the abolition of slavery

Krzysztof Wodiczko and Julian Bonder. Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery, Nantes. 2012

Pays                 Expéditions négrières
Angleterre           41 %
Portugal              39 %
France                19 %
Hollande               5.7 %
Danemark             1.2 %

Principaux ports          Nombre d’expéditions
Nantes                          1714
Le Havre                         451
La Rochelle                     448
Bordeaux                        419
Saint-Malo                      218
Lorient                           137
Honfleur                         134
Marseille                          88
Dunkerque                       41

Wodiczko and Bonder's memorial is on the Quai de la Fosse in Nantes, the wharf where the slave ships moored before they left for Africa. The most extensive description, including drawings, is on the arcprospect site.

Aberdeen + oil

Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Aberdeen City Garden, Aberdeen 2012

So, Aberdeen, population 200,000, oil capital of Scotland, is preparing for the end of North Sea oil extraction within the next 20 years.  

A recent and controversial project, Diller Scofidio+Renfro's transformation of Union Terrace Gardens (sponsored locally and privately, not publicly) will build the 'green heart of the silver city', a reference to the silvery granite of which Aberdeen is built. Ultimately it is the privatisation of a public amenity and has been protested muchly, but has recently narrowly been approved in a referendum.  Renamed Aberdeen City Garden, all is explained on its website.  It is undoubtedly very beautiful, a topographic landscape/building, all angles and shifting ground planes.  The images show hordes of people engaged in vigourous public mingling.  

Daniel Jauslin has written a review of the project in Topos, pulling out all its many architectural and historical references.  

Because I've been looking at Calgary recently, I'm struck more by the desire of oil cities to raise their ante with very expensive internationally-designed projects, whoever they are funded by, for their public spaces.  Having just gone through five decades of drawings of Calgary plazas full of the same people as are shown wandering through this new Aberdeen landscape, I do wonder if the driven lives lived in oil cities envision evenings of strolling about in lovely parks instead of coming home from work and then working on all evening till they crash into bed.

This is nothing to do with the actual designs, other than the experience of a city that when oil is booming, has little time for leisure, and when it isn't, is very depressed.  Very sobering these days are the images of all the near-abandoned buildings for the 2004 Olympics in Greece: nothing to do with the quality of their architecture, which was pretty stunning as I recall, and everything to do with economic  collapse, whether civic or personal, unexpected or planned for.

Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Aberdeen City Garden,Aberdeen 2012

Maracaibo: oil city

Riccardo Morandi. construction photo of bridge over Lake Maracaibo, Venezuela from - The Concrete Architecture of Riccardo Morandi by Giorgio Boaga & Benito Boni. Praeger, 1966

Maracaibo was isolated from the rest of Venezuela across a large lake and closer therefore to Colombia, until  El Puente Sobre el Lago was built by the Jiménez regime of the 1950s.  A competition had been set in 1957, and won by Riccardo Morandi, an Italian structural engineer, who designed it in concrete. It was the longest prestressed concrete bridge at the time, 8.67km.

Maracaibo is the oil city of Venezuela; the lake is attached to the Maracaibo Basin, part of the Gulf of Mexico and the site of Venezuela's oil reserves.  In 1964 part of the bridge collapsed after being hit by an Esso oil tanker. There wasn't a resultant oil spill, however there is no such thing as failsafe oil transport.

Puente Sobre el Lago de Maracaibo visto desde el paseo del Lago

The Esso Maracaoibo II, the tanker, had been the US Navy gasoline tanker, USS Narraguagas.  It had been bought by the Compania de Petroleo Lagos in 1947, so the US Navy must have been decommissioning its support fleet after WWII.  It ferried crude oil from Lake Maracaibo to a refinery at Aruba.  At the time of the accident it had 236,000 barrels of crude on board; an electrical failure occured and the tanker drifted, smashing into the bridge and a 248m section collapsed.  Seven people, in four cars, fell off the bridge and died. 

Hace 44 años el Esso Maracaibo se estrelló contra las pilas20 y 21 del coloso sobre el lago 259 metros de la estructura se desplomaron El capitán español Avelino González Zulaika no pudo controlar el barco debido a una falla eléctrica . Ocho meses y una semana se tardó la Creole Petroleum Corporation en reparar el Puente Rafael Urdaneta. Hasta 1985 el Esso Maracaibo estuvo navegando aguas venezolanas.

branding oil: Stavanger

Stavanger, Norway

Stavanger is Norway's Calgary, in that it is the site of oil companies' head offices for the offshore oil industry.  Once could say that the oil sands were offshore for Calgary as well, as it doesn't have to deal with any of the environmental or social fallout associated with oil extraction.

Stavanger, I read on Science Nordic, is seeking to re-brand itself, acknowledging that the association with oil will not always be positive if climate change continues to threaten our existence.  Evidently, Stavanger is 'historically Norway's teetotallers' town and also the golden buckle of the country's bible belt'.  Its pre-oil industry was canning, but curiously has 'no distinct proletarian culture', unlike Oslo.  I feel as if I am reading all sorts of things between the lines, but can't understand what they mean.  

With neither history nor the proletariat suitable for a modern brand, they are working on Stavanger as an energy town (their italics).  What a surprise.  Calgary's newest brand, coincidentally, is 'Catch the Energy'.  The vagueness of energy: it could mean nuclear, solar, wind, nano-technology, wood stoves – it could even mean people doing a lot of jogging.  It will do well for the future as almost anything can be fitted to it.  

This being Norway, Stavanger, predictably, has a young architecture firm, Helen & Hard, doing beautiful work.

Helen & Hard. Ipark, an office complex for young, innovative companies in Stavanger, 2012From Helen & Hard's description of this project: 'the design concept is based on a simple principle of stacking prefabricated timber elements to create the façades. By horizontally rotating the elements, two spectacular cantilevers are created accentuating the entrances'. 

Norway has trees, we have trees.  Norway has oil, we have oil.  Norway uses wood extensively: Oslo's airport has a large wood egg-shaped bubble hovering over the concourse, the counters in the train stations are wood, the panelling on the transit carriages is wood.  We, on the other hand, do not use wood extensively. I'm pricing spruce and cedar planks to replace my back deck; I am told by every lumber company that I should buy the plastic wood decking instead. 

oil in Khanty-Mansiysk

Erick van Egeraat. Chess and Billiard Club, 2008. Khanty-Mansiysk, RussiaKhanty-Mansiysk is something like the Calgary of Siberia: a glossy oil city.  Erick van Egeraat was one of the founders of Mecanoo, and now has one of those globalised practices with offices in Rotterdam, London, Moscow,  Budapest and Prague.  The Chess and Billiard club building was commissioned by the Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Region in 2008, and underwritten by Gazprom.  It isn't large, just 8000 m2, but it is special, built for the 2010 Chess Olympiad.  On van Egeraat's website he says that Khanty-Mansiysk 'understood the need to deliver signature buildings that underline the prosperous state the city is in'.  

I've recently been writing about Calgary, which has Foster's behemothic Bow Building as evidence of its prosperous state, and an enormously expensive Calatrava bridge.  Sometimes one wishes that the prosperity was spread about a bit, in small projects such as chess clubs, throughout the city.

another kind of oil town

Huntington Beach, Los Angeles. postcard, n.d.Oil wells at Huntington Beach, Los Angeles.  Not that historic, I went there once, and yes, the beach was on one side of the road, and heavy industry on the other.  

And, below, Echo Park, 1895-1901.  I can't imagine that driling technology, safety and escaping gas were done any better then than now.  Were all these people destined for a very short life?  No heroic socialist project here, but a different kind of compliance with modernity. 

Echo Park, 1895-1901.

La Cité du Pétrole

This is a trailer for Marc Wolfensberger's La Cité du Pétrole / Oil Rocks - City above the Sea, 2009.

And this, a map from liquidinfrastructure.info

Neft daşları and soviet modernity

The Neft daşları project, in this video, indicates something of the heroic nature of this oilfield town built in the middle of a sea.  Somehow, socialist modernism, the invention of new urban forms in strange places such as the Azeri oilfields or Siberia, was always heroic, something that all through the Cold War we, on this side, were taught to ridicule – a legacy that still holds.

Consider the Alberta oil sands – a project of capitalist modernity – which is always grooming its image, not pushing the workers to the fore as in soviet propaganda, but foregrounding economic benefits and, belatedly, environmental reclamation.  During the oil boom of the late 1970s, they were officially called the Tar Sands.  Athabascan canoes had been caulked with tar for centuries, not oil, but even the name of the product has been smoothly and cleanly re-branded.  What is real here?

Oil sands workers live in camps, fly in from all over the country for two and three week shifts, either send their money home, a real third world economic practice, or blow it out through the narco-economy.  The workers are not even foregrounded for propaganda purposes. 

OIL: Neft daşları/Нефтяные Камни/Oil Stones

Neft daşları.  A town of 5 000 oil workers, 100km from Baku, Azerbaijan and 55km from shore in the Caspian Sea.  It is a spread out little company town where what one would normally think of as fields, is water.  There are sports fields, hostels, bits of lawn and gardens, a bakery, a clinic, a cinema.  Miles of trestle bridges connect an array of rigs, docks, wells and pipelines. A gas turbine electricity station makes the oil field operations completely automonous.

Built in 1949, this was the first offshore oil platform in the world; by 1958 the town was built and continued industrial and residential construction up until 1978.  There is a core population of 900, and a rotating population of several thousand shift workers, but no families or children. Water and food are brought in.  Pipelines have gradually replaced tanker transport as weather on the sea is violent and unpredictable.

Neft daşları is sinking, or the sea is rising.  There are other platforms in Azerbijan that have superseded Neft daşları, some of the 200km of trestle roadways have collapsed, some rigs are inaccessible.

Here is a good explanation of the project, and below, an overview:

protection

Hans Hildenbrand. German trenches, Alsace, 1915.

It was often said that when a German trench was captured the British were struck by how well they were constructed.  Hans Hildenbrand was a photographer from Stuttgart who had been experimenting with colour film since 1911, and had been sent to record the progress at the front, mostly in Alsace and Champagne.  We don't often see the other side, but there is a new book out, Endzeit Europa, colour photographs of WWI, and a selection of images is on der Spiegel online.

Just in this small cross section of one trench there is order and hierarchy, massive protection compared to the sandbags at Vimy: enough infrastructure to remove the sense of being caught in a hole dug in the ground.  One of the Airborne Regiment, after it had disbanded, told me how much time he had spent in Somalia, lying in a very shallow depression in the dust beside the highway leading to Belet Uen, covered only by his tarp.

How much 'building' does it take to protect, without giving a false sense of protection.  These German troops seem very confident, but these are posed photographs, not taken in the heat of battle.  They too left their trenches for that darkling plain that was the no-man's land. 

higher ground

Rebuilt trenches at Vimy RidgeNot sure where I found this image, it has been on my desktop for months.  It presents the structure of the trenches, no long shots or avenues, the depth, the configuration, all of which take on, today, the appearance of a land art installation.  However, like yesterday's map of the Gallipoli Peninsula, there is high ground, full of threat, and there are valleys, where one is. 

It is, I suppose, psychogeography 101, that being visual beings, we like being high up in the landscape so that we can see what is below us.  Why else would new subdivisions have names such as Aspen Heights, and, in west Calgary, the confusing Valley Ridge? which is on the side of a valley, but clearly has aspirations.

JB Jackson's essay, 'Landscape Seen by the Military' compared the fields of war in Europe during WWII where he was a military intelligence officer, with peacetime land use: ordered, hierarchical, topographical.  He seemed to imply that war was just another social aspect of how we use land. I'm not sure about this relatively limp thesis, that we have pushed and shaped the land to map our sense of what is right and proper, and that the land has let us.  Well, we have pushed it around, but the land resists.  The trenches in farm fields in northern France were full of water for one thing: a high water table (which is what made them so fertile) and, in 1916, unusually bad weather.  The suicidal Gallipoli situation – the land was not the ANZAC's ally, nor was it for D-Day – again, men scrambling up beaches while batteries of guns at the top of the cliffs (whose erosion makes the beaches) fired down at them. 

Vitruvius has a whole section on the advantages of height: it is safer there.

ANZAC Day

Australia and New Zealand Army Corps, 1915, sent to capture Gallipoli to secure a sea route to the Black Sea.  Gallipoli was in what was still the Ottoman Empire, an ally of Germany.  The Gallipoli campaign lasted eight months, 44,000 British, French, Australian, New Zealand and Indian troops died.  It is clear, even from this little map, that the terrain is a rocky spine on one side of the gap, and more mountains on the other, a terrible military disadvantage for anyone landing on the shoreline. 

Gallipoli is to Australia as Vimy is to Canada: the alleged formation of a national consciousness separate from Britain.  In both the casualties were enormous, and to only minor military advantage in the whole war.  It was, I suppose, the moment of postcolonial consciousness, subsequently more fierce in Australia than Canada.

Is it fair, through the longer lens of subsequent history and analysis, to think it was such a waste?  Here, we are lectured that to question anything military means we are not supporting our troops, or our countries – does this divide have anything to do with national consciousness?  Protest defines a people, complicity rarely does – the Arab Spring has taught us that much. 

The phrase 'Never again' comes around every November, and must be reverberating though Australia and New Zealand today. What is it we are remembering on November 11th, or 25th of April, or July 1st, the day of the Battle of Beaumont Hamel which annhilated the Newfoundland Regiment?  There is always more war, more matériel, more lost generations.

on site in situ

Archizines exhibition at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York

Sent by Greg Barton, one of the contributors to on site 27: DIRT.  Nice to be seen in such heady company.

Bill Bourne's rural urban blues

So Bill Bourne, grade 8 in 1967, living on a farm near Red Deer, saw Oscar Brand's Let's Sing Out on tv and thought, I can do this. 

He is a relentless traveller, staple of the summer festival circuit, a rough, jagged blade of a voice.  This video is from a gig in Vulcan, a real back of beyond town an hour and a half south of Calgary, where the town built a spaceship in honour of Star Trek, instead of the god of fire, Vulcan, for whom the town was named by the CPR in 1915: rails of forged steel and sparks and all, including all eight avenues and nine streets named after Roman gods and goddesses until they were renamed as numbers.

Anyway, whatever, Bill Bourne played there at the Vulcan Lodge Hall in 2010.  Gordon Lightfoot, still on tour at 71 and interviewed on Q yesterday, was about to play the Casinorama in Orillia, the town he grew up in. Really?  This is Gordon Lightfoot we are talking about. At 12 he sang at Massey Hall in the Kiwanis Music Festival. His mother said, you know Gordie, Bing makes a living at this.

All this continues a discussion in On Site 27: rural urbanism, the powerful relationship between the rural and the urban, and the kind of cultural production that comes out of rural areas, migrates to urban centres, but contains an insistent rural sense of completely open possibilities.

Turner of Oxford

William Turner of Oxford. View of University Park Looking Towards New College, Oxford, after 1825. Watercolor over graphite on paper. 8 1/2 x 15 1/8 in. The Metropolitan Museum, New York.

Somehow completely in thrall to these horizontal landscapes this week.  This one so diagrammatic, one wonders if he was there at all.

winter in aberdeenshire, could be here

John Gardiner Crawford. Winter. n.d. Oil on masonite, 101 x 69 cm. The Scottish Gallery.Too much contact with landscape clearly makes one very abstract.

north wales in 1802

Cornelius Varley. Craig Goch, Moel Hebog, North Wales, 1802. Watercolor over graphite. 16.4 x 36.5 cm. The Metropolitan Museum, New York

This calm small watercolour of 1802 was done the year before Lusieri's Parthenon, below.  The description on the Metropolitan Museum website says that Varley left painting in favour of the development of optical instruments.  
Both are about seeing, the relationship between detail and sight, between recording and looking. 

the southeast corner of the Parthenon, 1803

Giovanni Battista Lusieri. The South-east Corner of the Parthenon, Athens, 1803. watercolour, 64 x 83cm. The National Galleries of Scotland, Lady Ruthven bequest, 1885.

When Lord Elgin was removing the sculptures from the Parthenon, the ones held in the British Museum as the Elgin Marbles and the subject of a long and intense campaign by Greece for their repatriation, he had Giovanni Battista Lusieri record the removal process.  

Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin was the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire between 1799 and 1803.  Clearly the Ottoman Empire, which had reigned from 1299 to 1923 – the remains are today's Turkey – didn't much care for Greece, indeed relations between Greece and Turkey simmer and seethe still.  Why were Canadian UN Peacekeepers in Cyprus for so long, for example?  Greece, Greek history, the Parthenon, the Phidian sculptures would have seemed archaeological, not particularly essential to a centrally located but culturally marginal part of a vast empire which occupied the Middle East, North Africa, the northeast Mediterranean and surrounded the Red Sea, the Black Sea and touched the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf.

Greece was lost to the Ottoman Empire in 1821, but by then the archaeological looting was complete.  Britain purchased the marbles, already in their possession, in 1816. The legality of the removal was questioned immediately after it happened; even Byron protested the removal, so it is not just a recent 20th century controversy. During the Greek War of Independence of 1821-1833, the Ottomans used the Erechtheum as a munitions store, confirming a basic disinterest in the spatiality of history in occupied territory.  

It was the beginning of the era of the Grand Tour however, and a British love of things Greek: language, architecture, philosophy.  It was felt that the marbles of the Parthenon were safer in England than in a place with a growing independence movement which predictably ended in a 12-year war.  

The moral justification for looting during a war often rests on salvation and protection.  At the end of the 20th century, the Elgin Marbles remained in the British Museum because Athens is considered too polluted – had they been left on the Parthenon, they would have dissolved away.  Now, I suppose Greece is considered to financially unstable to look after them. 

burning down the house

ah, the 80s.

Louis Edouard Fournier: the funeral of Shelley

Louis Edouard Fournier, The Funeral of Shelley, 1889. Oil on canvas, 129.5 x 213.4cm. The Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in 1822 when his yacht was wrecked in a storm in the Gulf of Spezzia, Italy. His body was cremated and his remains later buried at the Protestant cemetery in Rome.  He is watched over here by Trelawny, Leigh Hunt and Byron.  He was 29; Keats had died the previous year, Byron two years later: the Romantic triumvirate, their recklessness with life and limb echoed in the romance we still attach to Kurt Cobain – the dead boy.  Romance is all in the perception of death, not the reality.

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an interesting read: Richard Holmes on the mythologising of Shelley's death, part of the National Portrait Gallery's Interrupted Lives lecture series in 2004.