Three Cities About the Size of Boston

[czsz]

I'm always amazed at the decadence of Brussels' old architecture. Hardly difficult to see what inspires the EU's byzantine bureaucracy (disguised, of course, in glass boxes meant to evoke "transparency").

 

[ablarc]

A FOURTH CITY ABOUT THE SIZE OF BOSTON (but this one has vanished)?

A fine scale derives from tiny footprints:

Civilized transport. Folks not afraid to walk in the street:

Shopping mall:

Very prominent modern building on a principal square:

More traditional buildings, one of them leaning zanily:

Well, at least they can lean on each other?

Splendid ensembles of streetscape:

A large-footprint blockbuster:

Boston needs more canals. Hello, Seaport District?

Performance place:

Bridge with four lions:

Lots going on. Look at all the commuting cyclists:

Train line and canal (shades of the Boston El):

A big church and ancient roofscape:

Then they had a blitzkrieg. After that?

Pictures were posted by Troyeth on Wired New York.
Thank you!

 

[Ron Newman]

A FOURTH CITY ABOUT THE SIZE OF BOSTON (but this one has vanished)?

Sigh. I had a feeling what this was going to be before I saw the first photo. So sad.

 

[statler]

I know a quick search of the internet could probably answer this question, but what replaced what was destroyed?

 

[ablarc]

From Wiki:

 

[statler]

Tough to tell from that picture, but it is probably safe to say it is a fair bit better than what they did with the West End.

 

[ablarc]

Faint praise.

 

[Ron Newman]

what's with all the beacons?

 

[ablarc]

A reminder of air raids.

A symbol of rebirth.

The indomitable human spirit.



They do it every year.

 

[bdurden]

Tough to tell from that picture, but it is probably safe to say it is a fair bit better than what they did with the West End.

Not really -- it is a city that has lost its soul, like Dresden.

 

[Ron Newman]

Is that a Zakim bridge tower at the right edge?

 

[ablarc]

Can you name a single city comprised entirely of modern buildings that has soul?


Brasilia?

Dubai?



... Or neighborhood?


Kendall Square?

That place off Mass Ave south of Central Square?

 

[bdurden]

Seaside, Poundbury, Celebration

That is all I can think of.

 

[Beton Brut]

Can you name a single city comprised entirely of modern buildings that has soul?


Brasilia?

Dubai?

Chandigarh? Never been, but it's on my list.

Huge sections of Tokyo, Yokohama, and Osaka were firebombed during WWII, and rebuilt in the past 65 years. They felt genuinely urban (and soulful) to me. That said, I spent an afternoon in Odaiba, and it's on par with our Seaport.

...Or neighborhood?

Santa Monica? Pacific Beach (San Diego)?

 

[ablarc]

Chandigarh? Never been, but it's on my list.

We all know the monuments at Chandigarh, but is there a city? Is it a shantytown. Shantytowns and vernacular settlements nay be new, but they're not modern.

Santa Monica? Pacific Beach (San Diego)?

I bet the best parts aren't in the modern style.

I should have said "Modernist", but I'm tired of getting bashed (falsely) for using that label for anything I don't like. Seaside, Celebration and Poundbury are recent, and Seaside certainly has soul, but these places are not consonant with the principles of Modernism.

They're new, they're not really modern --except insofar as they're reasserting principles that folks have forgotten. Like the Renaissance; you could say that was modern because it remembered things that had been forgotten a thousand years. It launched the modern era of history.

 

[Ron Newman]

I lived in Santa Monica, and don't think of it as a place whose primary architectural style is 'Modern'. It's quite an old place, really, as California cities go.

 

[Beton Brut]

The most successful modern beach-side buildings in Santa Monica and coastal San Diego are in a reconstituted version Ocean Liner Deco. White concrete plaster and pipe railings. Clean and human scaled.

 

[Ron Newman]

This was my favorite Santa Monica beach building, a deco structure from the 1920s. Sadly, it was damaged beyond repair in the Northridge quake of 1994, and burned two years later.

I have not seen the modern replacement, only this photograph. But it looks to me like the new building fails to replicate the grace of its predecessor, despite being of nearly identical dimensions.

We've moved a long way from Rotterdam now, so I won't object if a moderator breaks this off into its own thread.

 

[czsz]

"Soul" is a far too slippery idea to go by, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Seaside doesn't have one simply because it architecturally imitates places that do.

There's a reason it made such a good set for "The Truman Show".

If we're assessing whether modernism can have soul, maybe we should ask UNESCO. They recently designated a bunch of outer-Berlin housing projects from the 1920s as World Heritage Sites - most by modernist architects by Gropius and Taut.

 

[ablarc]

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Seaside doesn't have one simply because it architecturally imitates places that do.

Doesn't sound like you've been there. It's totally unlike any place I've ever been, and it's not an imitation of anything. It has an extremely strong identity, like Charleston, Quebec, Forest Hills, Miami Beach or Carmel. You don't have to like it, but it's not like other places.

And that's the real reason it was used in the Truman Show.


(And that's also why they used Philip Glass' music.)