This sounds like it was an interesting residential experiment. I find myself wondering at the use of "utopia". There's no mention of any radical changes to (self-)government, economics, social structures or cultural norms. Nor is any of that mentioned in the city's Wikipedia page [0]. It seems to be more about exploiting tourism to fund an artistic and architectural vision.
Though Epcot Center the park is nothing like EPCOT the experimental prototype for the city of tomorrow. Seaside, FL; Celebration, FL; Cotino near Palm Springs, CA, and other "Storyliving by Disney" projects present and future are all much closer to the EPCOT vision than the Epcot Center itself is, despite the name intended to evoke the imagination towards the original EPCOT plan and Walt's masterful but failed attempt at selling it on national television.
It could have been a park, a farm, a forest. It could have been left as an interesting ruin for humans to explore and nature to reclaim. But in the name of some selfish artistic vision, this person built a vast concrete wasteland.
Good art triggers strong emotions, I suppose. I feel horror and revulsion.
I mean, you're entitled to your emotional response, but let's not pretend that's an impactful amount of concrete or land. Might as well be outraged about a supermarket.
There's lots I find objectionable about our built environment, but at least it has a purpose. Between butchering an animal for food, vs doing it for fun, this artwork is the latter.
200 people died there, 1000+ were injured, and 100k left homeless. This art is a monument and tombstone. This is perfectly respectful. I think most communities wouldn't build a supermarket or park over a recent human disaster site like this.
Its really a memorial, not modern art:
"I told him immediately, ‘let’s go see the old town’. It was almost 20 km away and I was just shocked. I almost felt like crying and then this idea came to me: here I could do something… This is what I would do: we compact the ruins — which are a problem for everyone — we reinforce them well, and with concrete, we create an immense white crack as a permanent symbol of what happened here,” Burri described on first seeing the ruins of Gibellina.
Did he see the disaster as an opportunity to ply his trade at an even greater scale? Sixteen years after the earthquake, he was asked not to build a memorial, but to help reconstruct the new city. He declined and created this piece instead. Your quote in context:
> mayor Ludovico Corrao called upon numerous architects and artists to help with reconstruction efforts. [...] “We went to Gibellina [...] When we finally arrived to visit the place, the new city was nearly complete and full of new pieces. ‘I can’t do anything here,’ I told him immediately, ‘let’s go see the old town’. It was almost 20 km away [...]
> Did he see the disaster as an opportunity to ply his trade at an even greater scale?
So what? The artist had a style of art in which he was an expert and known for. I totally get and respect that his art is not your cup of tea, but I don't see any negatives in the fact that he did see the opportunity to build this as a opportunity to "ply his trade" as you put it. Would you rather have him build something in a style he's totally unfamiliar with and bad at?
Totally agree. I never previously knew this existed and I think it's not only visually stunning, but an incredibly impactful instantiation of the tragedy it's meant to represent.
Most importantly, given that globalization and technology have resulted in a "homogenization" of a lot of art and culture, this piece feels truly unique to me (I also thought it was just a glitch in Google Maps when I first saw it) in a way that's very rare these days.
Horror and revulsion are proper things to feel about a monument to tragedy. Perhaps some additional feelings of solemnity and timelessness would come if you visited.
>There's something magical to concrete mega monuments
Concrete, more specifically brutalism, these buildings tend to be very opinionated. In many of those constructions even tables are made from concrete as part of the building, they enforce a particular function.
In one way its magical, it is shaping you because you have no choice but follow the architects vision and that vision is usually some idealised version of the future - an acquired taste. For example, Barbican Centre in London was supposed to be this utopia about living in the future. I'm big fan of it and because it was close to my office I was frequent visitor, however that vision clearly failed.
It very divisive style, and the division is %90 hate it, %8 feel unsure about it and the %2 love it but when you count the opinion(an opinion made of strong, large concrete pieces) of the building it easily surpasses the %50 love and the building stays.
Very unique place, located in the center of a busy metropolitan city. Great feeling when you enter it, going from noisy cars, people and city life to something like a tranquil garden filled with art.
Feels similar to Columbus, Indiana in that it is a place that has tons of amazing expressions of space but little practicality for people to inhabit them.
It’s the grand utopian disappointment to realize beauty isn’t enough.
Brunello Cucinelli is doing the same thing in Solomeo Umbria, but this time trying to use classical architecture and fund it all privately with his billion dollar fashion label. I visited and it’s impressive, but still quiet.
> They eventually settled on the “garden city,” a design popularized in the 1960s by English urban planner Ebenezer Howard.
That's your problem right there! The 'garden city' concept had already failed by the 1960s (both of the true garden cities were built by Howard in 1903 (Letchworth) and 1920 (Welwyn GC) - he died in 1928, so he wasn't popular in the 1960s).
What they were probably getting confused over, was the new town concept of the post-WW2 era, when towns such as Slough and Milton Keynes, which, as brutalist horrors, were already roundly panned by everyone except fashionista architects at the time they were built, and predictably sank into deprivation and decay by the 1980s.
Neither Garden Cities nor New Towns took into account any of the organic usage patterns that developed in organic towns, and thus ended up producing cultural wastelands for different reasons - Garden Cities because howard was a Quaker and had unpopular religious motivations resulting in stepford style living. And new towns because brutalism is depressing as fuck unless you're a fashionista, and encourages antisocial behaviour in normal people.
For reference on how desolate the place is, Letchworth is the only place I've been casually offered heroin while minding my own business walking through the city centre during broad daylight.
Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Denver, Miami, Salt Lake City, Seattle, and Portland are similarly desolate in this way
The idea that MK is deprived, decaying, and hated is certainly not universally held, least of all by the people who live there and say they are happy. You can quibble about its nontraditional layout but for the work-from-home era it seems almost prescient. If I had to nuke one of MK or Poundbury it would be the latter.
Never before in history had there been a profession as infested with snake-oil peddling, arrogant, hucksters.
70 years later numerous cities all around the world are still dealing with the echoes of their concrete monstrosities, err, monstrocities.
A famous and skilled surgeon suffering from the most deeply entrenched and severe god complex known to medicine would take one look at the lot of them and say "god damn you got me beat".
It was praised by the 1960s urban planners and architects, yet remains attractive today with high property values and a popular mix of suburban-style living combined with easy access to urban services. (Though it surely helps that Helsinki built an expensive metro line straight through Tapiola, and that some of Finland’s leading universities were relocated into the area from central Helsinki within the past 10-15 years.)
This style of architecture deserves a more descriptive term than simply "postermodern". I think this style should be called "malevolent".
Because you have to actually be malevolent to entertain even the slightest notion that any of these designs could ever possibly be a good idea. They're insults. No, worse than insults - they are violence. These grotesques do violence to the landscape. They assault the eyes. They rape beauty.
>What can you do with a failed postmodern utopia?
Destroy the abominations and reuse the stone to build prisons for everyone who had a hand in designing and green-lighting these experiments.
So I asked SD to generate a modernist monument. It was abstract concrete shapes with a set of stairs leading to nowhere. Then I asked it to generate a postmodern monument and it was also abstract concrete shapes but some were painted red and the stairs were removed.
It's wild how easy it is to not know that something exists.
One of my pandemic trips was touring Italy by Vespa, from the Alps to Sicily. I rode right past Gibellina without knowing it was worth a stop.
That was actually one of the challenges of the trip. If you're touring California, there's often only one road to get where you're going. In my case, I just took PCH the whole way north.
Italy has thousands of years of villages and paths between them. Their road grid is a spiderweb. Even figuring out what route to take on any particular day needed a lot of research and some random luck.
I often wish I could tell Gemini or some other ai my general preferences & interests (unique parks, board games, bonsai, pickleball courts etc) and while I was driving, google maps would occasionally pop up a silent notice saying "did you know, just 1 mile ahead is an exit leading to a nearby world-famous bonsai exhibit that is open now)
They could do this really really easily, and it would be EPIC and offer you the chance to discover things you basically NEVER would know about otherwise...
On the other side: more notifications while driving? No, thanks - bad for safety, likely to be very annoying, and extremely likely to be coopted by adsense ("did you know? Just 1 mile ahead you'll find the newest McDonald's in the city...")
I don't agree with these kind of moral hazard arguments which attempt to prove progress is impossible. It's not my problem that google may screw something up - they can do that if they want, and we can react. I do not accept any responsibility to "not think of ideas which would help me, because some other group may do something bad with them". How could you even go through the day, if you hold yourself responsible for potentially bad things other people could do?
Invent new medicine? Oh that's bad, maybe an evil army would use it to keep their soldiers alive. The entire point of life is to fight bad things and support good ones; I'm not going to just stop trying to progress.
My point is more that google's chokehold on mapping has meant nearly ZERO product innovation has happened in this space for 10+ years.
What's the point of a town without any industry, filled with inhumanly scaled sculptures? It's like a tomb, only dead people would want to live there. They seemed to think that it would be populated by the a segment of the independently wealthy that they're referring to as "artists," but those people don't want to live in the middle of nowhere without adequate luxury services and servants. And then the income of the town was meant to come from tourists wanting to stare at the "artist's" work. For free. There's no door charge, and there's no luxury infrastructure for the visitors to spend money on during their bicycle trips between massive concrete paperweights.
Pretty sure the goal of this project was to funnel somebody's, probably the state's, funds into the contractors who covered an acre of ground in a thick concrete slab, and similar, admittedly stunning, feats. I wonder if the concrete in those sculptures is of the same quality as the concrete of Genoese bridges.
We used to have ambitions and utopias, as societies; we used to think the future can be whatever we want it to be, that work would be done by machines, that we would live free in our flying cars, that nobody would go hungry, etc etc.
Obviously, it didn't happen; partially because some of these ambitions were unrealistic, but partially because we simply stopped believing it was possible to live without an incessant capitalist-driven commercialization of every inch of our existence.
45 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 116 ms ] thread[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibellina
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7874044,12.9707702,444m/data...
check some of the photospheres to see how it looks at ground level
There's something magical to concrete mega monuments (the Balkans have quite a collection, btw), like massive ruins-that-are-not-quite-ruins.
It could have been a park, a farm, a forest. It could have been left as an interesting ruin for humans to explore and nature to reclaim. But in the name of some selfish artistic vision, this person built a vast concrete wasteland.
Good art triggers strong emotions, I suppose. I feel horror and revulsion.
I find it irrelevant myself.
Its really a memorial, not modern art:
"I told him immediately, ‘let’s go see the old town’. It was almost 20 km away and I was just shocked. I almost felt like crying and then this idea came to me: here I could do something… This is what I would do: we compact the ruins — which are a problem for everyone — we reinforce them well, and with concrete, we create an immense white crack as a permanent symbol of what happened here,” Burri described on first seeing the ruins of Gibellina.
Did he see the disaster as an opportunity to ply his trade at an even greater scale? Sixteen years after the earthquake, he was asked not to build a memorial, but to help reconstruct the new city. He declined and created this piece instead. Your quote in context:
> mayor Ludovico Corrao called upon numerous architects and artists to help with reconstruction efforts. [...] “We went to Gibellina [...] When we finally arrived to visit the place, the new city was nearly complete and full of new pieces. ‘I can’t do anything here,’ I told him immediately, ‘let’s go see the old town’. It was almost 20 km away [...]
So what? The artist had a style of art in which he was an expert and known for. I totally get and respect that his art is not your cup of tea, but I don't see any negatives in the fact that he did see the opportunity to build this as a opportunity to "ply his trade" as you put it. Would you rather have him build something in a style he's totally unfamiliar with and bad at?
Most importantly, given that globalization and technology have resulted in a "homogenization" of a lot of art and culture, this piece feels truly unique to me (I also thought it was just a glitch in Google Maps when I first saw it) in a way that's very rare these days.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oTaTK99em6U
Well, not my cup of tea to say the least.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/Runit_Do...
Concrete, more specifically brutalism, these buildings tend to be very opinionated. In many of those constructions even tables are made from concrete as part of the building, they enforce a particular function.
In one way its magical, it is shaping you because you have no choice but follow the architects vision and that vision is usually some idealised version of the future - an acquired taste. For example, Barbican Centre in London was supposed to be this utopia about living in the future. I'm big fan of it and because it was close to my office I was frequent visitor, however that vision clearly failed.
It very divisive style, and the division is %90 hate it, %8 feel unsure about it and the %2 love it but when you count the opinion(an opinion made of strong, large concrete pieces) of the building it easily surpasses the %50 love and the building stays.
Very unique place, located in the center of a busy metropolitan city. Great feeling when you enter it, going from noisy cars, people and city life to something like a tranquil garden filled with art.
Oh and fwiw per wikipedia since 1997 it's an independent republic, the Republic of Užupis.
It’s the grand utopian disappointment to realize beauty isn’t enough.
Brunello Cucinelli is doing the same thing in Solomeo Umbria, but this time trying to use classical architecture and fund it all privately with his billion dollar fashion label. I visited and it’s impressive, but still quiet.
That's your problem right there! The 'garden city' concept had already failed by the 1960s (both of the true garden cities were built by Howard in 1903 (Letchworth) and 1920 (Welwyn GC) - he died in 1928, so he wasn't popular in the 1960s).
What they were probably getting confused over, was the new town concept of the post-WW2 era, when towns such as Slough and Milton Keynes, which, as brutalist horrors, were already roundly panned by everyone except fashionista architects at the time they were built, and predictably sank into deprivation and decay by the 1980s.
Neither Garden Cities nor New Towns took into account any of the organic usage patterns that developed in organic towns, and thus ended up producing cultural wastelands for different reasons - Garden Cities because howard was a Quaker and had unpopular religious motivations resulting in stepford style living. And new towns because brutalism is depressing as fuck unless you're a fashionista, and encourages antisocial behaviour in normal people.
Never before in history had there been a profession as infested with snake-oil peddling, arrogant, hucksters.
70 years later numerous cities all around the world are still dealing with the echoes of their concrete monstrosities, err, monstrocities.
A famous and skilled surgeon suffering from the most deeply entrenched and severe god complex known to medicine would take one look at the lot of them and say "god damn you got me beat".
The one 1960s garden city / new town project that I’m most familiar with is Tapiola, part of Finland’s capital Helsinki area:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tapiola
It was praised by the 1960s urban planners and architects, yet remains attractive today with high property values and a popular mix of suburban-style living combined with easy access to urban services. (Though it surely helps that Helsinki built an expensive metro line straight through Tapiola, and that some of Finland’s leading universities were relocated into the area from central Helsinki within the past 10-15 years.)
Because you have to actually be malevolent to entertain even the slightest notion that any of these designs could ever possibly be a good idea. They're insults. No, worse than insults - they are violence. These grotesques do violence to the landscape. They assault the eyes. They rape beauty.
>What can you do with a failed postmodern utopia?
Destroy the abominations and reuse the stone to build prisons for everyone who had a hand in designing and green-lighting these experiments.
/s
Or, you know, find new ways to use these things. Brutalist architecture is absolutely fantastic for street-art, for example, or to shoot sci-fi films.
Beauty is everywhere, when one has eyes open to beauty.
I did feel it got it exactly right.
One of my pandemic trips was touring Italy by Vespa, from the Alps to Sicily. I rode right past Gibellina without knowing it was worth a stop.
That was actually one of the challenges of the trip. If you're touring California, there's often only one road to get where you're going. In my case, I just took PCH the whole way north.
Italy has thousands of years of villages and paths between them. Their road grid is a spiderweb. Even figuring out what route to take on any particular day needed a lot of research and some random luck.
They could do this really really easily, and it would be EPIC and offer you the chance to discover things you basically NEVER would know about otherwise...
On the other side: more notifications while driving? No, thanks - bad for safety, likely to be very annoying, and extremely likely to be coopted by adsense ("did you know? Just 1 mile ahead you'll find the newest McDonald's in the city...")
I don't agree with these kind of moral hazard arguments which attempt to prove progress is impossible. It's not my problem that google may screw something up - they can do that if they want, and we can react. I do not accept any responsibility to "not think of ideas which would help me, because some other group may do something bad with them". How could you even go through the day, if you hold yourself responsible for potentially bad things other people could do?
Invent new medicine? Oh that's bad, maybe an evil army would use it to keep their soldiers alive. The entire point of life is to fight bad things and support good ones; I'm not going to just stop trying to progress.
My point is more that google's chokehold on mapping has meant nearly ZERO product innovation has happened in this space for 10+ years.
Pretty sure the goal of this project was to funnel somebody's, probably the state's, funds into the contractors who covered an acre of ground in a thick concrete slab, and similar, admittedly stunning, feats. I wonder if the concrete in those sculptures is of the same quality as the concrete of Genoese bridges.
We used to have ambitions and utopias, as societies; we used to think the future can be whatever we want it to be, that work would be done by machines, that we would live free in our flying cars, that nobody would go hungry, etc etc.
Obviously, it didn't happen; partially because some of these ambitions were unrealistic, but partially because we simply stopped believing it was possible to live without an incessant capitalist-driven commercialization of every inch of our existence.