October 26th, 2012
Piazza San Domenico Maggiore, au coeur du dédale du vieux coeur greco-romain napoliain.
Assis à la terrasse du Gran Caffè Napolis, un mouvement soudain de vie me surprend par son intensité. C’est vrai que les cloches sonnent l’arrivée de la longue pause de la mi-journée.
De nombreux ménestrels nouveau genre envahissent un bon cinquième de la place et chantent une sorte de trame sonore vaguement inspirée par les différentes cultures qui ont tour à tour choisies de faire de Napoli leur capitale. Et ils sont nombreux à avoir rêver de posséder la baie légendaire, des grecs aux bourdons d’Espagne, en passant par les romains et les normands. Même Napoléon a savourer les lumières de Campanie. De toutes ces cultures, je crois que la cité est demeurer la Neapolis héllénistique de ses origines.
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October 26th, 2012
Il est très tôt encore, le matin du septième jour, alors que j’écris à la hâte ces quelques lignes trop diffuses sur cette cité si complexe. Pourtant, j’en suis à mon cinquième séjour en autant d’années.
Napoli, le nom évoque la mer, le volcan, les mioches qui trainent la rue dans Montecalvario. Une cité qu’on apprend, au fur que les jours passent et que les découvertes s’accumulent, à désirer. Et puis, alors que l’on quitte une des nombreuses ruines de la baie, au détour d’une falaise qui projette le regard loin dans cette mer turquoise, l’on se prend de nostalgie pour ces visiteurs des siècles derniers. Le concept même du voyage n’est-il pas ce qui à survécu du Grand tour que ces nobles anglais et allemands accomplissaient afin de parfaire leur éducation intellectuelle et sexuelle ?
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October 25th, 2012
Sometimes it seems as though everyone knows Michael Leung — even the owner of a Kwun Tong dai pai dong, who chats amiably with the young designer as he sits down for lunch. “We made a zine about him,” Leung explains later. “He’s really proud of it.”
Scratch the surface of Hong Kong’s creative scene and you’re bound to come across something that Leung is involved in. There’s HK Honey, the urban beekeeping project he founded two years ago; Shanghai Street Studios, which runs art, design and cultural initiatives in Yau Ma Tei; HK Farm, an experiment in rooftop agriculture; 2 Years Ahead, a publishing and furniture-building project.
And that doesn’t even begin to cover Leung’s freelance work or his teaching at the Polytechnic University’s School of Design, where he will lecture on “design for the Asian lifestyle” in November.
“I think all the projects are so related, it’s almost like they’re the same thing,” says Leung, settling into a wicker chair on the roof of the Easy-Pack Industrial Building in Kwun Tong, where he maintains an organic farm and apiary with the help of photographer Glenn Eugen Ellingsen and archivist Matthew Edmondson. “I’ll do a food-safety project and I won’t know whether to put it in HK Honey or HK Farm.”
Leung is 28, with a shaved head and photogenic features. On a blustery day in late September he is dressed in grey shorts, worn pink slip-ons and a Ngau Tau Kok graphic t-shirt made by his friends at Start from Zero, the street art crew whose studio is just down the street.
October 24th, 2012
Over the past 30 years, Vancouver has transformed itself from provincial outpost to globally-renowned metropolis — a crucial link in the Pacific Rim necklace of capital, culture and migration. The change has been physical. Since 1990, more than 150 skyscrapers have been built on the Canadian city’s downtown peninsula, creating a densely-built environment that has more in common with Singapore or Shanghai than with most North American cities.
Nearly 40 of those towers were designed by James Cheng, one of Canada’s most quietly influential architects. Born in Hong Kong, educated in the United States and based in Vancouver since 1972, Cheng pioneered a form of slender “point tower” set atop a low-rise podium that became the emblem of “Vancouverism,” an urban design movement that advocates high-density residential construction with an emphasis on public amenities, natural light, open views, urban greenery and lively, pedestrian-oriented streets.
Yet Cheng remains an architectural outsider, even as his ideas have reshaped Vancouver’s urban identity. “As city-builder and innovator in high-density housing, he is without rival in this country, fighting for public amenities and public open space in his city-transforming projects at a time when autonomous architectural sculptures get the praise,” writes Vancouver-based architecture critic Trevor Boddy. Cheng describes himself in slightly less grandiose terms: “I don’t want to be a global player. I have no dream to be a superstar. I just want to do good-quality buildings.”
October 20th, 2012
For a few days, I walked all around Turin, talking to locals, enjoying the unique light you find there.
Most people asked me why I came to Turin. I couldn’t say. I told them I came without purpose, except perhaps to spend some time doing nothing else than having a caffè, eating well and observing people so that I could write about how they live in this northern Italian metropolis.
Turin strikes you less for its individual monuments than with the overall impression it gives you. There’s nothing special to say about its architecture, other than realizing how perfectly built the streets and public spaces were back in the old days.
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October 19th, 2012
Marchant dans les pas de Mark Twain, Nietzsche et bien d’autres, je parcours Turin, longeant d’un rythme paresseux ces rues longues et rectilignes, encadrées d’arcades si émouvantes de par leur charme démodés et franchement surannées.
Je trouve quelques chemises, dans une de ces nouvelles boutiques qui pullulent de plus en plus, jouxtant de vieilles échoppes aux façades noircies.
J’entends les pas qui résonnent, amplifiés mille fois par ces voutes qui me surplombent : l’Italie est une patrie où l’élégance est digne d’une dramaturgie grecque.
La perspective bute soudainement sur une vaste place qui forme une sorte de demi-lune étirée sur la longueur. Puis je devine le serpent d’eau que forme la Po, écrasée sous la masse informe des collines alpines. Un pont et une église ronde un peu pompeuse.
October 8th, 2012
We’re happy to introduce our newest contributor, Yin Khvat. Yin was born in Manchester in the UK and has lived in Australia for the last six years. She is currently on a short stay in Taiwan and has a particular interest in Cambodia.
Photo by Bo Nielsen
A woman is selling green coconuts off the back of her motorbike on the dusty street. With a scythe, she deftly chips the head of the coconut into a point, then guillotines the tip to reveal the sweet juice and tender white flesh inside. Next to her, a barber has set up on the pavement, his shop made up only of bare necessities: a mirror and chair. Young men in makeshift stalls, with car parts hung up on tarpaulin walls, observe you languidly as you watch them, curiosity returned for curiosity. On the corner, policemen in blue on their motorbikes look a little seedy, restricted in their uniforms, smoking cigarettes and surveying the traffic.
This is a typical street scene in Phnom Penh: a living, breathing cross-section of life in the Cambodian capital. Some look at this and see disorder, or a blight on the city’s beauty. Others see freedom, vibrancy, and the right of everyone — including the poor — to make a living. The city council has attempted to “reorganise” these small stalls — sometimes known as “romantic stallss” — believing they are messy or unhygienic. But for the time being, at least, it seems their efforts have not succeeded. Phnom Penh remains a capital city where the poorer sections of society can sell and provide services as the market demands, without the need to lease expensive commercial space.
But the stalls are part of a bigger social fabric, one which appears to define the Cambodian way of life. You see it not only in streets lined with people selling their wares, but also every afternoon and evening along the banks of the Tonle Sap River and Chaktomuk — the “four faces” where the Mekong and Tonle Sap Rivers meet. On Sisowath Quay, especially, people spend their free time sitting, walking and dancing with friends and family. They enjoy each other’s company under their city’s skies. Take one of the popular boat trips down the river and it is another episode of this same documentary, in which the delineation between viewer and object is blurred. You are watching them as they are watching you. The social interaction is thrilling, an essential element in a society where social integration is the outcome, binding people together and folding lives in on each other.
No doubt the warm weather and dense population contribute to this phenomenon, as does the economic devastation wrought by the Khmer Rouge and the civil wars through the 1970s and 1980s, from which Cambodia is only now recovering. But what of the social legacy? When I asked how people here can be so warm after the horrors they have faced, I have been told that many Cambodians “live and let live.” That many adhere to Buddhist teachings that there is good and bad in all of us, and that forgiveness is part of living. Many Cambodians want to put those years behind them.
And so perhaps what we get is something I can’t help feel is unique to Phnom Penh. This is city that is unafraid, welcoming, generous and open-hearted. Tourists don’t need to be invited into the homes of Cambodians to interact with real people, or to get a good taste of life here, of what Cambodians do and how they live their lives. This society has a transparent, wonderful, communal feel — even after what it suffered just a generation ago.