21 june 2005
I spent the longest day of the year in Berlin. Berlin is crazy. It defies everything I know about cities: how they are structured, how they look, where it is safe to walk. Berlin is like a random assemblage of patches torn from every other city on the planet: ultramodern architecture, communist bloc apartment buildings, monuments, memorials, highrises, and empty lots all strung together by the erratic rusty tendrils of subways and surface trains.
I am here for the second half of a two-week course in urban ecology. The first week in Amsterdam was a slightly disorganized quasi-success with good fieldtrips and bad powerpoints. Now we – about twenty of us from Oregon, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Spain and the Netherlands – are here doing a ridiculously quick redesign exercise for a former glass factory site. We are working in small multi-disciplinary, multi-national, not-so-multi-lingual groups, figuring out how soil scientists and landscape architects and geologists and physical geographers approach the same problem. The conversations are awkward and fascinating and full of misunderstandings and poor word choice.
We are staying and working in a small conference center accommodation in the east part of the city, in the former East Berlin. We have dorm rooms and a meeting space and a yard that ends on the Spree River. When the work grows too frustrating we lie on the deck smoking cigarettes and deciding what outings we can guiltlessly squeeze into our schedule.
Last night the Jewish Museum was open until 10 pm, so I headed there when we adjourned. Oh, Daniel Liebskind! You have restored my faith in architecture. I could describe the spaces but it would be unjust, it wouldn’t be anything like being in them, because he makes you experience all the ideas of the museum. The building itself makes you feel lost, and confused, and alone, and all the other emotions that one gently builds a tolerance to after a few days amidst the artifacts of what this city used to be.
Now it is Tuesday, 3:30 in the morning, and I have just come in from a few late-nite hours on the Spree with Talley, Michelle, Ian, Aaron, Madeleine and Casper. We drank seven bottles of wine. We laughed and talked shit and enjoyed the easy friendships of mutual relocation. We sang a lot of songs, and it made me glad for all the good people in the world with big vague dreams.
I am here for the second half of a two-week course in urban ecology. The first week in Amsterdam was a slightly disorganized quasi-success with good fieldtrips and bad powerpoints. Now we – about twenty of us from Oregon, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Spain and the Netherlands – are here doing a ridiculously quick redesign exercise for a former glass factory site. We are working in small multi-disciplinary, multi-national, not-so-multi-lingual groups, figuring out how soil scientists and landscape architects and geologists and physical geographers approach the same problem. The conversations are awkward and fascinating and full of misunderstandings and poor word choice.
We are staying and working in a small conference center accommodation in the east part of the city, in the former East Berlin. We have dorm rooms and a meeting space and a yard that ends on the Spree River. When the work grows too frustrating we lie on the deck smoking cigarettes and deciding what outings we can guiltlessly squeeze into our schedule.
Last night the Jewish Museum was open until 10 pm, so I headed there when we adjourned. Oh, Daniel Liebskind! You have restored my faith in architecture. I could describe the spaces but it would be unjust, it wouldn’t be anything like being in them, because he makes you experience all the ideas of the museum. The building itself makes you feel lost, and confused, and alone, and all the other emotions that one gently builds a tolerance to after a few days amidst the artifacts of what this city used to be.
Now it is Tuesday, 3:30 in the morning, and I have just come in from a few late-nite hours on the Spree with Talley, Michelle, Ian, Aaron, Madeleine and Casper. We drank seven bottles of wine. We laughed and talked shit and enjoyed the easy friendships of mutual relocation. We sang a lot of songs, and it made me glad for all the good people in the world with big vague dreams.
posted by tortaluga at 12:33 PM
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