Riots in the Suisse cheese

[KXX4493553 at aol.com]

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