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Monthly Archives: May 2016

Mineral Baths: Modest and Ornate, Semi-Functioning and Abandoned

May 29, 2016
Architecture, Bulgaria, Fuji X100 digital, Small Sensor Digital Photography, Sofia
4 Comments

 

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Mineral bath structure, village of Zhelyaznitsa, vicinity of Sofia, Bulgaria, 2016. Fuji X100 with +1.4x tele-converter. Click on image to enlarge.

Further to “Past Glory,” a weblog entry from 2014, the photos above and below show the present states of two mineral bath structures in the vicinity of Sofia, Bulgaria.

Above:

A rough-hewn stone structure set at a hillside mineral water source a few kilometers outside of the village of Zhelyaznitsa at the foot of Mt. Vitosha, not far from the Bulgarian capital, Sofia. The structure contains two bath chambers, one derelict and the second functioning. In an unabashedly Balkan manner, the functioning chamber remains the province of men; the derelict chamber, in principle, is reserved for women.

Below:

The ornate former entranceway to the abandoned bathing pavilion at Gorna Banya, a one-time spa resort just outside of Sofia.  Today, Gorna Banya is a quiet residential village but in the first decades of the 20th-century, it was sufficiently popular as a resort and suburban residential locale to merit being the terminus of one of Sofia’s first electric trolley-bus routes.  In the early years of the last century, Gorna Banya had the added panache of being the site of Bulgaria’s military cavalry school and later, less romantically, of an armored tank battalion.

As to the style of the entranceway, if the decision was left to me, I’d label it “Balkan-Neo-Secessionist-Neo-Ottoman” — a combination of the characteristic styles of two vanished empires but built of a  Balkan provincial mix of brick, plaster, and ceramic roof tiles.  Any other suggestions as to stylistic labels, or any information about the history and prospects of the bath pavilion and its surroundings, are most welcome.

While the bath pavilion molders, a couple of hundred meters away from it, on the other side of the village green, a nondescript commercial structure is being converted into an impromptu gambling casino, a usage, it seems, still  in accord with the developmental ethos and preferences of Sofia’s private sector and decision-makers .

Abandoned mineral bath pavillion, village of Gorna Banya, outskirts of Sofia, Bulgaria. 2016. Canon G10. Click on image to enlarge.

Former entranceway, abandoned mineral bath pavilion, village of Gorna Banya, outskirts of Sofia, Bulgaria. 2016. Canon G10. Click on image to enlarge.

Springtimes Past: Urban Paradoxes, Green-Space, Cultic Gardens

May 23, 2016
Bulgaria, Fuji X100 digital, Green Space, Identities and Traditions, Public Space, Religion, Sofia, Urban Dynamics
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Garden of the Seminary of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, Lozenets quarter, Sofia, Bulgaria, late April, 2015. Fuji X100 with -1.4 wide angle converter. Click to Enlarge.

Garden of the Seminary of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, Lozenets quarter, Sofia, Bulgaria, late-April, 2015. Fuji X100 with -1.4 wide angle converter. Click to Enlarge.

In a recent series of posts about Sofia, Bulgaria, I focused on the present-day appearances of the exteriors of Soviet-era, brutalist-style, prefabricated concrete-panel apartments block complexes built in the 1970s and 1980s, and on implications thereof re: issues of public and private space and of the nature of infrastructure.  However, Sofia is more than mere concrete.

Urban paradoxes

Sofia is a paradoxical city. Over the last century-and-a-quarter its population has grown by a factor of 100, from less that 20,000 to almost two million.  It is one of Europe’s most compact and densely populated cities — a potential advantage in terms of energy efficiency and non-automotive mobility, if and when properly capitalized upon.  Not least, Sofia is also one of Europe’s greenest cities — in terms of its tree-lined streets and unusually high ration of green-space to built-space.  Expansive parks, heavily-wooded and well-manicured, anchor the north, south, east, and west cardinal points of the city. Smaller parks dot the its and a greenbelt circumscribes its periphery.

Sofia’s parks were cornerstone features of a city plan drawn-up off-site in Berlin by the Nazi German architect Adolf Müssmann during the years of Bulgaria’s venal 1930s/1940s alliance with Hitler’s Germany.  The plan, by the way, was so foreign to the nature of Sofia and so imbued with Hitler’s visions for Berlin that it alienated Sofia’s otherwise quite pro-German municipal authorities and was in large part ignored.  After World War II, dedication to park space were the only elements of Müssmann’s concept that the newly-installed Communist regime retained in Sofia’s first post-war city plan drawn up in 1948. In the decades since the fall of Communism in 1989, shady property and real estate development deals have eaten away at the edges of Sofia’s once-ample green-space.  More recently, however, the green-space that remains appears, year by year, to be better and better maintained and more fully utilized.

Cultic gardens

Pictured above and below are two of Sofia’s smaller parks.  Both are the creations of religious traditions that emerged from the late-nineteenth scramble to create, shape, and give legitimacy to a Bulgarian national identity and to create new, vernacular-language, and supposedly indigenous spiritual spaces as alternatives to the once-ubiquitous power of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in what is now Bulgaria.

Seminary …

In the photo above: The garden of the Theological Seminary of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. The autocephalic Bulgarian church was reconstituted in 1870 by a firman (writ) of the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II, in part as a concession to Bulgarian aspirations for political, cultural, religious, and linguistic autonomy.

The clerical buildings in the background of the photo tell a story of their own.  They were designed is what is retrospectively called the “Bulgarian National Style” — actually an  eclectic amalgam of Moorish Revival, Secessionist, neo-Baroque ,Jugendstil, and supposedly neo-Byzantine elements characteristic of the work of Friedrich Grünanger, an Austrian-Hungarian architect who spent the bulk of his career in Sofia and who designed a number of the city’s iconic structures including, in addition to the Seminary, the city’s central bath house and what is now Sofia’s one remaining synagogue.

The supposedly neo-Byzantine elements that gave  facades of Grünanger’s edifices their ostensible “Bulgarian National” character are horizontal courses of glazed-tile-work meant to simulate horizontal courses of brick interspersed between and cushioning courses of stone, a structural and decorative feature that was actually a signature, not of Byzantine architecture. but of the architecture of the Ottoman Turks, the non-Christian, “foreign” tradition that the Bulgarian National Style was meant to supplant and to obliterate from memory.

Grave of a mystic …

In the photo below: The carefully tended garden surrounding the grave of the late-19th/early-20th-century Bulgarian religious syncretist and mystic visionary, Peter Deunov.  Deunov, a son of one of the first clerics of the reconstituted Bulgarian Orthodox Church, studied at a Methodist seminary in the United States but, following his return to Bulgaria did not enter the ministry.  Instead, he founded a nature-oriented spiritual movement of his own, one that remains active and vibrant to the present day.  Deunov’s journey from belief to belief was not atypical of the experimental searching for new religious and political identities characteristic of urban Bulgarians of his generation. Izgrev (tr. “The Dawn”), the suburban neighborhood surrounding the garden, was founded as a colony by Deunov and his disciples in the early decades of the twentieth century.  The Deunov garden is one of the lushest, well kept, and peaceful green spots in Sofia — this the result of the voluntarism and sense of community of those who maintain it. May it remain that way.

Garden of the followers of Deunov, Izgrev quarter, Sofia, Bulgaria, late April, 2015. Fuji X100 with -1.4 wide angle converter. Click to Enlarge.

Garden of the followers of syncretic mystic Peter Deunov, Izgrev quarter, Sofia, Bulgaria, late-April, 2015.  At the center, Deunov’s grave. Fuji X100 with -1.4 wide angle converter. Click to Enlarge.

Springtimes Past: Istanbul, From Dolapdere to Kurtuluş

May 16, 2016
Fuji X100 digital, Istanbul, Public Space, Turkey, Urban Dynamics
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Kurtuluş, Istanbul, 2013. Fuji X100. Click to enlarge.

Kurtuluş, Istanbul, 2013. Fuji X100. Click to enlarge.

In the midst of unseasonably cold and gray weather, an image from a springtime past: greenery bursting forth from concrete, and laundry emerging from houses, along a backstreet and stairway on the rise from the valley of Dolapdere to the ridge-top neighborhood of Kurtuluş — long ago known by its Greek name, Tatavla, and once the realm people of modest means from Istanbul’s traditional “minorities:” Greeks, Armenians, and Jews. (The Greeks were forced out a half-century ago; many Armenians and some Jews remain.) The bay-windowed house in the center appears to be a surviving traditional-style Ottoman-era family residence subdivided into apartments and with its original wooden facade covered by layers of plaster.  The children standing in the foreground and seated mid-distance are quite likely Kurds, recent arrivals to the backstreets of Kurtuluş from the east of Anatolia.

Mondrian Meets Dorian Gray: Patterns of Neoliberal Disregard + Thoughts on Infrastructure + The Wrong Tools for the Job

May 8, 2016
Architecture, Bulgaria, Fuji X100 digital, Infrastructure, Photography, Public Policy, Sofia, Urban Dynamics
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Hadji Dimitar quarter, Sofia, Bulgaria, 2016. Fuji X100 w/+1.4 lens converter. Click to enlarge.

Hadji Dimitar quarter, Sofia, Bulgaria, 2016. Fuji X100 w/+1.4 lens converter. Click to enlarge.

Mondrian meets Dorian Gray: Patterns of neo-liberal disregard

The photos above and below not only capture the accidental Mondrian-like effect of relegation of the maintenance of building envelopes to individual tenants, they also reveal a Dorian-Gray’s-like picture of the inefficiencies of neo-liberalism and the cumulative effects of decades of rising economic inequality and shirking of collective investment in an important component of the infrastructure that enables and sustains us.

Thoughts on infrastructure in general and building exteriors in particularly:

Infrastructure has been a recurring theme throughout the twists and turns of my eclectic work-life: Subway transportation,* the third city water tunnel, and green infrastructure in my native New York; airports, harbors, and inter-modal transportation nodes in the Netherlands; telecommunications and “smart” workplaces in Western and Central Europe; monitoring of infrastructure projects in the broader European context; and the history of infrastructure in the lands of the former Ottoman Empire.

A broad view …

My view of infrastructure is a broad, social-democratic one; a take that does not limit infrastructure to the usual narrow scope of roads, bridges, tunnels, etc. but that zooms out to include educational processes and facilities, health care delivery systems, the urban natural environment, and public housing — in other words, all that is critical to human activity and survival and implementation of which is beyond the reach of individual users and the efficacy of for-profit “entrepreneurial” activity (i.e. the so-called “market”) and outside of simple models of enterprise-based accountancy.

Envelope as infrastructure …

Building exteriors are infrastructure. The upgrading and maintenance of the legacy built environment are not just matters of patch-work attempts to achieve  individual comfort and moderately lower energy bills.  Attention to building envelopes is crucial to effective energy conservation society-wide, the slowing of climate change, and the reducing of dependencies on profit- and politically-motivated energy producers.  As a side effect, it removes the visible stigmata of who can and cannot afford to insulate their dwellings.

Societal glue …

Across-the-board attention to building exteriors provides societal glue.  The inefficient patchwork of apartment by apartment insulation is a sign of societal failure and ideologically-motivated narrowing of the responsibilities of governments, communities, and even tenants’ councils. In Eastern Europe, it is a visible sign of the abandonment of “we” in accordance with the cynical dictum of Margaret Thatcher and her like that “… there is no society.”  Worldwide, we now foot the bill for such idiocy.

Hadji Dimitar quarter, Sofia, Bulgaria, 2016. Fuji X100 w/-1.4 lens converter. Click to enlarge.

Hadji Dimitar quarter, Sofia, Bulgaria, 2016. Fuji X100 w/-1.4 lens converter. Click to enlarge.

Success …

The mass construction of panel-block housing in the former Soviet bloc was a strategy for creating low-cost housing during the post-war period of massive migration to cities, constraints in housing stock, and minimal availability of resources.  The aesthetic merits of such housing might remain open to debate but among the the practical result in Sofia, for example, was that by the final years of the communist period more than 80% of the population was housed in dwellings to which they had clear title of ownership, a major achievement by any account.

And failure …

The design and implementation of panel-block buildings was achieved according to a short-sighted logic that has been unsustainable for decades.  On the positive side, the panel bloc approach cut costs through standardization and modular prefabrication.  On the negative side, however, it gave no attention to insulation, heat retention, or cooling through shading.  The period of mass construction of panel block housing in Sofia was congruent with a period of nuclear power and nominal charges for electricity consumption.  Thus, if rooms were cold, one simply plugged in a few electric convection heaters.  And, if enough heat was not retained, one simply turned up the heaters up another notch and run them longer.  As to improving insulation: One could always cover one’s single-glazed windows with sheets of newspaper.

A remedy unlikely to effect a cure …

I do not follow news from Bulgaria closely  but in a conversation last week I heard that one-by-one private insulation of individual apartments recently has been made illegal.  Also, it seems, there are now European-financed programs for the insulation and renovation of apartment building exteriors.  But, as always, there’s is a rub, things turn out not to be so simple.  To qualify for European-financing, buildings must first be organized as legal entities, this requiring the assent of each and every apartment title-holder.  Also, residents must contribute a portion of total costs. Not least, the organization of such requires good-will towards one’s neighbors and familiarity with the law, as well as a degree of experience with navigating official channels.  A single hold-out or contrarian can block the process.  Thus, available funds flow more readily to smaller buildings with fewer and more prosperous and educated residents, rather than to  higher-need towering apartment blocks with scores upon scores of apartments in the lower-income neighborhoods of the city.  For the moment, thus, it is uncertain whether the remedy is likely to effect a cure.

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Note:

* Specifically, subsidized, affordable subway fares as a means for ensuring work-forces and customers to the private sector, for maintaining well-trafficked streets, and drawing the city’s ethnically and economically diverse population out of their homes and into cultural institutions.  Coincidentally, a similar argument was recently advanced by infrastructure advocate and scholar Alex Marshall.  Marshall’s excellent book The Surprising Design of Market Economies contains a passage about the social nature of infrastructure that may (or may not) have had its origin in an approach to the definition infrastructure that I shared with him during a conversation at the Regional Plan Association in New York in 2010.

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Hadji Dimitar quarter, Sofia, Bulgaria, 2016. Fuji X100 w/+1.4 lens converter. Click on image to enlarge.

Photographic footnote: The wrong tools for the job

On the basis of the photos above, absolutely nobody — me included! — would ever confuse me with the likes of, say, Andreas Gursky!  Indeed, the photos above were taken with the wrong tools in the wrong way and then processed in a manner no less inappropriate.  I’ll explain …

First, each of the photos was taken hand-held rather that tripod-mounted, a self-deceiving arrogance when working with strong verticals and horizontals and when confronted with a large two-dimensional object to be positioned parallel to the film- (or sensor-) plane.  Second, the photos were taken from ground-level with the camera pointed upwards rather than from a neighboring building at a height roughly to half the height of the subject.

The result? An amalgam of vertical and horizontal distortions (keystoning, pitch, yaw, etc.) beyond the reach of the correctional powers of image processing software, especially when working within the small confines of a laptop screen. In Lightroom, for example, one can easily correct for vertical distortion and rotate an image, but add horizontal adjustments plus some compensation for barrel or pincushion distortion to the mix and the shapes within an image begin to contort and vertical and horizontal lines to squiggle — and this atop the irregularities and lack of true verticals and horizontals in the subject itself, in the case of panel block buildings the results of attention to speed rather than precision during construction combined with the effects of gravity and the elements as the years pass.

So, for now, I’ll view the images above as “studies” and next time will head out with my tripod, my old folding field camera fitted with a lens and film back, or with my ever older combination of a legacy Nikon analogue body and perspective-correcting shift lens. In the meanwhile, my excuses.