Architecture for Atonement.
Friday morning, and the cold fog snuggled the city of Vienna like a damp comforter when I was woken by my alarm at 6.00 a.m. It was much too early for my jet-lagged body, which was still on Boston time six hours behind.
In the airport taxi twenty minutes later, we checked in at the Air Berlin counter for a discount carrier flight to Berlin. Thankfully, I slept all the way.
The best way to describe Berlin is not so much that it is a city, but a forest interspersed with roads and buildings. Having some extra time before our meeting, we drove through the woods to the Holocaust memorial, which is one of the most amazing pieces of installation art I have ever seen.
From the street outside, it looks like a whole lot of concrete slabs around four feet high, evoking a graveyard. It’s only when you wander in to the rows between the slabs that you realize that you are going down into a valley, and that the slabs are actually of vastly different heights. Soon you are lost in between the rows of concrete, and the sounds of the city fade until you have to strain to hear the noise of the traffic. The feelings of emptiness and the uniformity of concrete give you the impression of being in a prison of sorts. If ever there was a piece of architecture that made me reflect on the extreme edges of the human condition, this was it. The cold weather only added to the emptiness, the growing thought that all the variety in life had been stripped off layer by layer like an onion, and what remained was an empty, underground parking lot. I felt mostly serene, but there was a nagging part of me that wanted to just lie down among those stones and never get up.
We had morning tea around the corner at a beautiful café adorned with black and white photos of old movie stars. The establishment provided a wide open view of the American embassy, ring by metal and barbed wire with sandbags piled high and young marines with crewcuts casting a weary eye from the comfort of their guardpost towards the big bad world outside. They followed our progress carefully, as we dragged our suspicious looking suitcases across the pavement and into the café.
It looked like the beginning of a joke…An American, a German and an Indian walk into a café…
In the airport taxi twenty minutes later, we checked in at the Air Berlin counter for a discount carrier flight to Berlin. Thankfully, I slept all the way.
The best way to describe Berlin is not so much that it is a city, but a forest interspersed with roads and buildings. Having some extra time before our meeting, we drove through the woods to the Holocaust memorial, which is one of the most amazing pieces of installation art I have ever seen.
From the street outside, it looks like a whole lot of concrete slabs around four feet high, evoking a graveyard. It’s only when you wander in to the rows between the slabs that you realize that you are going down into a valley, and that the slabs are actually of vastly different heights. Soon you are lost in between the rows of concrete, and the sounds of the city fade until you have to strain to hear the noise of the traffic. The feelings of emptiness and the uniformity of concrete give you the impression of being in a prison of sorts. If ever there was a piece of architecture that made me reflect on the extreme edges of the human condition, this was it. The cold weather only added to the emptiness, the growing thought that all the variety in life had been stripped off layer by layer like an onion, and what remained was an empty, underground parking lot. I felt mostly serene, but there was a nagging part of me that wanted to just lie down among those stones and never get up.
We had morning tea around the corner at a beautiful café adorned with black and white photos of old movie stars. The establishment provided a wide open view of the American embassy, ring by metal and barbed wire with sandbags piled high and young marines with crewcuts casting a weary eye from the comfort of their guardpost towards the big bad world outside. They followed our progress carefully, as we dragged our suspicious looking suitcases across the pavement and into the café.
It looked like the beginning of a joke…An American, a German and an Indian walk into a café…
posted by Ravi Mantha at 4:01 AM
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