristof and NBC's Richard Engel from 18 Feb 2011, early in the street fighting when both reporters were on the ground.

In Bahrain, the protesters' physical focal point has been Pearl Square. In search of a Bahraini equivalent of the vast, Place de la Concorde-style Tahrir Square, the protestors have centered on a lowly traffic circus in the center of the city, with one of the few icons that the country had before the building boom: a white concrete sculpture topped with a sphere symbolizing a pearl, and recalling the time when the barren island's only wealth came from diving for pearls, and was not instead used to purchase them at Chanel at the mall. (Additionally, and in contravention of norms of decency and combat engagement, the country's main hospital was violently militarized by the government over perceived sympathy toward the protesters, who were the patients).

The Pearl Roundabout Monument, prior to 19 March.

For now, the Ritz-Carlton Hotel and Spa, the Payless Shoes outlet, and the Marks & Spencer of Manama are not yet the grounds of the bloody battles of the diminutive traffic circus that is Pearl Square. Most of the malls have been sealed, as if in mourning. But through the seering haze, the 5-star hotels, class-A office space, and supermalls of the Seef form a blue-gray backdrop to the foreground's fighting, viewable on Al Jazeera.

Images courtesy of MSNBC

That the fighting has not occurred inside these buildings is not to say that these new developments are unrelated to the unrest. On 13 March, the New York Times reported that the protesters had blocked access to the financial district, and were attacked with tear gas:

The demonstrations on Sunday occurred on King Faisal Highway at the entrance to Manama’s financial district...“It is like a ghost town with the highway closed and the financial district closed,” Hussein Muhammad, a bookstore owner and activist, said by telephone. “Thousands of people came all morning, and hundreds were injured.” Two demonstrators suffered serious head injuries, witnesses said...The demonstrators have grown frustrated that they have been allowed to hold on to Pearl Square, a traffic circle, but have not achieved their political goals. That is why, they said, they chose to move on the financial center in a country that prizes its business-friendly policies...

Spatial disgruntlement, the built manifestation of the population's marginalization by the country's elite, is one of the roots of this unrest. This wildly-circulated power-point of Google Earth images, comparing the immaculately verdant edens behind the high walls of the country's elite palaces, against the tiny, irregular clusters of citizen's housing was reported to have infuriated the public. Even if, much like social-networking itself, it is difficult to measure its influence on street protestors' will and courage, they evince the disconnect within the society. These new skyscrapers and shopping centers are monuments to the political and social hegemony which the Bahraini people see as their oppressor.

Image reprinted from BusinessInsider.com. Link in above paragraph to the incredible power point.

For many Bahraini citizens, the glass-and-steel towers of the seafront do not represent progress. It is a huge irony that a similar sentiment was so publicly and eloquently on display in the most recent Venice Biennale: Bahrain's award-winning project was imbued with a frankness and progressive attitude that is, in light of the last month, increasingly anachronistic (its tempting to wonder if the Google Earth slideshow was not inspired by this installation).

Bahrain Pavilion from 2010 Venice Biennale. Image courtesy of e-architect.com

From an outside perspective, in the cosmopolitan banality of Manama's skyline, its possible to see not only Abu Dhabi or Kuwait, but even Las Vegas or Miami. While such street-war on Brickell Avenue or the Strip remain incomprehensible, somehow the strange juxtaposition of the rock-hurling resistance against the imposing instant skyline manifest a wider culpability in this conflict, a guilt that is as global as the brands in the mall directories.

We didn't need this violence to know that dueling Burberry boutiques are no substitute for fishing rights, or a decent education, or the chance at a meaningful career. But the events in Bahrain ask a more nefarious question, as to whether these exclusive zones, the purpose-built, privatized spatial products of debt-and--consumption, are fortress-like enough to protect the state from the dissatisfaction of its people, or have a role to play, in favor of one side or the other whatever the outcome of this revolution will be.

UPDATE 20 MARCH: The Pearl Square Monument was raised by the government on 19 March:

Top image courtesy CNN Arabic. Other images ©AFP/Getty Images.