Haiti's ISPAN Up Against a Wall

While doing volunteer work in Haiti last March, I could not help but marvel at something that no one even thinks about discussing post earthquake: the fabulous Haitian architecture. I was fascinated to see a poster in Jérémie for the Institut de Sauvegarde du Patrimoine National ("ISPAN"), an organization devoted to architectural preservation. Jérémie is like a Hollywood set of an African city late 1800s, a city that time forgot. The colonial architecture is striking.

Most impressive is the whimsical ginger-bread Victorian architecture in Port-au-Prince. So many villas feature "witch's-hat" spires, many beneath the rubble. How can preservation efforts even begin to compete with the desperation of restoring infrastructure and saving lives ?

Films Highlight Arab Persian Chasm

Omar Sharif stars with a young Pierre Boulanger in the French film Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran (2003) by François Dupeyron. Cairo-born Sharif plays a Sufi grocer, Ibrahim Demirci, in a Sephardic Jewish section of Paris on rue Bleue in the 1960s. Sharif describes this in the voice-over commentary as the Sentier section in the 2nd arrondissement, center of the "schmatta business", although rue Bleue is a bit north of rue Sentier. The young Jewish Moise Schmidt (Momo) befriends Ibrahim as a father figure, after his own father has abandoned him. This heartfelt affection between Muslim and Jew forms a backdrop of tolerance relative to the chasm between Arab and Persian culture.

Momo's father frequently asks him to go across the street to purchase items from the "Arab." There is a great line from Ibrahim "I'm not an Arab, Momo. I'm from the Golden Crescent." And later, "I'm not an Arab, Momo. I'm a Muslim." This is reminiscent of the similar line in the triple-Oscar winning American movie Crash (2004), by Paul Haggis, a film based on racial stereotyping. The Iranian shopkeeper is so distraught after his store has been wrecked and tagged with racist graffiti. He says "They think we're Arab. When did Persian become Arab?" It seems that mistaken identity is more damaging than the trashed store. Of course, this is against a backdrop of 9/11.

There is a strange nexus between the two films. Ibrahim and Momo go off on a trip to his homeland,Turkey, in a brilliant red Simca Aronde Océane (spyder). Well, that sports car ultimately crashes and leads to Ibrahim's death. By the way, Brigitte Bardot appeared in a red Simca Océane in the movie la Parisienne, which is the basis of a scene in the film, played by Isabelle Adjani.

Timmy Thomas' Why Can't We Live Together (1972) is the main soundtrack for Monsieur Ibrahim. The lyrics speak wonderfully to the "collision." Sade did a great cover on Diamond Life (1984).

Tell me why, tell me why, tell me why.

Why can't we live together?

Tell me why, tell me why.

Why can't we live together?

Everybody wants to live together.

Why can't we be together?

No more war, no more war, no more war...

Just a little peace.

No more war, no more war.

All we want is some peace in this world.

Everybody wants to live together.

Why can't we be together?

No matter, no matter what colour.

You are still my brother.

I said no matter, no matter what colour.

You are still my brother.

Everybody wants to live together

Why can't we be together?

Everybody wants to live.

Everybody's got to be together.

Everybody wants to live.

Everybody's going to be together.

Everybody's got to be together.

Everybody wants to be together.

I said no matter, no matter what colour.

You're still my brother.

I said no matter, no matter what colour.

You're still my brother.

Everybody wants to live together.

Why can't we be together?

Gotta live together...Together.

Candy Wrapper Weaving: Cleantech No More

There is some argument over the origin of candy-wrapper weaving. Many scholars say it is based on ancient Mayan paper-weaving techniques. It has also been traced back to prison or "tramp" art from the early 20th century. Men in prison made sculptures out of cigarette packs or gum wrappers sewn together with shuttles fashioned from plastic bottles and fishing line. Gum wrapper sculpture and jewelry making became a popular hobby in the U.S. during the 1960s and 1970s.

Now that this craft has entered the mass market, it is no longer a product of "innocent art." Modern manufacturing operations buy candy wrappers new and fabricate items directly. Ultimately, this product is no longer a cleantech solution as we are no longer reusing spent wrappers.

1838 Brooklyn Navy Yard Hospital: Culture of Abandonment

Would you like to pretend you are Hernan Cortés discovering lost ruins in a steamy South American jungle ? Well, you can do that in Brooklyn (August is hot and steamy) at the Brooklyn Navy Yards, wandering around pre-civil war hospital grounds that astound the senses. This is the epitome of a Culture of Abandonment. It is abhorrent that such a magnificent piece of high style architecture (reflecting a certain cultural attitude in 1838) could fall victim to such neglect.

This urban archeology is the closest thing New York City offers to Cambodia's Angkor Wat. The Navy Yard Hospital Building and the Surgeon's Residence are both designated as NYC Landmark buildings. Technically, they lie outside of the Brooklyn Navy Yard and can be viewed through the gates on Flushing Ave. - they were referred to as an "Annex of the U.S. Naval Receiving Station, Brooklyn, NY." The property was acquired in 1966 by the City of New York and administered by the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corp. During the Civil War, the hospital would supply over 1/3 of the medicines used by the Union troops.

According to the AIA Guide to NYC, the Greek Revival hospital is made of marble quarried locally (Sing Sing) by those hapless prisoners. AIA suggests that such buildings were inspirational for Albert Speer's visions for Hitler's Berlin. Martin E. Thompson was a talented Greek Revivalist architect. Excellent photos of both the Hospital and the French Empire Surgeon's House (with a concave-profiled mansard roof) appear on the web inadvertently uploaded to the Quarters A NRHP site at http://pdfhost.focus.nps.gov/docs/NHLS/Photos/74001252.pdf. A tall flagpole and obscure memorial commemorating soldiers who died in the Canton River (now Guangzhou and Pearl River) in 1856 during the Battle of the Barrier Forts at the beginning of the 2nd Opium War are the only clues of a stately lawn long forgotten. A photo in Berner's The Brooklyn Naval Yard shows the Canton memorial originally stood at the Sands St. gate.

The Kingston Lounge (who advertise as guerrilla preservationists and urban archeologist's) have fabulous photos of the Annex at http://kingstonlounge.blogspot.com/2009/02/brooklyn-navy-yard-hospital-complex.html.

Asmara's Secret: A Gift From Mussolini

The Kingdom of Italy created Eritrea at the end of the nineteenth century, using the classical name for the Red Sea ("erythra"). The colony of Italian Eritrea was established in 1890 (and lasted officially until 1947). Between 1936 and 1941, Italy's Fascist rulers transformed Eritrea into one of the most industrialized modern colonies in all of Africa.

Asmara has been described as a "surreal, out-of-body tourist experience" (The New York Times, 3/19/06, 10/8/08), leading one to ask "Where am I ?" Africa ? The Mediterranean ? The Middle East ? South Beach (minus the miniskirts and Ferraris) ? Asmara became an Art Deco laboratory during the 1930s for designs too avant garde for Italy. Rationalism, Novecento, neo-Classicism, neo-Baroque, and monumentalism are represented. The crown jewel is the Fiat Tagliero gas station designed in 1938 by Giuseppe Pettazzi to look like an airplane. One can imagine the locals living La Dolce Vita many decades ago.

New Khmer Architecture: Contextual Modernism

Cambodia was a protectorate of France from 1863 to 1953, administered as part of the colony of French Indochina, though occupied by the Japanese empire from 1941 to 1945. After independence in 1953, Phnom Penh desired to make a statement in its architecture that borrowed from International Modernism, yet retained local color and culture. Planners grappled with the delicate challenge of how to create forms that would be recognised as both Cambodian and modern. One of the leading proponents of the New Khmer Architecture was Vann Molyvann.

Molyvann, now 79, is a Cambodian cultural icon. His work in New Khmer Architecture sprung from the Sangkum Reastr Niyum period of the 1950s and 60s when Khmer culture flourished under the patronage of then-King Norodom Sihanouk. During that time Sihanouk appointed the young Vann Molyvann as chief architect to the Kingdom. Molyvann, who had traveled to France to train as a lawyer before switching his studies, soon became the country's most celebrated architect. He fled during the Khmer Rouge occupation. His style reflects influence from LeCorbusier and Paul Rudolph.

Photos above are from Phnom Penh (Chaktomuk Conference Center, National Sports Complex), Battambang, and Sihanoukville (Bank of Cambodia).

There is a wonderful web site at http://newkhmerarchitecture.blogspot.com/ providing a wealth of info on buildings, architects, and walking tours. Darryl Collins, Helen Grant Ross and Hok Sokol carried out extensive original research into the architecture of the 50s and 60s in a book entitled Building Cambodia: New Khmer Architecture 1953-1970.

The American Gets a Fistful of Sergio Leone

Well, maybe an abdomen full. You see, the Dutch director Anton Corbijn is a big fan of the zen master of Spaghetti Westerns, Sergio Leone, and especially his uber art film Once Upon a Time in the West or C'era una volta il West (1969), which we see playing on TV at the Bar del Monte in the medieval hill town Castel del Monte, nestled in the heart of Italy's Gran Sasso mountain range. This scene is on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sechGmM9HCo. The last scene of Leone's masterpiece is Cheyenne (Jason Robards) ignominiously dying a slow painful death from a bullet he took in the abdomen (pictured), just as Clooney does in the last scene of The American. But The American pales in comparison. Ann Hornaday (The Washington Post) opines "What Leone understood, and Corbijn is still learning, is how to deploy the hoariest archetypes in ways that make even pulp entertainment artful and art entertaining."

Comparisons abound, the wide open landscapes, the facial closeups, the methodical passage of time. The hooker Clara (Italian actress Violante Placido - has an oxymoronic ring to it) is a dead ringer for Jill McBain (Claudia Cardinale), both falling in love for the lone gunslinger Jack or Edward or "Butterfly" (not coincidentally Charles Bronson's Harmonica or "The Man With no Name" in Leone's film). But baby-faced Clooney is no match for craggy-faced Bronson as a masterless samurai.