Riots in the Suisse cheese

[Dave Monroe]

.. and, of course, there's Fredric Jameson's (in)famous discussion of Los
Angeles'  Bonaventure Hotel (as featured in Brian De Palma's Body Double, if you
want to get a feel for it).  Apparently (though I've heard this disputed),
between all the mirrors and the obstructions, it's very difficult to get one's
bearings therein--Jameson claims this provides a "cognitive mapping" or whatever
of the complexities of postmodernism ... which reminds me of  Doug's--relevant, I
think--comment about the labyrinthine layout of the Mittelwerke ...

KXX4493553 at aol.com wrote:

> I'm not an expert in architecture, I have got only an intuitive relation to
> it but I think indeed that PoMo architects plan buildings for other people
> not for themselves. Some of them surely live in their own creations but I
> think most of them don't prefer to live in such "deconstructive ruins". In
> Germany we have the opportunity after the reunification to compare two kinds
> of architecuture: the Bauhaus version and the real socialist version,
> tenement blocks in East Germany in the frame of social house building. When I
> first saw such socialist tenement blocks in the suburbs of Belgrade in the
> end of the seventies I got a shock; how could the people live in such
> horrifying buildings? But they did, they prefered living in such buildings
> more than living in the countryside. In the socialist states it was "modern"
> not to renovate the old cities (with the exception of Poland: the re-built
> Warsaw I saw 1992 and was quite impressed; Warsaw was destroyed to 90 % in
> the war). The result you could "admire" after reunification: even towns like
> Goerlitz at the Polish border which wasn't bombed at the war looked like one
> single ruin -very romantic. An East German told me that at the end of the
> socialist regime you could buy whole streets for one Mark if you renovated
> them. The houses nobody lived in were full of waste and sometimes smuggled
> goods from Poland for the German market, and vice versa.
>
> In comparison with that the banlieus in France (in Paris, Lyon, Strasbourg or
> elsewhere) are still  worse than the real socialist tenement blocks. The
> French social house building created a curious style of "postmodernism"
> architecture in which people living from income support moved into artificial
> castles or in buildings looking like Suisse cheese or something like that.
> Everybody in France is now speaking about the "intifada" of the young beurs
> (Algerian teenagers) in these ghettos, and PoMo architecture doesn't change
> their social situation in any way. Riots in the Suisse cheese.  Architects
> should not be "social engineers" but should have perhaps a little knowledge
> of the people who live in their buildings because they had no other choice.
>
> kwp