The Inconveniences of Winter

From twenty five stories up, a snow-covered Manhattan is beautiful. Walking through a park, the snow is beautiful. Playing in the snow late at night in a deserted South Street Seaport is indeed fun. But, walking on plowed streets and shoveled sidewalks is not enjoyable whatsoever.

During the rest of the year in New York, people cross streets diagonally, jaywalk from the middle of one block to another, and generally just don't follow the grid pattern when at all possible. While the grid is simple and easy to follow, for fast-paced Manhattan, walking tends to take a more "the quickest way from point A to point B is a straight line" approach. Say your destination is the corner of 53rd St. and 5th Ave., and you are walking up 5th Ave. from 52nd on the opposite side of the street from where you need to go. If traffic permits (ok, maybe 5th wasn't the best example here, but use your imagination), you will cut across Fifth in between 52nd and 53rd, reaching your destination decades more quickly than if you were to go all the way to the end of the block and cross the street there. Imagine a right triangle, and by crossing the street in the middle of the block, you are taking the hypotenuse, which is shorter than the sum of the two legs.



Now, add the snowdrifts that are created by plows to the sides of the road (which can be otherwise dangerous too), and you have no opportunity to take the hypontenuse route. You are trapped on sidewalks by mountains of snow, which is by now, not silky white, but shit-colored re-frozen slop. So, in formulating walking times for winter, not only do you have to figure in the wind coming at your face at fifty miles per hour, but you also have to add all that time wasted by crossing the street in the sidewalks. Oy.

The Expiatory Temple of the Holy Family

Seeing the Sagrada Familia, a cathedral started well over a century ago, still under construction really reminds you how much we take architecture and building for granted these days. Skyscrapers go up in the matter of only a few years at most, but the great cathedrals of the Middle Ages took hundreds of years to complete. If such a project were started today it would be met with impatience and the need to build something quickly. What cathedrals symbolize is a heritage left for the city, whereas skyscrapers fulfill an immediate need. Both show civic pride represented in the form of “mine is bigger than yours,” but the cathedrals of Europe are works that are passed from generation to generation, creating a much greater appreciation of their existence and building.

Barcelona is the perfect city for such a project in modern times. Barcelona is not afraid of the “little things” that while bring no immediate profit to the city—ornamental streetlamps and sidewalks, public art, and colorful buildings. They are thus concerned with portraying an image of civic pride, fitting in with the Catalonian pride of the region. This is exactly the kind of pride that continuing the construction of the Sagrada Familia which, after nearly 120 years of construction, will most likely continue for at least another fifty. The final product will be an amalgamation of various styles, starting with Gaudi, and will be the perfect summation of the city from 1882 to 2050.

Yesterday, in my 20th Century Architecture class, I learned a little more about this church. And it left a bad taste in my mouth. Apparently, the church was funded by a group of people that thought society had a little expiating of sin to do. Now, society doesn't have the normal Se7en sins like a person. The sins of society include, but are not limited to, revolution, republican government as opposed to monarchy, Darwinism and evolution theory, and the separation of church and state. Parts of that sound familiar? A lot like Bush Christianity, the type of "moral value" shit that seemingly won the last election.

I have never let ideology come between me and a piece of great architecture. Seeing traditional Gothic Cathedrals and churches in Barcelona, I was completely awe-struck, even knowing they were possibly central to the Spanish Inquisition, something far worse than a few people wanting to expiate society's sins. I just can't get over the fact that Darwinism is a sin. Maybe it's because that issue is so relevant today, and I am (to put it lightly) unhappy with the form of Christianity that Bush and his colleagues are pushing. My feelings on the Sagrada Familia are entirely complex, and I really want to grow up, get over my personal emotions, and just like the building without reservations.

Maybe in a few years.

"Mundane" Designs

The first few posts here will be from my recent trip to Barcelona, just a few musings on the wonderful city...

When considering the design of a city, at least in America, streetlamps and sidewalk bricks are not the first thing that come to mind. Their form is lost in their function; they are nothing but pure functionality. There is nothing spectacular about most American streetlamps. It rises above the street, and if doing its job, it illuminates the area underneath it. It ends with that. It is nothing to look at during the day but a steel rod. The sidewalks of America are largely nothing more than a big cement area with cracks forming large squares and rectangles and most of the time also going haphazardly every which way, though these kind are not intended. Sidewalks are nothing nice, but rather, just for walking.

In Barcelona, the exact opposite is the case with both of these everyday urban forms. Most streetlamps are large black iron casings with a bright white light inside, clustered in groups of three. While being great to look at during the day, at night, they illuminate the streets wonderfully. Though this is their dominating form, there are other lamp designs as well. In the Placa Reial, the lamps in the center are said to be Gaudi’s first designs. They are intricate, and true to Gaudian aesthetics, vibrant and nearly alive. Not what you’d expect from something as “mundane” as a streetlamp. In New York do we walk through Washington Square Park and point out how the lamps are Gwathmey Siegel’s first designs? No. Though in many of New York’s parks the lamps may be somewhat more interesting than elsewhere, their design is not particularly notable.

And the sidewalks—in Barcelona, the bricks vary from block to block, neighborhood to neighborhood. In many places they are stately and fairly large, but in other places they may be circular with intricate carvings repeated from brick to brick. They’re still just as easy to walk on. The transformation of the everday—the lamp and the sidewalk—into something more elegant is exactly what gives this city its character. While these aspects go unnoticed consciously, there is no doubt in my mind that they subconsciously invite people to the streets, welcoming them heartily.

Maybe that’s why people seem to walk the streets here more than anywhere else.