Olaf Henny sends along some additional photos, this time from Erfurt, Germany (he’s a big fan of small Central European towns).
I like particularly, in the architecture of that time, that it combined some of the playfulness of the late Renaissance with the liveability provided by the large light-admitting windows of that period …
… as compared to the timber frame construction of earlier times, shown by an example from the same city.
But it’s not as though the Europeans have always learned a lot from their own history and experience. Here’s a housing block in Vienna’s Donau City – a comprehensively designed, mixed-use development begun in 1995 – that seems to have been modelled after some of North America’s more regrettable public housing projects.
There are lots of similarly scaled projects throughout Europe – Copenhagen’s Orestad, for instance. Other nominations welcome.
I can feel the life getting sucked out of me by that third photo. Perhaps it should be named “Angstplatz”.
European have developed a certain schizophrenia with their architecture heritage
you could be interested by architecture/urbanim of Les arcs ski resort in France well illustrated by this picture
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/Les_Arcs_2000_and_1950.jpg
Forefront, almost coming of an Erickson sketch (vision 56 for DT Vancover, which we have spared of) are some building from the 80’s (all the resort has been designed according to some lecorbusier principle by the way, and the wiki page of les arcs give some fine example of it).
The “village” behind the Eriksonian buildings has been built in 2003… by Intrawest… and like Whistler is a mock-up of a traditional village, called les arcs 1950.
Les arcs 1950 (the Intrawest village) has been greeted by locals with a range of emotion ranging from skepticism (who would like “faux-vieux”) to outright hostility (“we don’t want to be Disneyland on the mountain”) . Intrawest basically give up to market its products to French, over 80% of the buyer are British : local have hard time to understand this interest.
and I am pretty sure the inhabitant of Erfurt could react the same if some promoter was trying “faux vieux” and they could be right…
closer too us, once upon a time, I was visiting Old Masset reserve (queen Charlotte island): basically not different of any other Indian reserve, but it happens to have at least one house built in the traditional Haida style… It also happen that this house has not been built by a native…