Maybe it has to do with all that existentialism. If you can’t even decide if you exist or not, who cares what color the building is painted

One thing that really trips me out in Paris, is that all the buildings are beige. Every single shade of beige that could be imagined and then some. Is there some kind of unwritten rule about this, did all the Parisians long ago decide on this particular aesthetic? I have heard that in New York City, all the brownstones are brown because when you mix all the paint colors together, thats what you get. That could be just an urban legend, but was this what happened in Paris, but in a lighter way? Maybe it has to do with all that existentialism. If you can’t even decide if you exist or not, who cares what color the building is painted. Well, I guess in the end its probably all for the better, although a bit peculiar. If you just let people paint the buildings however they want, your most likely gonna end up with some bad results. A purple, pink and bright green Paris, would just ruin the experience.

Even with all the charm, mystery, history and culture that one encounters when they first find themselves in the “City of Lights”, Paris, one can’t help but notice certain aspects of the city that seem a bit stale and outdated.  It doesn’t even seem like it’s holding on to it’s past glories and it’s place as the center of the western world, just a century ago. But seems, at this point, to be just stuck with a bunch of old things and ways.  Like a favorite shirt that was still proudly worn a couple of months ago, even with the few small stains and missing buttons, but now looks so bad that your friends start to wonder about your financial situation, when worn out for a night on the town. This is not to say that Paris isn’t still magnificent in it’s own specific way or that it doesn’t live up to the image that it projects out to the world, which it does and then some. It’s just that it resembles a museum and a museum is a place for an objects final resting place, not for its creation.

Though among this year’s crowd, it seems to have been the architects who were the fewest in number and the least remarkable. The presentations began with Rory Hyde, an Australian fresh out of arch-school whose work and ideas fall squarely in the category of ‘alright, I suppose’. He was followed by the duo of Rogier Klomp and Bart-Jan Kazemier, who used the style of Gang of Four’s ‘Anthrax’ to present the history of Bertelsmann’s media empire.

Next up was the man who stole the show with the longest applause and the loudest laughs, Bernard Bolter. The San Francisco-based artist presented his surreal collages of city landscapes by rapping freestyle to the beat of a djembe drum. I never thought I’d hear anyone rap about Frank Gehry “doing his thing” in Los Angeles and Bilbao. Well, now I have, and it was absolutely hilarious.

Few others came close to being that entertaining. Alex Scordelis of NYC’s Improv Everywhere kept everyone laughing with his scenes of orchestrated urban chaos, though his candid-camera-style clips were nothing most people hadn’t already seen on the Internet.

Long videos that broke with the typical format and a humourless style didn’t go down too well with the audience. Edial, a new media student at the University of Amsterdam singled out Sid Lee’s presentation for criticism. “It was too promotional,” he said with a scowl, “an advert for an advertising agency.

photo: Tanja Baudoin

First exhibition of the limited edition prints of the digital city series. Excellent catering was provided by Francoise, Lekker Traiteur, music was provided by DJ Job. Special Thanks to Daniel and Martin at Cutting Cultures, and to everyone else that came.

The main difference seemed to be that they don’t worry about things as much.

Every society in the world has a certain thing that they cut back on first, and in Portugal that would be the sidewalks. I understand that it’s an old country and they didn’t have much to work with in the first place, but when the time of the automobile and modern transportation came around, sidewalks were the first thing to go, leaving about a half meter of width at some point, for groups of lost travellers and locals, to pass each other on the busy streets of Lisbon. Well, on the flip side, I guess jaywalking probably isn’t a punishable offence.

The city of Lisbon has quite a few similarities with my home town of San Francisco, California - it’s built on seven hills, they have cable cars, the bridge resembles the Golden Gate and they have a history of earthquakes. The main difference seemed to be that they don’t worry about things as much. First off, I didn’t see any cars with their wheels curbed (having the wheels turned toward the curb so the vehicle won’t suddenly roll down the hill), which will get you a quick  and expensive ticket in the SFC. Second off, they don’t seemed so worried about earthquakes, whereas I grew up with constant warnings and earthquake drills as a youngster. But I guess in a city built out of large stones on top of steep hills, if there was an earthquake, you’d be a goner anyway, so why worry.

I guess in the end, people just want to run where they’re from, take it or leave it.

In the history of western civilization, it always amazed me how, at a certain point, waves of Nordic people continuously come down from the north and invade the “known” societies of the south. First off, where were these people coming from? Did they just thaw out at some point and start raging? Were the people that came down from the north the losers of the battle for the cold land of Scandinavia, or the winners looking to get more?

Walking around Stockholm, you get a picture of this past, from all the monuments and statues that pay homage to the royal families and Nordic warriors from long ago. It all gives you a heavy feeling of a history from another source. Then again, why were they holding down this cold tundra so hard? Granted, in the summer, the nature is quite beautiful with the feeling of space all around, but that probably didn’t factor in too much, back in the day, when the world was less populated and nature was what there was all around. Must have been something. I guess in the end, people just want to run where they’re from, take it or leave it.

Like one giant hamster house, people move through tubes and passages from one end of the city to the other, without ever going outside.

The city of Hong Kong is a testament to human concentration, built on the side of a steep mountain, overlooking the water that separates it from the mainland. The passages and people-moving escalators extend from the maze of malls that exist below the towering skyscrapers at the bottom of the hill, into the city above, creating an eerie symbiotic experience between city and mall. Like one giant hamster house, people move through tubes and passages from one end of the city to the other, without ever going outside.  You could almost imagine people on giant treadmills, running fast, but never going anywhere, with a wad of cash dangling in front of them as motivation, but just out of reach.

But if the is one thing taller than the skyscrapers in Hong Kong, it is the hills, which are all the more accessible due to the fact that there are escalators that carry you almost to the top. As you climb the steep streets and stairways that extend past the escalators, you begin to emerge from the concrete jungle into the hill top natural jungle above. Which is very overwhelming and quite vast, making you wonder why the masses live so concentrated down below, when there is so much space on the top. Well I guess when one gets accustomed to escalators all the time, why build a house where you would have to walk up a steep hill to get to it?

Try installing new windows and spicing up a joint with IKEA furniture, in a building that’s a thousand years old

The port city of Marseille, is one of the oldest in France, and if you go to the oldest part of town, it seems a bit abandoned. Apparently, the Nazi’s destroyed most of it in the war, because the old school basements and tunnels proved to be too resourceful for the resistance. Even so, it still feels a bit odd, in this modern age of urban renewal, that such a city center would remain broken and somewhat abandoned. If you go to the other parts of town, like on top of the hills or around the beach, it’s a different story altogether, almost like there’s two different cities in one.

Maybe it’s a more natural progression in a county like France, maybe the French, especially in the south, got so much old shit, they just can’t be bothered. All these other cities that have this urban renewal thing going on, like in northern Europe and especially the States, are happy if they can preserve a building that’s a hundred years old, which at least is something you can work with. Try installing new windows and spicing up a joint with IKEA furniture, in a building that’s a thousand years old, probably a pain in the ass. And in a city like Marseille, where visitors are more likely trying to get to the beach than anywhere else, there’s no tourist incentive to rebuild the old town. Which in the end, let’s old Marseille keep it’s abandoned charm intake, cuz it would probably be Starbuck’s and MacDonalds, that would be fixing the windows and throwing IKEA furniture in those old buildings, if things were different.

It seems people just need to have the world at their feet these days,

Las Vegas is just plain odd. Most cities grow around some sort of natural occurrence, whether it be a river for easy shipping or a mountain top for security reasons, but Vice City grew out of a loophole in the law that forced the activity of throwing one’s money into a machine, pulling a handle, and hoping to see more money come back out, into the state of Nevada. Why this is illegal elsewhere, is another matter altogether, but the resulting concentration of all these coins that never come back, grew so great, that the seven (if not more) wonders of the world needed to be built there as a means of enticing more legally frustrated coin chuckers to come and continue to fill the machines.

Las Vegas got it’s own Eiffel tower, it’s got it’s own San Marco, it got it’s own Pyramid, it’s got it’s own Oasis and it even has it’s own pirate ship that bursts with light and water canons every night in some kinda cheesy “Pirates of the Caribbean” musical show. All in the middle of the dry, hot and flat desert. It seems people just need to have the world at their feet these days, because the old style casinos of the wild west and circus clowns look like decrepit old relics, ready to be torn down to make way for Vegas versions of Big Ben, the Golden Gate Bridge or even the Great Wall of China. But hey, why go anywhere anyways, when you can just throw that plane fare money right down on the table and spin the wheel of fortune.

but even Hollywood is just built on the side of a hill, set apart, giving it a vantage point to look down on real life

The city of angels, a sprawling modern metropolis, where roads have replaced sidewalks and cars have replaced shoes. A city of countless souls, and of countless more, that come there every year in search of something. An urban center, turning out culture at a rapid rate, supplying the world with it’s own image, whether people like it or not. An epicenter so much on the map that it might as well created the map. But still a city where the center is elusive.

In a city that has built and filmed probably most of the city centers of the world, it’s a bit hard to pin-point the definitive center of Los Angeles. Sure, there’s some skyscrapers, but they just seem built as a symbolic effort to keep up in man’s race to the heavens. You’ve got Hollywood, which would proudly claim to be the center of everything, but even Hollywood is just built on the side of a hill, set apart, giving it a vantage point to look down on real life, for the inspiration for it’s next hit. But that’s not where the center is at. You got the beaches, with Venice and Santa Monica, where all the people seem to be at. But you wouldn’t call that the center either.

Maybe theoretical physics could help a bit concerning this matter. If you were to take an infinite plane and look at each point individually, you would find that every point in this infinite plane would mathematically be at the center. Maybe this explains why it seems that a lot of folks in LA think they are the center of their own universe.

All to show their contribution to the global melting pot of culture.

An amazing labyrinth of canals, staircases, bridges, narrow walkways and crumbling stones, Venice gives one the impression of a civilization born upon water itself. An independent race of mankind, that never invented the wheel and who’s evolutionary path seems to be headed in the direction of growing outboard motors out of their backs. It was apparent the water was the way to move when I first saw the Venice police in hot pursuit on a speed boat, quickly catching the perpetrator, who was on foot. Without any buses, trams, cars or even bicycles, Venice has a peacefulness and quietness that is quite unique for a city, when all these tiny disturbances are taken for granted in most urban areas. But on the other hand, all this lack of vehicles makes skateboarding one of the fastest modes of transportation in this town. So fast apparently, that it caught the local pidgins off guard and I hit a couple of these pampered flying rats as I skated through town.

While I was in Venice, the art Biennale was taking place all over town, with the major nations of the world building grand pavilions and squatting old halls of arts and science. All to show their contribution to the global melting pot of culture. The largest exhibit takes place in the Arsenal, the former military barracks that used to house all the weaponry of the city. At first it seems a bit odd, the exhibit is presented quite well, but upon more consideration, when you think about this modern world of ours, and the fact of a mutually assured destruction in the event of modern warfare, maybe culture is the modern weapon of choice and the Biennale is well housed, accordingly.