corbusier (II)

that day, marion and i first went to teufelsberg, then stopped and paid our respect to monsieur le corbusier. i think, if i'm not mistaken, we had five or six cameras between us: marion the rolleiflex, her LC-A, and my praktica (this was the day after georgette went on strike on karl-marx-allee); i had my nikkormat, a disposable, and possibly the zenit, which i can't recall for sure. i believe though, these were taken with the zenit. in any case, this is the slide roll, and it worked its crystally magic.

corbusier (I)

word. some residents at corbusier's building in berlin are trying hard to re-establish natural conditions.

also: spot the dog.

happy weekend!

//

sometimes, it's all in the details.

more of mies

mr. less-is-more, the man with the cigar, he built some very nice houses indeed. i thought i'd show you a few more shots taken on that crisp and sunny winter's day. i'm glad i had both a colour and a black-and-white roll with me, they came out so very differently.

p.s.: i'm still pinning.

mies et marion

marion suggested paying mies a visit, and we did. and look, how well they got on!

the house, originally landhaus lemke (1932), is tiny. like so many places in berlin, it has a complex history. after the war, the russian allies used it as a garage, in the 1960s, it was used by the stasi (east german secret service) as laundry storage. today, you can visit the house - it is almost empty, there is no signage, there are no wall texts, no plaques, no explanations. which is astonishing. at the same time, it gives you the chance to just see and feel the place, the light, the textures.

a few days later i found myself pondering how mr and mrs lemke, the original owners, might have used the space. i can work out kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom (fairly obvious), but how did they use the two main rooms? did they choose to have the view onto the garden and the little lake beyond from the living room? and how did they furnish the rooms? a look at the house's website gives you an idea, and i must say, well, in this instance, i agree to disagree with mies. i bet the carpets were chosen by the lemke's though. oh, the absence of taste.

p.s.: don't forget you can still enter for my little giveaway. i will draw a winner this coming sunday.

lines

i'd like to say thank you for all your feedback. not only does it make me happy to hear from you, it is also so very helpful. i always tend to think that everybody else knows exactly what they are doing, that everybody else has a clear, distinct style, found their way, while i'm finding it often excruciating to be all over the place. rather like circling an unknown point-of-having-arrived, and constantly being somewhere along the wide periphery of that circle. since i feel i'm so far from that certain point, the circumference is great and the individual spots i'm checking in from lie wide apart. it seems so random.

still, on that journey, i'm learning a lot, and you often keep me going. so thank you.

this morning, i have some lines from the corbusier house in marseille for you.

morning

waking up at the hotel corbusier on a summer's day.

corbusier

well, i had to go. and of course, marion took me. to the unité d'habitation in marseille, one of le corbusier's most seminal buildings.

it's hard to put into words how connected i felt to this place. maybe you can guess from the photos i took.

p.s.: a new post here, with some news.

more corbu

ok, i can't help myself and am posting the other photos from the berlin unité now. hope you don't mind...

le corbusier designed his berlin version of the unité d'habitation for interbau 1957, an international, star-studded building competition in berlin. the building was erected between 1956 and 1958. sadly, due to building restrictions (and i bet a fair bit of ignorance on part of the german city clerks) the original design was quite substantially changed, so that le corbusier finally distanced himself from the project. one of the changes apparently was the ceiling height, which corbu had meant to be 2.26 m (based on his modulor), and which in the end was 2.50 m, due to fire safety regulations. do you think that sounds about right or might be an urban myth?

anyway, these are some shots i took when we walked around the building. it was a dismal afternoon, very grey and windy and cold. i think i may come back in spring or summer to see how different the play of light and shadow will make the building seem. and how different the colours will look.

happy weekend!

inside le corbusier

you remember me saying i took photos at le corbusier's unité d'habitation (or corbusier house) in berlin and didn't know if any of them would come out because i used the wrong shutter speed? well, i got lucky. i used expired film and it was a tad dark (grey skies, again), so the colours are a bit flat, but you know that's how i like them anyway.

so here is the first round, taken inside the lobby of the building. sadly, the building is not open for visitors, the lobby is the only place you can access freely. there is a bit of a photo documentation of the building there, which is rather nice. if however you want to see one of the apartments, you can do so once a year (!) at the day of the open monument in september (the next one being september 12, 2010).

obviously, you can also look at the building from the outside. more about that in my next post.

monday, monday

morning! hope you had a wonderful weekend. i did some pottering around the house and some dreaded admin. on sunday, met up with friends to bake cookies and celebrate the first of advent. oh yum.

again, i need some help from you. i'm really not a technology wizard, but my macbook is getting slower and slower and there must be some cause-and-effect thing going on between that phenomenon and the fact i've been storing more and more pictures on it. (only joking - i know that's the reason.) anyway. i thought the best thing to do would be to get a decent external harddrive, to archive photos there and only keep the most recent in my iphoto-library on my macbook. is that what you are doing/would recommend, or is there a better way to archive photos and keep your computer from crying?

many thanks!

photos taken on a bike ride from kreuzberg to prenzlauer berg last week, which roughly takes me 40 mins (i'm not the racing kind of bike rider, for those of you who know the city). the sun was setting, and it was remarkably quiet on the streets. i stopped every now and again to take pictures. i love early evenings in the city.

thank you

thanks so much for all your kind comments on my last post and all your birthday wishes! i'm really touched.

thanks also for bearing with me - i've been a bit absent recently. this afternoon i came back home from a long weekend, which was wonderful, and jumped straight back into work.

i'll be around more this week and look forward to catching up with all of you. what are your plans?

p.s.: for now, i'll leave you with two pictures from the latest roll of film i shot with my praktica. i really love those lights - i saw them again when i was at art forum, berlin's annual art fair. they are easily 2 metres in diametre. impressive.

p.p.s.: oh, and do you like swedish pop music? then do take a look here!

soundtrack

last week was crap from start to finish. to be honest, i think this may not just be down to the fact that i've been working for weeks without a day's break and was sick, but still had to work, but may also have been weird side-effects of the antibiotics. although i have to work this weekend too - this time at my desk, translating - i'm determined to enjoy the sunshine and take a little time off tomorrow.

so here's my soundtrack for this weekend:

keren ann, lay your head down

johann sebastian bach, goldberg variations played by glenn gould

coralie clément, indécise

on a different note - i think it may be time to say good-bye to venice. it was a good time. here's to travelling with a good friend, seeing lots of art, being surrounded by water and amazing architecture. to the unbelievable light. thanks to you all for coming along! (if i may, i'll show you more pictures from the second part of trip to france next week.)

a note on my pics (since i still haven't figured out to do captions that look good - tips welcome):

1st - funky lights by artist tobias rehberger at the venice biennial bookshop and cafeteria in the giardini 

2nd - said crazy cafeteria, one of the art works that won a golden lion

3rd - oh to travel with a good friend, thanks jo!

4th - dutch pavilion with a series of amazing art works by fiona tan

5th - light and shadow in front of the belgian pavilion

monday again

had a busy weekend in  a good way. am helping out in one of berlin's most beautiful bookshops in the museum of contemporary art for a few weeks. and although that means working saturday and sunday, i had a really good time. what a dream to be in the middle of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves all day, right? apart from the selection of books on art, photography, architecture and design, which is quite awe-inspiring, there are also loads of great artists' postcards (this one here is by david shrigley) and other goodies that are either useful in a beautiful way or completely useless but a lot of fun anyway. i like this presentation of rubber bands. the book is a photo book on roadside diners in the U.S. and features a picture of an (untouched by the hands of a food-stylist) dish coupled with a portrait of people working there. nice one!

also went voting for the european parliament on sunday morning. the polling station was in an old school building in my neighbourhood. i think the old sign saying 'walhllokal' (polling station) they put up there must have been from the 1950s. and despite the awful rain that morning and the fact that i had to cycle to work in that weather, those signs made me smile. loved the faded colours on the walls and the crumbling plaster as well. i think it must have been a corridor they opened for polling day that's otherwise not in use at that school (everything else is quite newly refurbished).

hope your weekend was inspiring, too!