Impressions, Brussels

This post is a bit difficult for me, since I am not really sure what I want to say here. Guess it purports to write down a few recent impressions I had.

So, after I finished this years antiproton run at CERN, and a short visit at GSI, I had an opportunity to visit a friend who stayed in Brussels for a few weeks.

Brussels. Right.

What came to my mind is

1. the European Union, 
2. Frensh, sorry, Belgian fries 
3. and Hercule Poirot.
   
   Oh, yes, and 
4. the Atomium.

It turned out to be a visit which connected a lot of mental loose ends I had in my head.

What really impressed me was the extensive use of Art Deco like architecture throughout the city. In terms of style, one may think of a Hercule Poirot BBC TV-series featuring David Suchet, which is full of Art Deco like scenograpghy. Housing seems to be arranged in "Residences" where apartments can be rented out furnished or unfurnished, and those residences would be given fancy names.

Now, I still have only a poor mobile phone camera with me, nonetheless: here are a few random examples from the southern part of the city:

"Palais de la Folle Chanson" (Palace of the silly song)

Entrance of the same building.

Another random building near the ULB university.

However, some buildings were extensively decorated with organic cast ion forms:

From http://brusselsphotos.blogspot.com/

Clearly different than Art Deco. It reminded me of the Metro station entrances in Paris:

A Metro station entrance in Paris

and indeed, this architectural style is known as Art Nouveau, or "Jugendstil". It is a predecessor to Art Deco.

The influence still prevails, take a look a the Kusmi Tea label design, and I think I sometimes see elements hereof in the steam punk genre. Computer games too, most noteworthy BioShock where the entire utopian underwater city "Rapture" was kept in Art Deco style mixed with plenty of steam punk.

In an earlier post, where I mentioned Bucarest, lots of Art Deco architecture should be found (such as the "Cinema Scala" building, shown in the same post, with its characteristic curved surface.)

So, I started to reflect, why do I find this architecture fascinating?
A part of the answer might be that this style of the inter-war period conveys some sort of jovial limitless belief in development of technology. Protagonists of industrial tychoons naively extrapolated this idea into megalomaniac dimensions, and it surely had its downfall, the sinking of the Titanic probably one of the first evidence hereof.

Visiting a comic book shop, a colleague recommended me the book "Brüsel" by the famous Belgian comic artists François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters.

(Now I got another reason to improve my French.) This book generally portraits the same idea. Inspired by the actual destruction of a real world part of Brussels to give room for new buildings , "Brüsel" describe a very similar scenery.  Corporate oligarchs push new ideas beyond limits, leaving a wasteland behind as they fail since the human aspect was ignored.

Hm, this post has now become an eclectic mix of thoughts. Anyway, this way too short, yet overwhelming, visit in Brussels more or less puts the city into my top 5 list of cities I would like to live in.

Thanks Linda and Nico :-)

And I am now going to buy a decent camera.

"Brechungen"

Take a look at this blurry picture:

and try to guess where and when it was taken.

I showed it to some of my colleagues, and got answers like “Aarhus, 1970” and “Detroit, 1950’s”.


Your call...?


The answer is: Bucarest, 1941. The picture was taken by Willy Pragher (1908-1992), who was a German-Romanian photographer. Recently an exhibition of his photography “Brechungen” was touring across Europe, and I had a chance to visit it in December (yeah, I was the only one who came that day. And by the surprised look of the lady at the reception, I might have been the only visitor during the entire week).

Bucarest, 1937

Pragher captures the burgeoning industrialization and urbanization in the capital city of Romania along with the agricultural life on the countryside. Heavy industry such as oil processing, steel mills, smelters and mining are contrasted with the rural existence. The concept by itself may sound trivial, yet this exhibition covers the late 20’s and early 40’s of Romania, and is today accepted as a significant contribution to the country’s photographic treasury. Pictures themselves are categorized in the post-expressionistic “Neue Sachlichkeit” genre, and generally try to reflect contemporary views without imposing any opinion on them -  that is something I fancy.

But, what hit me, was feeling of imagining what the (by then) prosperous country could potentially have been today if it was not by the disaster of the Second World War and the succeeding communist era - later ruled by the mad dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. There was a reason why Bucharest was called “the Paris of Eastern Europe” - before Ceausescu started to pull down the city so he could spell his name with precast concrete slabs.

Even the 1989 “revolution” (or some may say coup d’etat) helped little, as the new government was constituted of former apparatchiks, leaving a corrupt system and a disillusioned population behind.


The same feeling explained above occasionally overcomes me when I view old photographs of eastern Europe. Worth mentioning is the rather timeless and pioneering experimental movie Человек с киноаппаратом “Man with a movie camera” by the famous director Dziga Vertov. It is a B/W silent film, but a few years ago the British band “Cinematic Orchestra” added some great music to it, making the movie even more enjoyable. Here is my favourite excerpt ("The Awakening of a Woman"):



Most of the move was filmed in (thriving and socialistic) Odessa during 1929. The full one-hour movie can be viewed here, and is certainly worth watching.