"ingenious, but useless"

 [image: mattdork's flickr page]

From the New Statesman: an interesting tale of war, historic preservation, and what to do with Vienna's Flaktürme. Relics of the Nazis' visionary but ultimately futile plans for defending the city from Allied bombing raids, these six towers are now lightning rods at the center of a debate on how to recognize and memorialize the city's history under Nazi rule.

In a standoff with the government, which seems to want to keep the towers shuttered, a group of would-be preservationists/activists are hoping to open the towers to the public in the interest of historical transparency.

I suppose you could call it nostalgia in the name of justice. 

In any case, they're gorgeous. I especially dig the oversized, clover-shaped pancake-turrets.


link: "Secret History" by Robin Stummer, in the New Statesman (via the ever-titillating things magazine.)

Sante on nostalgia

I'm currently reading Luc Sante's Low Life—something I should have done when I lived in the Lower East Side before I escaped to the Brooklyn countryside. I'm quite taken by the book's critique of nostalgia, which Sante defines in his preface as a kind of false, delusional sentimentality for a version of history that might not have actually existed in the first place. There's something quite compelling about Sante's take on nostalgia, and even though his words are directed towards a specifically New York-centric brand of repackaging the past, I think the critique can easily apply to any number of architectural or urban adventures in nostalgia. Sante:

[Nostalgia] can be generally defined as a state of inarticulate contempt for the present and fear of the future, in concert with a yearning for order, constancy, safety, and community—qualities that were last enjoyed in childhood and are retroactively imagined as gracing the whole of the time before one's birth. [Low Life, xi]

New Urbanism, anyone?

save robin hood gardens.

A different—but no less urgent—political campaign across the pond catches my eye.

link: "Building Design Launches Campaign to Save Robin Hood Gardens"

Update: Check out this photoset on Flickr with some heroic images for your enjoyment.