By the way...

In case anyone apart from me actually reads this blog, and is wondering about what happened with that chartership thing I mentioned in the first post, there is news.

I passed.  Celebrated on a rooftop in Istanbul, as you do.

That is all.

Shining in the darkness: Byzantine mosaics

As I begin to write, I’m listening to the call to prayer and the sky is darkening over my little corner of Istanbul to reveal a full moon hanging in the sky.  This sound never fails to evoke an incredible sense of otherness for me: it’s a stark reminder of how far I am from home, repeated five times daily just in case I forgot for a moment.  Beautiful, though, as since I got back to the apartment the reddish haze in the sky has gone and Levazim and Ortaköy are twinkling again.  The best thing about this flat is the view, and tonight for the first time I’m sitting with my laptop on the little glazed terrace that capitalises on it.

The key thing about this place for me has got to be the light, or more precisely the effect that minimal lighting can have.  In the same way as the vistas across the Bosphorus really become magical as the sun goes down, it’s the shadowy interiors of the remaining fragments of Byzantium that really capture the imagination.

I couldn’t write about Istanbul without talking about the Aya Sofya (Hagia Sofia or Sancta Sophia in Greek and Latin respectively), which has been dominating the skyline of Sultanahmet since the 6^th century.  It’s widely considered to be more impressive inside than out, and aside from the size this is very much down to the mosaics…

I first learned about Byzantine art during A-levels and can recall that a) it was one of the earliest forms of figurative art from the Christian church, which had survived through the centuries because b) it was all about the mosaics, and tiles don’t rot and flake like paintings in Roman catacombs.  I also recall that these mosaics were special because of their tiny tesserae (tiles, to the layman) which allowed incredible nuance of detail and shading, and abundant use of gold and lapis lazuli laid not-quite-flat to catch and reflect the light and so give the images their lustre.

… so naturally I was excited to see the Aya Sofya.  It was a big part of my agreeing to this little easterly sojourn.  On our first free day I virtually dragged my long-suffering Spanish travelling companion to the door and into the lengthy queue to get in.  Then we stepped inside and I felt, well, no more than moderately impressed. 

It grows on you though.  Once you move away from the worst of the tourist throng, it’s possible to take in the atmosphere, reflect on just how old it is and begin to see the traces of the original decorations that have variously been plastered or painted over during the building’s life as a mosque.  That’s when the impact comes: imagining the place with shimmering mosaics on every surface in its heyday, just as Justinian saw it.  And now I find myself considering stumping up the entrance fee again for a second visit….

Mosaic in the Upper Gallery

 

Section of plaster removed to reveal mosaic

The Constantinople of Constantine and his successors is hard to find in modern Istanbul, save for the one show-stopping church-turned-mosque-turned museum, so it’s necessary to leave Sultanahmet in search of it.  A reasonably well visited alternative is the Chora, the 11^th century church tucked away in the west of the city.  No period of reflection is required here to feel its impact: the domes of the narthex glow, with mosaics more stunning and complete than those of the Aya Sofya.  I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.

 

 

 

The Chora is just within the Theodosian walls, which cut across the peninsula and enclosed the city – preventing its conquest for a millennium as the last vestiges of Imperial Rome withered and died quietly within the empire’s eastern outpost.  These walls are in a terrible state of repair, and being well outside the tourist centre are largely ignored.  The shell of a fortress forming part of the wall (Palace of the Sovereign or Tekfur Sarayı in Turkish) prompted further recollections from school as I contemplated the end of empire.  This time it was Year 7 English lessons, and learning the poem that most will find more familiar from the Watchmen film character and his taste in interior design.  Of all of Shelley’s lines, it’s only the pedestal inscription and the sentiment that stick in my head:

“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”

Despair indeed, ye mighty, not at the greatness of Ozymandias but for your being destined to share in the same fate.  Somehow, for me, Rome is most poetic at its bitter end.

(I also remember thinking that Bysshe is really a very strange name)

Language acquisition at the beach

My Turkish vocabulary now extends to at least ten words.  I can now ask for up to five of the following things:

1. Beer
2. Water
3. Tea
4. Coffee
5. Watermelon

I'm reasonably satisfied with the progress of this, but if I'm honest it's not a critical life goal of mine to become conversant in Turkish.  The project of the moment remains to learn Spanish, properly.

Some weeks ago I found myself on a bus full of Spaniards heading for the coast.  This was something of a step up in what I was expecting of myself in Madrid and represented a vague attempt at making some of my own friends in Spain.  Spanish ones.  I think through work I already know more Spanish people than your average guiri. English folk in Madrid generally tend to be language teachers, and consequently meet each other much more than locals, which impedes their own language learning and makes it harder for them to get to know locals... and so on.  I think I can hope for better integration than that, even in the short time I'm around.

So today I'd like to talk about language, or my lack of it in recent months.  With the level of Spanish I had on arrival I would never have dreamed of going on that trip - I couldn't even have read the website to find it.

Everyone who has put themselves through this process will be familiar with 'the silent phase' when you sit through evenings, lunches and meetings with a gradually improving idea of what's going on but without ever saying a word.  You feel like an idiot.  The Spanish phrase for someone who doesn't speak a language is simple, poetic and appropriate for this situation: estaba una chica sin palabras (I was a girl without words).

It's pretty hard going - my brother is convinced of the need to suffer to learn and language properly and I tend to concur to an extent.  He's maybe a little bit extreme in his views on the matter but it is really very hard to see another way to get beyond the 'tourist' level where you can ask for things and manage basic interactions but can't really engage in proper conversation.  It's perfectly possible to live for years in a country without achieving that higher level: people do and it's not always a problem.  It's just not for me.

I feel like I am beginning to come out the other side now, when people are patient with me and I'm not distracted by actually being in Turkey, that is.  In fits and starts and on comfortable ground I now have words.  It is still exhausting (another feature of living in a country and attempting to learn the language - sheer blind fatigue) but getting better.

On the Monday after my weekend of speaking no English it was as though everything had just clicked into place.  It was definitely worth going purely for the language practice, as I felt myself relaxing in conversation over breakfast.

The trip, incidentally, was my Spanish beach trip for the year - I found the group on the internet and liked the sound of a party on a catamaran as the sun set, followed by beach and hiking the next day.  Here's a picture.

Engineer on tour: Go East

I wrote a blog post on a plane again.  This is happening a lot (the being on a plane, more than the writing on planes). Outside the window what I assumed at the time of writing to be the lower reaches of the Carpathians marched northward toward the Bulgarian border as I crossed towards the Bosphorus and the eastern terminus of the Orient Express… going to Istanbul.  It’s a mighty range of mountains and a bleak and forbidding landscape, even the valleys between baked dry with their rivers nothing more than tracks of dust.  I’ve lost count of my recent plane journeys but I still love a good window seat.  I’m considering the purchase of a travel atlas for easier landscape identification.

The journey merits inclusion in the blog because it’s not just another holiday.  The vagaries of construction project workload in the current environment and a global employer has seen me sent East in search of gainful employment.  Turkey is busy and buzzing so we’re joining in.  I know little about what to expect, but will endeavour to record some of it in as articulate a fashion as I can muster.

As previously though, with a long flight and a laptop I have a chance to fill you in on something interesting I’ve recently seen.  It’s been a long time coming but I’m finally in a position to share my thoughts on the Herzog and Meuron talking piece that is the CaixaForum building, just off the Golden Mile of Art in Madrid. 

The building is sponsored by, fittingly, the CaixaForum, the charitable arm of a large Spanish bank, and was commissioned as a venue for art, music and general stuff considered good for society’s soul.  Entrance is free, and a visit worthwhile just for a trip up the first staircase which takes you – like a spaceship’s entrance ramp – up from the centre of the floating building’s undercroft through sci-fi brushed aluminium into the belly of the beast.

The building began life as a fairly unremarkable masonry construction, a municipal substation if I remember correctly.  The Swiss architects, or probably more likely some of their employees from the company’s office in Madrid, kept just the upper levels of this façade to raise up the building mass and open up a semi-subterranean plaza (which one might call an undercroft, if so inclined) beneath, complete with water feature and the aforementioned entrance experience. 

Above, the older building is topped with the architects’ favourite material of the last decade: COR-TEN (or pre-rusted metal to mortal men), which blends tonally with the brickwork as well as adding height and a nice bit of texture.  I like it.  It’s uncompromisingly modern without being shiny, and inventively turns an old bit of structure to a new purpose rather than tearing it down to start again.  There’s some great detail about the architecture on the CaixaForum website.

Once inside, vertical circulation is up through one of the concrete cores that provide support and stability to the structure, and the smoothly undulating, high spec exposed concrete makes it feel like the inside of a sculpture.

I was there to take a look, eventually, at the Piranesi exhibition.  I had a vague idea of his work, and knew it featured buildings and cityscapes but really no knowledge of who, when or where he’d been.  I certainly didn’t realise how inspiring I’d find the images, how redolent they’d be of a sense of place or have any sense of the level of their finely etched detail.  

A mostly frustrated architect in the 18^th century, Piranesi apparently took refuge in the imagined places of his etchings, drawing heavily from studies of Classical constructions for landscapes of ruins, surreal vistas and fictional cartography. The exhibition showed a broad range of his work, grouped more or less chronologically, and standouts for me were one small print of tiny people racing along in between the outsized tombs of the Via Appia and a modern video adaptation of his Imaginary Prisons etchings made 3D.  The video is available online, set to a Bach Cello Suite, and although one might argue the ethics of wilful manipulation of another, long dead, it doesn’t detract from the originals but draws you back to take a second look at the images so vividly brought to life.  I am also conceiving a real appreciation for the humble cello, I think.

The sheer enormity of the imagined edifices calls to mind every time I've stood in awe of an ancient (and they are always ancient if they have this impact - I think it's the contrast of scales between the fine details and the building size), monstrously large building and felt so very small.The work was about creativity, but also just about skill.  It’s a quality of representation that really makes itself apparent in the work. 

Just in case you were paying attention in the first paragraph: yes I was wrong about the mountains, but also sort of right.  The internet tells me that the mountains in that particular part of northern Greece are called the Rhodopes, which go up to meet the Balkan mountain range that covers much of Bulgaria and a bit of Serbia.  The Balkan mountains in turn do almost meet the lowest part of the arc of mountain ranges that form the Carpathians, but they’re cut off by the Danube.  So… I was right about what direction I was looking but not much else.  Like I say, must get that atlas.  There seem to be mountains in all sorts of unexpected places, as I intend to discuss at a later date…

By way of explanation...

I've been asked to explain myself, and give some sort of justification for this whole blog-writing business, haphazard as it is.  So I've identified three reasons, two of which do me no personal credit whatsoever:

1) Laziness - why write long emails to lots of different people when you can just put a link up on Facebook, or not even notify anyone and just expect people to check back periodically to see what you've been up to. It's this modern ailment of not being bothered to talk to anyone directly, which I'm wholeheartedly embracing.  In my defence, the odds are that the internet in its facilitation of this cold, impersonal communication is really often replacing a sharing of information that never would have occurred, rather than better quality contact.

2) A near-pathological aversion to repetition - I hate repeating myself.  It annoys me.  I remember very clearly a stand-up fight with my mother many years ago over the vacuuming of my bedroom: the hoover hadn't been working very well so although I had done the chore the original goal had not really been fulfilled. Nevertheless I refused to do it again on the basis that I had done what I was asked once already and it was unreasonable to expect me to do it again.  Ok, maybe there was an element of the laziness I just referred to, but for the most part I just couldn't stand the idea of doing the same thing again.

The same applies to conversation, and a consequence of this is that I tend to speak as though people know things that I have never bothered to tell them but did describe with thrilling vivacity to someone else.  They then appear not to appreciate the development of that same theme. So instead of a) having to tell people all the same things about my time in Madrid or b) remember what interesting and different things I've described to each person it's easier just to write a load of stuff down and go from there.

A similar difficulty applies to forming any kind of routine or developing a proper hobby.  It begins to feel boring, repetitive and claustrophobic and I find a new thing to obsess about for a bit.  This is the reason I still can't play the guitar and will never succeed at any competitive sport.

3) Writing makes me think better.  This is a good one, I think, and should help me get more out of this whole foreign travel and work business. 

I did it in previous years, when I was travelling and it was a good way to pass the time, but I don't know if it was (a greater degree of) immaturity or the fact that it was entirely private that made me write this travel diary with even lower editorial standards and an even greater level of self-obsession, along with a lot of the assumptions of familiarity that I mentioned above. 

A public forum, albeit one that few strangers will find or ever bother to read, focusses my ramblings to be a) more succinct and b) less about facile chronological diary entries and more about abstract things that I find interesting.  Additionally, as I articulate my thoughts about things I find more then occurs to me. It also can act as a impetus to continue doing and seeing interesting things, so that I have something to write about.

In that spirit, it's 3.30pm on a Friday so I'm off out to sketch the city, maybe from a terrace, with a caña in hand.  Next blog post is likely to be about Piranesi, engineering and drawing and how they all fit together.  Or potentially Herzog and de Meuron's Caixa Forum building.  Or mountains or the beach.  

Less of an icon - terrace life in Madrid

One of the things I've been enjoying on the few occasions I've managed to sit down and write this blog is the way I start remembering things.  Specifically in articulating what I think about buildings and the city I find myself remembering some of that dearly purchased knowledge that came from four years of architectural study.

A big thing, love it or hate it, in architecture is the concept of the 'iconic' building.  That big, shiny white elephant on the corner that people will travel miles to visit and everyone stops to photograph but that has real meaning to no-one at all because they don't live or work there.  It's not a part of (almost) anyone's daily existence. 

Cities fall over themselves to embrace the Guggenheim effect, while architects chase that big competition win.  Architecture students try to conjure hypothetical landmarks on the street corners of provincial towns, unfettered by either cash flow or gravity but well versed in what makes an 'Icon'.  Engineers are complicit, too, when we award prizes to buildings that we see little merit in beyond the fact that they are bigger and more expensive than the next. 

The elegant little bits of design that sit silent but efficient in the corners of buildings (their very invisibility testament, often, to their ingenuity) are attributed no more praise than the shanty communities that develop unplanned yet seem to function on a basis of community engagement and shared ownership, albeit in the informal market.  These need to be explained and promoted by their creators, as well as watched for and appreciated by building users.  The architectural press, to their credit, has a nice line in appreciation of fine detail (the Detail section of the AJ, particularly, springs to mind as an example) while engineering journals can often veer wildly between incredibly broad-brush and uninformative or offputtingly dry and inaccessible.

As an aside, my brother and I both recently read a great book called Whole Earth Discipline by Stewart Brand, which deals at length with the effective informal administrative arrangements of shanty town communities and the potential of developing world in general.  Different parts of the book, which explores a wide range of topics all running along the lines of 'How do we save the planet?', seem to have relevance to conversations on a regular basis, so we keep referring back to it.  I still harbour some doubts about some of Brand's comments about building without regulation or design in some of these (extremely seismic) areas of the world.  Professional building designers may in the eyes of many be entirely superfluous but there is a critical safety component to what we do.

What was originally going to be a little pre-amble into a description of a nice, low-key square in Madrid has turned into more of a rant than I intended, for which I apologise, and I assure you I have more than my fair share of white elephant photographs. I like those buildings, a lot of the time I'm making my living from those buildings, and I do see the value to our culture of having more criteria than 'Can I eat it, make money from it or live in it?'.  Construction is one of the few areas left that, even with the widespread loss of traditional craftmanship, has a substantial niche for the bespoke.

The problem is that the building of ambitious construction projects in Spain with dodgy financing and even more questionable business plans has been identified as one of the major contributors to the current woes of the country.  One of my colleagues was telling me today about a huge €1.1bn airport in Ciudad Real that was operational for less than three years before going into receivership.  It's one of many examples that I hear about every day, when all the while I'm never far from the marching, shouting indignados on the street outside.  

On a lighter note, and what I was initially planning to write about, the point being that it's not all about the centre of the city, or the big buildings, but really it's all about shoes...

...some time ago now I found myself in the Plaza Dos de Mayo (2nd May Square: named for the same Madrid uprising in 1808 that gives us that day as a holiday here), which is a little way north of the centre of the city.  It seemed to be the heart of a great deal of family and community life - I don't know if it's the weather or just a cultural difference, but children seem to be far more involved in the city here than back in the UK.  Maybe it's something to do with our reservedness and need to have our own gardens, which we then keep our children in rather than letting them share city squares.

Anyway, it was around the time of the San Isidro (patron saint of Madrid) festival, and as I sat drinking coffee in a cafe in the shade the children were running around in traditional outfits, chulapas, that made them look disconcertingly like very small old people.  A number of them were mustachioed.  It seemed like they were having fun.

I was sitting in the square having come up to that part of town in search of a shoe shop I had found written about on the internet - they sell traditional Spanish alpargatas (you know, those rope wedges that occasionally find themselves in fashion) and have done for generations.  I needed to get some, but like a true tourist had fallen foul of the eccentric opening hours operated here.  Of course one should expect a shop to open at quarter to five 'for the afternoon'.  It's telling of the attitude toward time of a nation when they don't have separate words for afternoon and evening.

I bought some.  I had been distracted by the curious phenomenon of Bubble Tea (more on that another day, I'm sure) by the time the shop eventually opened, but a few minutes late I headed back and I found it full.  The proprietor seemed to have a short fuse, and was already at the end of it as a result of two apparently fairly thick English tourist girls so it wasn't quite the idyllic experience I'd been imagining.  Good shoes though.

Sorry, I didn't forget about you. Barajas Airport (the Richard Rogers terminal)

I've been away for two of the six weeks I've not written.  For the rest, well, life in Madrid began to feel like normal life and true to standard form I just didn't quite find the time.  So I've not been to that Piranesi exhibition at the cool Herzog and de Meuron building on the Paseo del Prado that I've been dying to tell you about, and I've not found the time to go exploring the other cities of Spain to tell you about them. I've not even been back to the Palacio de Comunicaciones to try to go up the tower.

I have been back to Casa de Campo for no less than five runs and two picnics.  I also managed to go to Cercedilla (more on that later).  I've just not told you about any of it.

What finally made me write, peculiarly, was this:

As I said, I've been away, and before I left I'd seen the elderflowers in Cercedilla in full flower (like I said, more on that later).  On my way home through the park today I realised that the grass had dried out in the intense heat and that the lavender had flowered.  A sudden overwhelming sense of seasonal change and the passing of time made me feel that the time had come to return to you.  So here I am.

Going away and flying long haul for once gave me the chance to get a good look at Richard Rogers' prizewinning (11th RIBA Stirling Prize) Terminal 4 building at Barajas.  So naturally, perhaps not wisely, in the three hours of my wait I started wandering around the building taking a couple of photos and making notes.  I have had Rogers' book Cities for a Small Country sitting mostly unread on a bookshelf for the best part of a decade, and never visited any of his buildings until late last year, yet now I seem to have inadvertently started collecting them.  The book is only mostly unread because I probably skim-read a couple of chapters to find essay quotes at uni.  Perhaps the time has come to actuallly read it properly.

The first of the Rogers buildings I went to visit as a result of reading Peter Rice's 'An Engineer Imagines' and happening to be in Paris.  Rice devotes a chapter of his book to the Centre Georges Pompidou, and although he had a lively appreciation of the architecture I took from it an engineer's bias: my visit was therefore spent predominantly admiring the ingenuity of the cast steel nodes and lamenting the effect of 40 years on the paint finishes.  Piano and Rogers' exterior servicing concept and flexible internal space (which, from half-remembered architecture lectures, I seem to recall is not generally used particularly flexibly for some reason to do with the deep plan - I don't know) didn't really register particularly strongly.  The views and the strange 'soundscape' artistic installation in the escalator tubes did.  Here is a photo if you can't remember what building I'm on about, along with an image from a totally different building: the tree columns off to one side of the new King's Cross concourse roof in London owe something to Rice's gerberettes, I would say.

Anyway, I digress.  Barajas is a very much newer building than the Pompidou, so the 'high-tech' of Rogers' architecture doesn't really have the same resonance or impact as it might once have done, although it's certainly still there in the shiny ductwork, immaculately detailed cabling and several storey high scrolling digital signs that appear to have no function other than to tell you that you're in Barajas and it has shops.  The atmosphere comes off sort of like Blade Runner, only really clean.

It does have lots of lovely exposed structure, brightly painted to form part of the gate colour coding system to aid way-finding (incidentally, unless it's pretty deeply subconscious I'm not convinced by the system - despite being pre-warned of the system, having read something about it when the building first opened, it still took me until after I'd got to the gate before I'd noticed the graduated rainbow tones of the steelwork that also matched the colour of the signs I'd been following). 

The wavy roof in the main departure hall (i.e. not the bit in the photo) is supported and stabilised by inclined columns that spring off either side of a central concrete elevated walkway and separate to each support two of the undulating roof beams.  These roof beams continue out past the barely-there curtain walled facade with its tension cable mullions and skinny transoms, with another line of support and a modest cantilever outside.  I very much like the structure; it's a large open space so like the great train stations of engineering's Victorian heyday it should and did invite good, regular, expressed structure, with none of those silly room things that architects like so very much that really just get in the way.  Bit light on pubs though, it must be said.

The third Rogers building (or Rogers Stirk Harbour, whatever they're called) that I've collected in under 12 months probably doesn't count.  I walked past the under-construction Tower 3 in Lower Manhattan last week.  It's not that big yet, and I can't honestly say I noticed it.  The nice Irish pub round the corner, on the other hand...