Touring the Site

Architourism has for centuries concentrated on ruins of great old buildings, but now we could turn it around so that we travel to sites to experience how buildings are constructed.  The first example that springs to mind, of course, is the World Trade Center site where for the last nine years visitors have stood to watch the slow progress in rebuilding the destroyed Towers.  Lately you have been able to see actual buildings emerge and I remember a particular thrill last time I was there just chatting with three construction workers leaving the site. 

Sometimes you stumble across construction sites by accident. There are maps of Antwerp that list the Red Star museum, with exhibits about the history of emigration through the port. If Ellis Island stands at one end of the Atlantic migration, then it would make sense that European harbor cities would build museums recounting the process whereby emigrants left their homes behind.  Fittingly, there have been conferences and publications on the topic, and I have even spoken with a professor who took a tour through the old Red Star ship line facility for processing emigrants. So when you are in Antwerp, and you're from New York, you might want to visit this historic point embarkation.

Alas, the maps are deceptive and the story about the tour not conclusive, because when you stand at the site of the Red Star museum as indicated by your official museum guide to Antwerp, you quickly discover that it is but the shell of a facade and a big muddy construction zone.  Sure, there is a giant placard with a computer generated image of what the museum is supposed to look like in two years, but the thing itself is just a husk of a building.  So when you get over your dismay, you realize there is another level of tourism, watching to see how an old, run down, relatively modern structure is transformed into an interactive cool space.

  

The construction site is porous, it allows you to wander through the empty lot, thereby revealing just how thoroughly historic buildings are stripped down before they are renovated.  Indeed, throughout Antwerp you can find late medieval buildings under historic renovation where nothing stands except the four outside walls.  The interior has presumably been catalogued so that it can be rebuilt wholly anew.   The historic character thus resides solely in the exterior walls and not at all in the high tech interior spaces.  A visit to the construction site makes all too clear how little history remains in contemporary preservation projects.  The creaky old floors, the tacky tiles, the moldy corners, the dim light, the labyrinthean layout have been replaced with a space that allows large groups to shuffle through an exhibition.

The latest architectural sensations foster in this fascination with the construction of museums.  The MAS, Antwerp's striking new city museum, has a book available for 20 euros that depicts its own construction.  The folks in Antwerp have learned plenty from Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin.  When the Libeskind museum first went up, a variety of books were published recounting its design, yet these were published while the success of the museum was not yet obvious.  The folks in Antwerp have take a more aggressive approach.  They had a book recounting the construction of the MAS available on opening day, as part of a rather over aggressive strategy to turn the building into a Frank Gehry/Daniel Libeskind icon.  Pictures of its construction have become a necessary component in creating the myth of the building's uniqueness.  In won't be long before the next innovative museum project offers cognoscenti guided tours of the construction site just as you can tour the Roman forum to learn about what once stood there.  In Lower Manhattan, the lines would be too long and the large crowds would interfere with the construction work, to say nothing of the insurance and legal issues involved.  So for now, it is best to just walk onto an unsuspecting site on your own.

Antwerp's Museum at the River

There has been lots of warm, friendly buzz about Antwerp's new high-rise museum in the harbor district: MAS, Museum aan de Strom.  Check out Roman Hollenstein's excellent piece in the NZZ, available here in English translation:  http://www.signandsight.com/service/1284.html

The building is a  marvel and a delight, rising 60 meters high in a wide open area of docks and water.  It stands all alone; it has no need to integrate itself into an urban context, instead it allows visitors the opportunity to enjoy increasingly higher panoramas of the historic city and the industrial harbor. 

Each floor has a serpentine glass wall facing out into a different direction.  The floor are layered on top of each other in 90 degree turns, like a disheveled pile of books.  The red sandstone sets the building off from the rest of the city while also keeping a rough natural feel of quarried rock.  The stone has a raw, tactile feel even as it so obviously suggests a desert environment far removed from northern Europe. 

The architectural firm of Neutelings and Riedijk have raised a number of buildings through the Netherlands and Belgium that look like viewing platforms, and soon they will bring their techniques to the new Cincinnati Art Museum, their first project in the United States.  Cincinnati has already an avant-garde art museum designed by Zaha Hadid, which like MAS leads the visitor through a carefully arranged series of stairs, or escalators, so that the building becomes a spectatorial apparatus.  The visitors are guided along an ascending path with turns that provide them carefully chosen views.  In the case of MAS, the eye is allowed to wander across a vast panorama, so that each level is literally an elevation above the previous one.  Wisely, the highest floor faces the historic city center, so that the rising alternative views reach their culmination at a point that allows the viewer to enjoy a birds-eye view much like the historical prints shown in the exhibition.

The exhibitions include a selection of Old Masters lent from the royal art museum, placed in dark rooms with precise lighting. You can get your nose up close to a delicate van Eyck. 

The dark exhibition rooms have the added effect of covering over the fact that the interior spaces of the building have a rough unfinished quality, which at times is presented as "honest" reference to the harbor's business of loading and unloading ships, but at other points has the feel of rushed job when for example  2x 6 beams are thrown up to hold Golden Age masterpieces.  To carry on the harbor metaphors, the MAS feels like a ship on its maiden voyage:  the various collections ranging from the history of Antwerp to Indonesian and African ethnography are not given a meaningful connection.  The themes that are chosen to place them together, such as "Representations of Power"  "Life and Death" have all the credibility of a ninth grade social studies text book.  Added to this are distracting sound tracks in the exhibition spaces.  Why do you need to hear a man playing loud violin music as you are contemplating a gold coin with Alexander the Great's profile from the city's numismatic collection?  The staff throughout the museum were nervous and jumpy, especially as the electricity on several floors would intermittently fail.  All of this will presumably be straightened out: the staff will learn the ropes, the exhibits will receive a coherent structure.  As things stand right now, the museum's presentation of Antwerp's urban history is far too fragmented and jumpy, a far cry from Ghent's magnificent city museum.

Right now, the wonderful building (and the interspersed Old Masters) makes the short trip to the edge of Antwerp a delight, eventually the rest of the museum will be ship shape.

Where History Never Ends

We all know that you can read history off the walls of a cathedral, but you have to know what your looking for, and that is the hard part.  Happily, many churches provide you with a brochure, and they, too, help you read the history out of the church.

One wonders who writes these little brochures?  When you hold one in your hand, you see that they are obviously produced locally within the parish.  While they have an assortment of learned and curious facts about the church, they are definitely not written by either a tour guide or an academic, because they reveal a point of view that is neither scholarly nor customer-oriented friendly. 

Read one after the other as you wander from church to church in some ancient city, such as Antwerp, where I am walking my flat feet into the pavement, you can piece together a fascinating ecclesiastical history, one in which old grudges live on.

For example, one Catholic brochure cannot resist hitting back at the Reformation, and tries to do so by pulling the wandering tourist over to its side with the following warning: "Don't look for the original Gothic and early Renaissance pieces of art here; they were destroyed in the two iconoclasms of 1566 and 1581."

That's almost 500 years of carrying a resentment.  But if you wander into a Dutch cathedral further north (where the Calvinists ruled), you are confronted with an empty nave where the remnants of smashed saints and disciples still hang on the wall.  The marks of Calvinist assaults have been left unrepaired in Holland, a point of pride in the north but a deep injury in Catholic Antwerp.  

Today, somewhere in the folds of Antwerp's parishes (where the Jesuits drove out Calvinism 450 years ago), there are volunteers writing brochures for English-speaking tourists who are happy to throw a few elbows at Protestantism.

And really, it is quite wonderful to see that these ancient battles still bother and offend believers, that somewhere in Antwerp there are people who still resent the Reformation--as if it weren't really over.

In many churches, the Enlightenment is seen as an even bigger threat.  The French Revolution is mentioned with a shudder, because it meant that churches were shut down and stripped of all their valuables, while the monks were chased away.  The end of monastic orders meant the decline of all churches-- a barbarism so tremendous that the brochures' authors seem to struggle to hold back their outrage by confining themselves to a few shocked sentences.  The Calvinists were vanquished here in Antwerp, but no one believes that the French Revolution does not continue to hold sway over the political system.  And of course, the tourist holding the brochure may harbor some sympathies for the Revolution, thus "the less said, the better."

A simple question to a friendly guard at a small baroque museum showed me that locals still remember the churches that were secularized: After admiring a portrait by van Dyck of an intense-looking Italian diplomat, I pulled out my city map and asked "where is the church where this painting originally hung?" "It is no more," came the answer.  "Gone?" I asked slicing my hand across horizontally.  "No, it is now a school," was the final resigned word.

Then there is the occasional dead Emperor who gets a punch.  In one church (which shall remain nameless but is easy to surmise), Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor and Habsburg monarch of Austria, is repeatedly criticized for having covetously removed a beautiful Caravaggio painting of the Virgin.  In its place stands a copy of the same painting, made centuries after the mad genius Caravaggio had passed on to his reward, and underneath a placard denouncing the Imperial theft.

Museums in Turkey and India have such signs, objecting to colonial appropriations of their own antiquities, but to see a Catholic church rebuke (a not so pious) Catholic monarch is definitely an ecclesiastical form of inside baseball.

And it is really great reading!  What is not to like about such religious shots.  It shows that the church continues to have its defenders, that the centuries do not wash away the hurt.  So long as the fighting is confined to passing remarks in a church brochure, it only heightens the architectural experience.

Rough Justice

You cannot travel around Europe as an American these days without being asked what you think of the Strauss-Kahn case.  Back in the 80s everyone asked you about Reagan and at some point I just stopped talking about his politics, because the assumption is that you as the American are going to defend Reagan, or in this case the "Perp Walk."  The French outrage has focused on this admittedly humiliating violation of the defendant's rights to privacy and to being presumed innocent until proven guilty.  (I am not sure if he got the full Perp Walk treatment or if he was simply photographed in a court setting where anyone could be but most people are not.)  The Perp Walk amounts to parading the arrestee only for the sake of the cameras.

But the European shock and dismay at the New York police force is fairly overstated.  Law and Order: Special Victims Unit is shown on most major Western European televisions.  The first night I landed in Germany, I had the weird sensation of channel surfing between coverage of Strauss-Kahn and watching Ice-T dubbed into German.  Europeans all know how Law and Order works; they were just surprised at who made a cameo last week.

The key thing is that critics over here think that Americans don't realize that the Perp Walk is archaic.  Once you admit that it is, explain that it goes back to the days of arresting gangsters in the early 20th century, that it completely violates rights, but that it is a rough local custom, then some of the heat is off the attack, and there is the chance that our talk can turn to the issues of the alleged crime itself.

We know little about the details in the hotel room, but some things are worth considering:

Both alleged attacker and victim speak French.  They may not have known that at the time.  Whatever exchange there was, would probably have taken place in English.  The fact that they were both native French speakers points to the former colonial relationship between countries of origin, but the fact that these two people met in New York was more a result of global economics, the regulation of money flowing between wealthy and poor nations, producing and consuming societies, and the inevitable movement of people these relationships produce, whether it's financial managers or impoverished emigrants.  The guy tried to regulate the global flow of capital, the maid was carried along by the current.

The second global aspect of the case is tied to the financial, but runs on its own rules: the media coverage. 

The French media are using the opportunity to hammer at the Americans for being puritanical and disrespectful of human rights; the Americans are mocking French hypocrisy.  In an earlier age, say two hundred years ago, this case might have led to war.  Everyone can read about how the others are representing the case.  So we get British summaries of the French press, French recapitulations of the American.  In the end, French anti-Americanism seems to trump feminism.

Little is said in defense of the alleged victim, quite simply because the media does not know how to discuss someone who does not play along with their practices.  If you don't give interviews, avoid the camera completely, reject public statements, then there is little the media knows to say.  The alleged victim, nameless in the US, but described in France, simply refuses to participate.  The French media violates her right to privacy, just as the American media walks all over Strauss-Kahn's.

Justice will in the end be applied locally in New York to two people born and raised in foreign countries.