B eauty found, unexpectedly, as a surprise as one comes to know a new place is beauty at its most satisfying. This phenomenon allows new treasures to be discovered and rediscovered, as cities, perhaps ancient, are continually re-engaged by newcomers, new citizens. In Berlin, Mies’ New National Gallery, Scharoun’s Philharmonie, Libeskind’s Extension to the Berlin Museum produce pleasure not only through their beauty and spatial resonance, but also through the knowledge one is in the presence of a recognized greatness, a part of the highest point of the culture of our discipline.
There is a more furtive, personal pleasure in recognizing qualities in the work not so iconic. The buildings and spaces found, enjoyed, appreciated and perhaps later discovered in expansive architectural histories of a particular place. Eric Mendelsohn’s Deutscher Metallarbeiter-Verband in Berlin-Kreutzberg or Emil Fahrenkamp’s Shellhaus in Berlin-Tiergarten were hidden pleasures, slightly out of the limelight of a rediscov- ered Berlin of the 1990’s. beauty found lost discovered beauty Andrew King and Angela Silver
calgary 1996 Much has been said of the re-discovery of the North American city that is necessary for its survival. Re- engagement of the urban condition is also about isolat- ing the fragmentary beauty that may exist. Calgary, the archetypal North American city, continues to reveal itself through fragments of this furtive, undisclosed beauty that are as much as much a part of finding this ‘place’ as driving to Drumheller and witnessing the prairie landscape shift. The brutalist spectacle of Jack Long’s Planetarium, the elegant facade of the Fording Building and the discrete Deco of the Barron Building are punctuation marks in the benignly banal cityscape that is Calgary. Less overt, more discrete discoveries were the beautiful piloti held courtyard office space on 17th avenue that housed the Forbidden Flavours ice cream parlour (now unrecognizable as an italian hilltownish clock tower stucco-covered mundanity) and the relentlessly modern, delicate south balcony facade of the High- lander Motel on 16th ave north west (now rendered as an absurdity with a green metal chalet roof perched like a timid lemming). North Hill Shopping Centre, anchored with an original Simpsons Sears store, was a project that had everything to do with Calgary in the mid twentieth century, an architectural expression about the burgeoning North American city, a typical but expansively optimistic con- dition. Its a small thing, a 1960’s shopping centre on what was then the periphery. It is solid: a clear and honest material strategy, a subtle composition along its facades, a building that through its language is about a young modern city. A piece of architecture driven by architectural culture, but one that reflects commerce, exchange, the ability to build in on a vast topographic, economic and political expanse.
above: life as it was lived at the 1958 opening of North Hill Shopping Centre. below: the original store (drawing courtesy of Sears Canada, North Hill).
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ON SITE review 6: BEAUTY
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