a long day yesterday riding the rails from Kiel to Aachen, back into familiar spaces again there. a really nice but far too short visit with Günter, Christina, and Manon — who is now as tall as her mother! last time I saw her she was just a little child, maybe eight years ago?! lovely child. so, hanging out talking about books, art, life, music, so nice to re-connect after all this time.
re-creating the passage of time. young children grow up.
a leisurely breakfast with Christina, and she then drove me to the Hauptbahnhof for my train through Liege and on to Brussels Midi, a short walk to the hotel, where Dirk has faxed a three-day plan of meetings with a variety of artists, artist’s collectives, and educators working in that fuzzy space of new media. my room is not ready, so I stash my bag and start wandering towards the first agenda item: a round-table (albeit around a rectangular table) with two of the principles of LA[bau] — a laboratory for architecture and urbanism — Manuel Abendroth and Els Vermang.
a nice lunch (those dang baguette-sandwiches are always so crunchy that they cut the skin in my mouth at first, I forget to remember this and take care, flipping the sandwich over so that the smoother side of the baguette is up). but mmmm. on the way to lunch, however, a strange event. walking towards a building under reconstruction, a scaffolding is being set up, maybe four stories high at the moment. I catch the eye of a guy who is stacking parts to be hauled up on a cable winch, nothing unusual there. I am looking at the structure which looks somehow unstable. I decide to walk off the sidewalk instead of under the structure. I am looking up at the structure, calculating it’s condition. a pass it by, return to the sidewalk and hear a clang, then a meter in front of me a wrench, a heavy one, smashes to the ground. there is a group of 4 guys walking towards me about the same distance from the landing point as I am. faugh! how weird is that. I had the prior intuition something was wrong with the situation, and I can’t really say that the slight detour I made brought me closer or further away from my head intersecting with this tool which must have fallen from around 15 meters up. far enough up that is could easily have killed me or those other people.
so the rest of the day, I am watching things more carefully, but what difference does it make? if you look one way, you miss what is coming the other.
at any rate, they outlined their program and a couple of the main projects they have undertaking recently. tough to cross over my lack of background in architecture — it has always been a distant field of interest, but seldom the opportunity to crack the conceptual world that it is embedded in. the one time jumping in on a final critique with some of EJ’s students at Boulder was interesting — along with a surficial awareness of functionality in housing design — but does not provide any preparation for the contemporary conceptual spaces of inquiry. it does seem that innovative, and especially decorative design elements in architecture are about something. but the connection between the about-ness and what I would understand as the reason for the existence of architecture is not clear to me. but this is perhaps my own weakness combined with a deep frustration at the frequent appearance of non-functional design in built structures and in objects, for that matter.
at any rate, their work shows the presence of superior economic capital, and the consequent high production values which is nice. professional. sleek, designer, urban.
been in the desert too long, or, not long enough.
Crabbit (cra-bit) dialect, chiefly Scot. – adj. 1. ill-tempered, grumpy, curt, disagreeable; in a bad mood [esp. in the morning]. (often used in ‘ken this, yer a crabbit get, so ye are’). n. by their nature or temperament conveys an aura of irritability. — drink coaster at Christina & Günter’s place
