I’ve lived in some historic places over the years — Paris, Greenwich
Village, Washington — but it wasn’t until I spent a winter in Chelsea a
year ago that I felt as if I were inside a diorama. The ur-Chelsea, I
mean: London, not the quarter of Manhattan that provided Joni Mitchell
with inspiration for a song and, in the process, Bill and Hillary
Clinton with a name for their newborn daughter. For historical
voyeurism, London’s Chelsea is hard to beat, especially if you incline
to artist-writer types, or as my late friend Christopher Hitchens would
put it, “people of that kidney.”
Winter, I should add, is an excellent time for dead-celebrity stalking.
In spring and summer, London thrums and buzzes like a hive. Pubs spill
onto the sidewalk, tourists swarm (those Americans!) and the lush city
parks that inspired the spare landscapes of Thomas Gainsborough resemble
Woodstock re-enactments. Even residential Chelsea takes on the look of a
Davos confab or world’s fair.
Immediately next door to our little rental flat on Embankment Gardens, a
sweet little enclave hard by the Thames, was the Chelsea Royal
Hospital. In May, it becomes the site of the annual Chelsea Flower Show.
As splendid an event as it is, the very acme of the floral monde, I was
glad not to have been a collateral part of it. The empty winter
streets, brisk but never too-cold air, and golden afternoon sun made for
superb and invigorating perambulations.
We were in London because my wife was studying for an advanced medical
degree in tropical medicine. Every morning she would bravely tootle off
in the dark to catch her bus and the Tube. I was a stay-at-home spouse,
banging away at a novel, and feeling rather inadequate to the task,
given the density of illustrious literary figures who once lived around
the corner.
Every afternoon, when the day’s banging away was done and the larder of
metaphors and bons mots was finally empty, I’d lace up my sneakers
(trainers, as the British call them) and embark on epic walks,
culminating with a rendezvous with my darling at the oyster bar at
Harrods.
Yes, I know, Harrods: throngs of actual tourists (as opposed to, say,
me) and that weird, creepy shrine to Diana and Dodi. Call Harrods a
cliché if you insist, but the food courts on the ground floor are my
idea of perfect heaven. And sitting at the marble counter with a glass
of Sancerre and a dozen Kumamotos sure worked for my darling, after a
long day of PowerPoint presentations on loa loa and other revolting
filarial nematodes.
Having refreshed, we’d cruise the bright, gaily tiled food courts,
gathering up whatnots for supper at home: Scotch eggs, fish pies,
aromatic salamis and cheeses, dumplings, fresh-shot pheasant. The food
courts are a gastronomic United Nations. On the way out, we’d dip down
to the wine department in the basement for a bottle of claret, sherry,
Chablis or whatever looked good (and cost less than £10,000).
Then came the mile-and-a-half hump back to Embankment Gardens in the
dark, a goodish half-hour, through Hans Place to Pont Street, past
Lillie Langtry’s old residence. You remember the “Jersey Lillie” —
beauty, actress, muse, concubine to the Prince of Wales (among others).
She sat for Whistler and traded quips with Oscar Wilde.
Where were we? Down Pont Street and right onto Sloane Street by the
Cadogan Hotel, where Wilde was arrested by detectives for “gross
indecency.” Down Sloane to Sloane Square, then west on the King’s Road,
epicenter of 1960s Swinging London. Then zigzags down smaller streets
and a tree-lined allée that in the late 17th century was the driveway to
the Royal Hospital, and down St. Leonard’s Terrace toward Tedworth
Square, where Mark Twain lived for a time.
Onto Tite Street, the home stretch, with a brief stop at the corner
Tesco convenience store, for milk and a half-dozen newspapers, including
the guilty pleasure of tabloids shouting “Gotcha!” at the latest
naughty cross-dressing member of Parliament or Prince Philip for telling
some derogatory anecdote about Princess Di. Bliss.
Down Tite, past Oscar Wilde’s house, and a few yards farther, John
Singer Sargent’s, now homes to ordinary folks (no offense meant). We
were groaning now under the weight of our Harrods-heavy backpacks.
Looking down the street and seeing the shimmer of lamplight on the
surface of the Thames brought a sigh. Almost home.
On the flight home in March after our happy three months, I made a list
from memory of what names I remembered seeing on the blue plaques
denoting that someone of eminence had once lived there. Some names are
perhaps more boldfaced than others: Bram Stoker (author of “Dracula”);
Handel and Mozart (you know all about them); Jerome K. Jerome (“Three
Men in a Boat”); Dante Gabriel Rossetti (founder of the “Pre-Raphaelite”
school of painting); Algernon Swinburne (poet and very naughty);
Hilaire Belloc (“Jim, who ran away from his nurse and was eaten by a
Lion”); J.M.W. Turner (painter); Sir Thomas Carlyle (the Sage of
Chelsea, whose manuscript of “The French Revolution” was inadvertently
tossed into the fire by John Stuart Mills’s housemaid); Carol Reed
(directed “The Third Man”); Henry James; T.S. Eliot; Alexander Fleming
(penicillin) and Ian Fleming (no relation, I don’t think); Jacob Epstein
(sculptor); Herbert Beerbohm Tree (theatrical producer of Oscar Wilde
plays); Sir Thomas More; and, what do you know, Henry VIII.
If you search online, you’ll find dozens more Chelsea residents,
including Mick Jagger and Keith Richards (something to do with music);
Eric Clapton; Agatha Christie; Ava Gardner — well, it’s endless. There
are some fun sub-themes, such as the two famous fictional spies who
lived there: John le Carré’s George Smiley and Ian Fleming’s James Bond.
The Royal Hospital right next to Embankment Gardens is one of London’s
really, really splendid pieces of real estate. It was commissioned as an
old soldiers’ home in the 1680s by Charles II, and designed and built
by Christopher Wren.
We often glimpsed the “Chelsea pensioners,” old men in scarlet tunics
and military decorations. (Some female pensioners also live there.)
There you’d be, in the checkout line at the Tesco with an armful of
lurid London tabloids and your liter of milk, and suddenly you’d notice
one of them behind you, bent with age, chest clinking with medals won at
D-Day, perhaps, or Operation Market Garden. As an exercise in humility,
this is hard to top.
Other sights in Chelsea give you pause to contemplate your place in the
universe. A few hundred yards from our flat, west along Cheyne Walk, is
Chelsea Old Church. Historians believe it was about here in 54 B.C. that
Julius Caesar’s army found a place to ford the river on their way
north. About 12 centuries later, a church was built here. Two centuries
after that, the church had evolved into the chapel of the local
landowner, one Sir Reginald Bray. Sir Reg is buried here in the family
tomb. It was he who, after the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, is said
to have found the slain Richard III’s crown dangling in a thorn bush.
He conveyed it to Richard’s successor, the Earl of Richmond, who became
Henry VII, first of the Tudor monarchs and father of Henry VIII.
A few decades later (we’re up to the early 1500s now), the chapel had
become part of the estate of Sir Thomas More, chancellor of England. Sir
Thomas’s patron and friend Henry VIII visited him in rustic Chelsea.
The occasion is beautifully and ominously recreated in the film “A Man
for All Seasons.”
His Majesty liked Chelsea so much that he built himself a manor next
door. Part of its wall can still be seen. As you know, Sir Thomas
eventually found himself at odds with the king over certain theological
principles, including wife-dumping. But Sir Thomas had always been
realistic about his relationship with the king. As he told his
son-in-law, William Roper, “If my head would win him a castle in France,
it should not fail to go off.”
Henry did have his friend’s head “go off,” after which it was put on a
spike on London Bridge, as a warning to others who might hold views
discrepant from his majesty’s. Later, it was hurled into the river, and
retrieved by Sir Thomas’s grieving daughter Margaret, wife of Roper. Its
whereabouts is unknown. (Roper and Margaret are buried in the Roper
Vault of St. Dunstan’s Church in Canterbury.) The little enclosed
greensward next to the church, once part of Sir Thomas’s orchard, is
designated Roper’s Garden.
So there, in one tidy spot on the banks of the Thames, is a completed
sequence of English history: the tomb of Sir Reginald, who fought
alongside the future Henry VII, father of the man who chopped off the
head of the later owner of Sir Reg’s chapel.
Chelsea Old Church was almost destroyed during a night of particularly
vicious bombardment in the Blitz. One of those killed that April 1941
night was a young mother, a Canadian named Yvonne Green. Yvonne had
volunteered to stand fire watch in the bell tower. A plaque outside
commemorates her sacrifice.
There are so many plaques. Another notes that the sculptor Jacob Epstein
once had his studio in Roper’s Garden. To complete yet another circle:
Here Epstein carved the sculpture at Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris
that adorns the tomb of someone who once lived just a few blocks away,
on Tite Street — Oscar Wilde.
I realize I’ve spent most of the time talking about dead people, like
that kid in “The Sixth Sense.” So let me say for the record that Chelsea
is not a mausoleum. It’s a vibrantly alive place. King’s Road may not
be quite as swinging as it was in the 1960s, but it still hops to the
echoing beat of “happenings” that went on there. Mary Quant sold her
first hem- and eyebrow-raising miniskirts. John Osborne kicked off the
“angry young men” movement of the 1950s when his play “Look Back in
Anger” opened at the theater on Sloane Square. Diana Spencer and her
fellow Sloane Rangers headquartered there.
One evening as my wife and I were lumbering through the gloaming,
backpacks bulging with vittles and bottles of plonk, we weren’t paying
attention and took an errant turn off Tite Street. But getting lost is
one of the joys of wandering in Chelsea.
We found ourselves standing in front of a pub called, rather neatly, the
Surprise. How could we not go in? The Surprise became our regular
hangout, the nook to which we’d repair on cold winter nights, to sit by
the fire and drink Guinness and chortle over the day’s tabloids.
Why don’t I not give you precise directions, so finding it can be your
own Chelsea surprise. It’s there, and with a bit of luck, you’ll get a
bit lost on the way.
Christopher Buckley’s book of essays, “But Enough About You,” will be published in May.
Amsterdam’s Dam Square in 1656, with the new city hall under construction at left.
By
PICO IYER
Published: December 26, 2013
The Dutch in the 17th century, Russell Shorto informs us at a
characteristic moment in “Amsterdam: A History of the World’s Most
Liberal City,” were on their way to becoming “the greatest shipping
nation the world had ever seen.” Amsterdam’s canal ring was “the
greatest urban feat of the age.” In fact, Shorto says, Amsterdam more or
less gave us the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the
Enlightenment and the stock exchange (though Antwerp’s stock exchange
building is 80 years older). The United East India Company, put together
in Amsterdam, was “unique in world history,” Shorto writes. It “remade
the world.” It “pioneered globalization and invented what might be the
first modern bureaucracy.” It inaugurated “the beginning of consumerism,
which, for better or worse, is surely a component of liberalism.”
Phew! That’s a lot for a city currently as populous as Columbus, Ohio;
many places might pay handsomely to receive such enthusiastic support.
In 2004 Shorto gave us his often eye-opening book “The Island at the
Center of the World,” describing how the Dutch helped create Manhattan;
now he fills in the other side of the story, and tries to show us that
“liberalism was born” in Amsterdam, which “has influenced the modern
world to a degree that perhaps no other city has.” This in spite of the
fact that liberalism, as Shorto admits, “is a diffuse concept” and
carries “seemingly opposite meanings in the United States and in
Europe.” Economic liberalism, after all — the free-market capitalism to
which he alludes above — is almost exactly what social liberals often
deplore. If liberalism means both right and left, making money and not
doing so, individualism and communalism, it’s perhaps no surprise that
all roads in Amsterdam led to it.
The author’s method in his new book is to take us on a very brisk tour
across the highlights of Dutch history, from the Golden Age and tulips
to the legalization of squatting in 1971, from Rembrandt and Spinoza to
John and Yoko staging a bed-in at the Amsterdam Hilton. Much of this has
little to do with Amsterdam or with liberalism, but no matter: One
minute we’re reading about the transformation of the herring industry,
and four pages later about Martin Luther, whose theses “set off a tidal
wave that rolled 400 miles due west and crashed head-on into the
medieval town walls of Amsterdam.”
So much has to be packed into so little space that quite often one is
left with the feeling of ingesting an entire turkey with every mouthful.
Charles V, we are told, “had fought off Ottoman encroachments, sailed
the Mediterranean in swashbuckling campaigns to rid the sea of pirates,
personally sent off Magellan, Cortés and Pizarro on their voyages,
managed Spain’s South American colonization, extended his dominion to
the Dutch provinces, through Germany, and across Italy, and in pretty
much every way worked to hold up the pillars of the medieval world
order: monarchic power, domination by the Catholic Church, feudal land
management, divine right, mercantile colonization and obedience to
authority along the strict metaphysical lines of the great chain of
being.”
Three pages later, just as you’re trying to catch your breath, you read,
of Dutch power: “It was in the hands of herring merchants and cloth
traders, men who owned soap works and timber yards and shipyards, the
regents who sat on town boards, who were nominated to their governmental
position by those same wealthy men of business, the members of the
water boards of each community, and the dijkgraaf, literally
‘dike count,’ who had overall responsibility for the never-ending task
of managing the damming and rechanneling of water, and which is still an
important position in the Netherlands.”
The effect, inevitably, is of an old-style documentary, at once sonorous
and excitable, that someone has mistakenly set on fast forward. And the
long sentences are not exactly Jamesian. In a single chapter we have
scales falling from the eyes, “a chiseled visage” and “the glories and
writhings of the individual.” Indeed, in a single clause we get
“chivalrous decorum, thudding hooves and roisterous bonhomie.” The
looseness of the language seems to speak for an imprecision in the
thinking. Philip II, we learn, “was a man of his time, preoccupied with
the trappings of the past yet dealing with forces of the future.” I’m
not sure if any man of any time could be described very differently.
Here and there, we are given interesting tidbits: There’s a nice capsule
summary of Jan van der Heyden, the contemporary of Rembrandt, who
invented streetlamps, founded Amsterdam’s fire department and was a
painter of repute; and, as in his earlier book, Shorto tells us how a
Jesuit visitor to Manhattan in 1643 counted 18 languages and dialects in
a settlement with barely 500 people — though the facts were a little
different before — and describes how the place was then called Amsterdam
in New Netherland and featured gabled townhouses, two windmills and a
canal.
The author grows more confident as he nears the present, when he’s
drawing not from history books but from the testimony of those he’s met,
like an 86-year-old Auschwitz survivor who grew up with Anne Frank.
Besides, he’s wise enough to concede that liberalism and tolerance are
not the same thing, and that maintaining the second “would forever be a
challenge” in the Netherlands. At the heart of his notion of Amsterdam’s
liberalism is the principle of gedogen, which has less to do
with turning the other cheek than with turning a blind eye. Thus
coffeehouse owners must pay taxes on hash they sell, even though their
goods are technically illegal.
This begins to explain how the “Republic of Amsterdam,” as some still
call it, can flourish in what even Shorto calls a “bland monoclass” of
conservatism and bourgeois values; it’s an island in the center of a
nation, perhaps. At his best, Shorto’s primer to the town he’s called
home for more than five years is “a reasonably pleasant combination of
whimsy and stolidness,” to cite his description of the Amsterdam style
of architecture.
The problem is that Shorto’s grand ideas seem to be superimposed upon
his material rather than to flow out of it, as if he had his thesis
before he had any facts. And where in “The Island at the Center of the
World” he gave zesty life to fresh research, here he tries to marry
quite familiar history with some dangerously sweeping contentions. The
core of his argument seems to be the notion that Amsterdam both gave
unique freedom to the individual and patented a rare mix of individual
enterprise and community spirit (though some of us might discover this
in Confucius 2,000 years before). “I do find it compelling,” he writes
of Matthijs van Boxsel, that he “and other Dutch writers see the
historic struggle against water as formative to a cultural ethic of
cooperation that created a society strong enough for it to impel,
curiously, a commitment to value the individual.”
If that sounds confusing, the other formulations of the book’s central
idea are even more so. And much of the reasoning does not repay close
scrutiny: “Amsterdam was an oligarchy,” we’re assured, seven pages
before being reminded of “the egalitarian nature of Dutch society.”
Thomas Jefferson drew from John Locke, we’re told, and Locke spent five
years in Amsterdam, so Amsterdam deserves some credit for our pursuit of
happiness. When we read that “probably more than any other major
philosopher, Baruch Spinoza is looked to as a guide by serious thinkers
today” — would that it were so — and that he was “the first true
philosopher of modernity” as well as “the first and maybe the greatest
philosopher of liberalism,” we may begin to suspect that the
superlatives are a way of repeating, at top volume, the claims that
Shorto has failed to prove, as if quantity of argument could make up for
quality.
The oddity of “Amsterdam” is that it is at once too narrow and too
unfocused. Since Shorto almost never looks outside Amsterdam and the
Netherlands, his claims for their distinctiveness become
self-fulfilling. Throughout the book, there’s no sustained
consideration of any other city — apart from Dutch Manhattan — and when
Shorto ventures as far as Paris, it is to find its “grandiosity” a
“little silly” next to Amsterdam’s canals. It would have been helpful to
acknowledge, however briefly, Bangkok or Beirut or San Francisco or
Havana, none of which, in my experience, is a slouch when it comes to
loucheness, or to looking the other way; if liberalism is taken to refer
not just to a philosophical principle but to the freedom to do what one
likes, there are many places on earth more lawless and wide-open than
Amsterdam.
The deeper problem, for those of us interested in the city from afar, is
that Shorto’s rather rosy take on familiar material has to compete with
much more rounded and unillusioned perspectives of Dutch-born locals
like the veteran journalist and historian Geert Mak. His “Amsterdam,”
from 1995, is far richer and more sophisticated as a narrative — and
more stylish even in translation. It has the wryness to note, on its
very first page, “Our political debate is about as exciting as a wet
sponge” and “Our avarice is legendary.” Much of the city’s liberalism
over the centuries, as Mak argues, was the result of economic
desperation and misery.
And Ian Buruma’s “Murder in Amsterdam,” from 2006, is a typically supple
and searching examination of the shadow sides of tolerance, including
all the ways it can lead to its opposite. The flamboyant gay politician
Pim Fortuyn, Buruma notes, was killed in 2002 by an animal-rights
activist; and nearly two years later the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who
made a film with Ayaan Hirsi Ali about the oppression of Muslim women,
was shot and stabbed in the street by a Dutch Muslim of Moroccan
descent. Having spent the first 24 years of his life in his father’s
country — he still carries a Dutch passport — Buruma has a stake in
thinking seriously about whether “freedom of speech” simply leads to
public vilification of Muslims and Jews.
Shorto acknowledges some of this as his book draws to a close and
suggests, for example, that the Dutch could accommodate themselves to
the Nazis in part because for years they’d maintained a “pillar system”
that left Catholics, Protestants, socialists and liberals segregated
from one another. But what he continues to talk about is how his beloved
city enjoys “probably the most sophisticated urban bicycle system in
the world” and became “the spliff center of the universe.” (Take that,
Tangier, Varanasi, Vancouver and, for that matter, Mars!) By the end,
he’s suggesting that the very fact that “a larger percentage of Jews
here were killed than almost anywhere else” during World War II might be
one of the building-blocks of Amsterdam’s contemporary liberalism. One
shudders at the implications.
Pico Iyer is a distinguished presidential fellow at Chapman
University and the author, most recently, of “The Man Within My Head.”
Top: View of Volgogradsky Bridge across the Volga River, Middle left: Komsomolskaya station of the Volgograd metrotram, Center: Volgograd railroad station, ...
15 hours ago - A suicide bomber carried out an attack at a train station in the southern Russian city of Volgograd that killed 16 people, officials say.
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city once known as Stalingrad into a state of terror. The latest bomb,
the third in three months, ripped through a trolley-bus in the morning
rush-hour, killing at least 14 people. This came less than a day after a
bomb went off at a railway station http://econ.st/Kftg2t
Months after the collapse of the Rana Plaza complex in Bangladesh
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Tree that inspired Jack London won't come down as scheduled
Associated Press
Posted:
12/26/2013 09:18:39 AM PST |Updated: 4 days ago
BC-CA--Jack London Tree,124
Eds: APNewsNow. Will be updated.
GLEN
ELLEN, Calif. (AP) -- A tree in Sonoma County that provided shade and
inspiration to writer and adventurer Jack London is getting a reprieve
from its scheduled removal.
Researchers at the University of
California, Berkeley said this month that the oak tree, though suffering
from a fungal disease, is healthy enough to continue standing for
another two to 10 years. The Press Democrat of Santa Rosa reports
(http://bit.ly/18MT40O) that it was scheduled to come down in November
because of concerns that one of its branches could fall and damage
London's nearby cottage or injure someone.
The 50-foot tall, 350-
to 400-year-old tree sits on a ranch site in Glen Ellen that served as
London's home from 1905 until his death in 1916. It is now a state park.
GLEN ELLEN, Calif. --
A centuries-old oak tree that provided shade and inspiration to writer
and adventurer Jack London when he lived in Sonoma County will be
allowed to stand for a little longer after lab tests showed it is
healthier than California park officials originally thought.
The decaying oak was scheduled to be taken down as a safety
precaution last month because it is infected with a fungal disease.
Officials at Jack London State Historic Park in Glen Ellen worried that a
branch could fall off and injure a visitor or damage the cottage where
London lived and wrote from 1905 until his death in 1916.
The
end was so close that park rangers hosted several events this year to
honor the tree, including a Native American blessing ceremony, a
dramatic storytelling and having children harvest its acorns for
replanting elsewhere.
But park boosters sought a reprieve, turning to a University of
California, Berkeley expert in forest pathology who concluded that
"Jack's Oak" had another two to 10 years before it would have to be
removed as long as it was regularly monitored. Three arborists had
determined earlier that the tree was beyond saving.
"We
couldn't be more thrilled," said Jack London Park Partners executive
director Tjiska Van Wyk, whose group manages the 39-acre park that
includes the cottage and the ruins of a house that was destroyed by fire
in 1913. "In the season of joy, we consider this a great gift."
To protect the public and the cottage, the park has instituted new
parking restrictions near the tree and plans to inspect and prune it
regularly.
"We're not out of the woods. We're in a gray area
where the risk needs to be assessed," said Matteo Garbelotto, the
Berkeley adjunct associate professor who conducted the most recent
tests.
The 50-foot tall, 350- to 400-year-old tree sits on the
former Beauty Ranch, the property "The Call of the Wild" author bought
in 1905 to be close to nature. London could see the oak from the window
by his desk in the cottage and drew inspiration from it that surfaced in
his later work, California State Parks senior archaeologist E. Breck
Parkman said.
"I think everyone is going to be pleased that this tree has a little more time," Parkman said.
The
construction of Gazprom’s 403-metre Okhta tower in St. Petersburg has
been dividing the city since 2006, and now even Russia’s ruling
partnership is lining up in opposing corners. President Dmitry
Medvedev has weighed in on the side of UNESCO (the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation), calling for a halt
to construction since it could harm the city centre’s place on UNESCO’s
World Heritage list.
But in the modernist’s corner the architect argued that the glass
skyscraper was a symbol of St. Petersburg’s future as the economic
capital to rival Moscow’s stalled business district, Moskva-City.
“The Okhta Centre will become St. Petersburg’s modern business area
and a new symbol of the city”, the tower’s chief architect, Philip
Nikandrov, told The Moscow News. “Now there are 28 industrial structures
in the city that are up to 310 metres and they do not have any
historical value – so the city needs a dominant feature higher than
them.” In a rare sign of differing viewpoints from Russia’s ruling
tandem, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has consistently supported the
tower, saying it will help revive the city’s economy during the crisis.
“Since the main office of Gazprom-Neft is moving in, it will bring
annually around 20 billion roubles ($631 million) in taxes to the city
budget and some 60 billion roubles ($1.9 billion) will be invested by
the company in the construction directly,” said Nikandrov. Cultural projects
The project – dubbed by some “Gazprom City” – has received the
backing of St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko and will include
offices, hotels, shops, a concert hall, an art museum, libraries, a
skating rink and a park. Critics say the tower contrasts with the
surrounding Tsarist-era buildings and both the St. Petersburg Union of
Architects and the International Union of Architects have gone against
their peer. “The maximum permitted height of buildings in the area
is 48 metres, so the tower will completely ruin the panoramic view of
the city and will dwarf Rastrelli’s Smolny Monastery, which is right on
the opposite embankment,” said Oleg Romanov, vice president of the
local organisation. “St. Petersburg has its own character and has
gained an historical value because there were high standards of
architecture in Tsarist times. We are not going to resemble London or
New York.” Opposition protests
Medvedev has now come in line with opposition parties, such as the
Communists, Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s ultranationalist Liberal Democratic
Party, Just Russia and Yabloko, who had already taken a firm stand
against the tower. The liberal Yabloko have already launched a
lawsuit against City Hall for overlooking the law on city standards and
their refusal to hold a referendum on the issue.
“[The government] tends to ignore citizens’ and professionals’
opinions and, moreover, ignores the law prohibiting any building in the
area to be higher than 40 metres,” said Maxim Reznik, the head of the
city’s Yabloko branch. “It goes without saying that the tower will spoil
the ancient architecture of the city and the panoramic view. By
promoting the project people just want to earn money on construction.” Opponents decried
Okhta’s defenders reject their opponents’ allegations, claiming the
project is legitimate – having undergone public hearings in September
2009. The tower is to be built in an industrial area 5 kilometres from
the city centre.
“The project will be constructed to fully balance with the city’s
skyline and isn’t at odds with any historical place,” said Nikandrov.
“For a person standing in the city centre on Vasilievsky Island, the
tower will seem lower than the Peter and Paul Fortress.” He added
that opponents of the project use it as an opportunity to promote
themselves and often use unprofessional or false plans and doctored
photographs to create a misconception of the project. Plus for tourism?
The city’s tourism industry has also plumped in favour of the
skyscraper, pointing out that London has suffered little backlash after
modern architecture changed its historical cityscape. “I have not
heard of representatives of the tourist industry being concerned about
the construction of the Okhta Centre,” Sergei Korneyev, vice president
of the Russian Tourist Industry Union, commented on the Okhta Centre’s
web site. “In London – which last year became the world’s leading
tourist destination – they are absolutely happy about the fact that
there are several modern skyscrapers, including famous buildings by
Norman Foster, around the old city.”
The Okhta tower will give tourists a new vantage point to view the
city, with the highest viewing platform currently only 42 metres high in
St. Isaac’s Cathedral. The plans are currently undergoing state
verification and construction is slated to start next year. If the
project goes ahead it will take four years to build and create
employment opportunities but its opponents are confident the
high-profile support of President Medvedev will deliver a knock-out blow
to the tower. “I do not think the giant will be finally built,” said
Reznik, of Yabloko. Recently more and more top officials and ministers,
and outstanding art people have criticised the project.”
Gazprom, the opera
Russian activist group Chto Delat (‘What is to be done?’) have sung
out against Gazprom’s Okhta tower, producing a Soviet-style musical film
called ‘The Tower: A Songspiel’. The performance is set in Gazprom’s
boardroom.
On one side there is the PR manager who promotes the project, a local
politician, the company’s security chief, a priest, a gallery owner who
is set to become the director of the corporation’s contemporary art
museum and a fashionable artist. Pitted against them is a microcosm
of Russia’s voiceless minority. The intelligentsia, workers, pensioners
and the homeless among others strain their vocal chords to shout down
the tower.
Museums
used to stand for something old, dusty, boring and barely relevant to
real life. Those kinds of places still exist, but there are far fewer of
them, and the more successful ones have changed out of all recognition.
The range they cover has broadened spectacularly and now goes well
beyond traditional subjects such as art and artefacts, science and
history http://econ.st/18RSYja
© RIA Novosti. RIA Novosti
向山基地範圍廣大，分為靠近日月潭面的前半及位於內陸之後半部，各自以「向山行政中心新建工程」（以下簡稱本案）、「向山旅館BOT案」為計畫之目標。位於基地前半、率先建造之本案，身負兩塊基地開發成功與否之關鍵。
設計的主要出發點，將本案作為旅館的前庭，以環抱日月潭為意象，設計兩棟彎曲之建築物。並將屋頂由低到高配置，形成與地面結合之半地景半建築造形（圖一）。
遊客可順著坡道，走上屋頂眺望景色（圖二）。
本
案緣起於2003年台灣觀光局所主辦的一系列國際競圖中的「地景系列（Land form
series）」計畫，「地景系列」中選出了四個台灣最具代表性的觀光地區為基地，當然也包括了日月潭風景區，而本案即是位於日月潭向山地區，兼具遊客服
務中心與風景管理處兩種機能的計畫。在競圖的初期首先感到的是，這種機能的建築計畫，大部分並不是為了維護周圍環境或景觀而設立的，相反地破壞了周圍景觀
的例子還不少。
基地座落於日月潭西邊的涵碧半島之對岸，距離日月潭觀光區的中心稍微遠的場所。日月潭是由涵碧樓所在的半島與日月潭的起源ー停泊觀光遊艇的水社碼頭為中心
而發展開來的，所以在那周邊聚集了很多旅館、停車場或餐廳，而造成周圍景觀逐漸地惡化。所以風景管理處的基地被選定在遠離觀光區中心的地方是可以被理解
的。雖然基地的形狀為南北兩端都有湖水深入的峽灣，但只有北面狹窄的開口稍微可以望見日月潭的湖水，相對地靠內陸的一側則沿著道路深入地展開；面湖側因為
左右兩邊的山勢緊迫相鄰，所以能欣賞到的湖水景觀被切割成Ｖ字形。總之，從日月潭風景管理處的基地上可以欣賞到的風景，還比不上從涵碧半島上的旅館窗口或
露台來得全面與寬廣。 在這樣的基地條件之下，為了能眺望到更寬廣的湖景，通常都會將建築物配置在靠近湖水的ㄧ側，而導致內陸側的空間沒法被利用而浪費。
