brutalist brussels

Renown for his portfolio of works that includes a pavilion on the flora and fauna of the Congo created for the venue’s 1958 l’Exposition universelle (the one the Atomium was built for) and the city’s cinema museum, Belgian-Polish architect Constantin Brodzki also designed an iconic headquarters for Cimenteries CBR (acquired by HeidelbergCement in 1999) in 1967—comprising seven hundred fifty-six prefabricated oval concrete modules that give it its distinctive façade. Abandoned for some time, the historic building has been restored and conserved—retaining many of the original elements and built-in furniture units—and is reopening as a multistorey coworking and conference space. The revival is being called Office Boitsfort/Bosvoorde, after the Brussels municipality, and you can see more at Curbed at the link above.

7x7

asterix and obelix: the comic book route of Brussels

mad libs: a handy template for Republican politicians to use for announcing their retirement

slot cars: a electrified stretch of road opens to traffic in Sweden which will recharge the batteries of electric vehicles as they drive down it, via Slashdot

stamina, fitness and skill: Pelle Cass’ compelling composite photography of athletic events capture the patterns of motions in sports

fluency: an artist explores the roots of language and consciousness through a vocabulary of personal hieroglyphics

saloon: a virtual cache of bar- and alcohol-related accessories and ephemera, via Weird Universe

b-side: an Austrian company developing high definition vinyl records, which can be played on existing turn-tables, will bring them to the market by 2019

le génie du mal

Our thanks to Kuriositas for introducing us to this handsome devil, who’s taken up residence underneath the pulpit (chaire de vérité) of Saint Paul’s Cathedral of Liège (previously).
Not the usual subject of religious sculpture, the artist who executed this fallen angel, Guillaume Geefs, had to come up with his own iconography—drawing from the myth of Prometheus and other sources to frame his creation—which was commissioned as a replacement for an earlier work by his younger brother, whose version of the Genius of Evil was removed from the church for being too much a distraction for the congregation. See a comparison at the link up top. I suspect that church-goers still do not dedicate their undivided attention to the sermon but rather spare a glance to the tortured soul lurking below—the elder Geefs making the androgynous figure even more alluring. The brothers Geefs came to prominence themselves in the 1830s with Belgian independence movement by creating nationalistic monuments and public sculpture that celebrated their history and culture separate from the Netherlands, and the Church turned to the artists to convey their dispatch of the “triumph of religion over evil’s genius” but it is debatable whether either iteration was exactly on message for parishioners and the wider public—the devil too sublime and seductive. It’s always a gamble whether people respond better to caricature or camouflage.

6x6

hello, I am a bear: ursine pondering and poetry, via Dave Log

alles in ordnung: German government being sublimely dull

down in the underground: the forgotten catacombs underneath Brussels, via Messy Nessy Chic

muted: hushed and concise social media is reviving the cinematography of the silent film

orbit city: celebrating the life and work of Gin Wong, the architect who inspired The Jetsons

adult swim: synchronised images of Soviet-era public pools

proost!

Taking advantage of the nice Spring weather, we had a chance to visit an outdoor Belgian café and got the chance to give a proper toast to our friends in the newly discovered solar system hosted by a red giant in the constellation Aquarius, some forty light years distant.

m-class or goldilocks

Amongst the thousands of confirmed exoplanets in the firmament and the untold trillions of worlds estimated, NASA just held a colossal press-conference that served to the public the very exciting news of a solar system discovered in orbit around a cool (ultra-cool, Red Giants are m-class stars but Star Trek’s planetary classification system is unfortunately made up) dwarf star in the constellation of Aquarius, some thirty nine light years distance from us.
Astronomers are giving the discovery the designation of TRAPPIST-1 as it was the first solar system to be observed directly using transit photometry.  The acronym for the programme and one of the telescopes used spells out Trappist, like the monastic order and brew-masters of Liège, where the search method was first conceived. Seven rocky (terrestrial) worlds orbit the star and at least three are thought to be in the habitable-zone, conducive to life as we know it thriving. After compiling and analysing telemetry for a year and half, researchers are very confident in their results. Finding no life in that entire star system would be, I’d wager, far more stranger than discovering extraterrestrial life. As we said above, this ensemble joins an already crowded Cosmos, but I think it’s brilliant that there’s already an artist’s conception to captivate and stoke the imagination—it reminds me of Mongo of Ming the Merciless and the other floating kingdoms in that overcast empire. Here’s to science, NASA and the monks. Flash jump, everybody!

magic lantern

As the bloc has expanded from twelve member states to twenty-eight, office space at the European Union headquarters buildings is naturally going at quite a premium—not counting the attendant actors accompany the “travelling-circus.”
The councillors that represent the executive officers of the member states, the other chamber that acts as a counter-weight to parliament (it’s all terribly complicated and byzantine and enough to make people shutdown rather than engage), and support staff are moving—or rather, are expanding into, after some delays and misgivings, from their purpose-built structure, the Justus Lipsius hall that the Council occupied since 1995, to this new building, occupying a space donated by the city Brussels and just separated by a span of footbridge (next to rest of the ensemble that makes up the rest of the supranational government). The glass façade encloses an orb that comprises eleven storeys of conference rooms, cafeterias, galleries and offices. The whole edifice is a marvel of passive engineering and highly energy-efficient, and much of the construction material was recycled and salvaged from demolition sites across Europe. No word yet what this new headquarters might be called but the Samyn and Partners commission will be ready to host its first sessions in 2017.

tchin tchin!

UNESCO is adding the beers of Belgium to its representative list of intangible cultural heritage of humanity, this rich tradition matriculating with Uzbek humour, the pottery of Portugal and falconry in the UK and joins the ranks of champagne and an array of French wine and the cuisine of Mexico. How nice that we can raise a glass to this deserved accolade, though absolute purists may not exactly appreciate that this currant beer is the only one we have on hand.

umbrage

Via Colossal, we are treated to the serendipitous sketches of Belgian film-maker and illustrator Vincent Bal who has transformed the shadows cast by various objects resting in the sun into creative, artistic Rorschach ink-blot interpretations. We really ought to banish harsh, shadow-dispelling overhead lights in the work-place if a stray item could inspire like this.

parity of esteem

Since first hearing about the small village outside of Antwerp over the summer on NPR’s Invisibilia, I’ve really been intrigued about the story of Geel and its approach to addressing mental illness and appreciated Hyperallergic’s giving the community and its mission further exposure. After becoming a pilgrimage destination for the mentally ill in the late twelfth century, the villagers have hosted displaced and alienated souls, bringing them into their homes and providing a course of treatment and therapy that doesn’t try to make their guests conform.
This unusual patronage is traced back to the daughter of a pagan Irish chieftain and a Christian mother, called Dymphna (Little Fawn) who herself converted to Christianity against her father’s will. Dymphna’s mother passed away when she was a teenager and her father became absolutely inconsolable, quickly descending into depression. His courtiers pleaded with him to re-marry, and reluctantly, the chieftain agreed, provided he could find one as beautiful and charming as his lost wife. The chieftain’s overtures turned towards the teenaged Dymphna, and fearing what would come next, she fled to Belgium with her confessor and, oddly, the Court Jester. Dymphna and her crew problem would have never been found, but at Geel, where they settled she founded a hospital for the poor and suffering and her charity eventually made its way back to Ireland. Her father went to Geel to retrieve Dymphna but she refused at which point her father beheaded her. Though perhaps not the imbalanced party and unsuccessful at that particular juncture, many of the demon-plagued who visited the place of her veneration were pronounced cured of their condition, maybe not advancing the understanding of mental disorders in the broader public awareness but at least reducing the social stigma on a local level. The lives of the boarders are chronicled in a series of photographs that blurs the distinction between guest and host and is in stark contrast with the usual methods of reintegration through institution.

wintertuin ou hôtel particulier

Thanks to Messy Nessy Chic for piquing my curiosity with this divinely art nouveau glimpse of the Hôtel Hannon in Brussels, a Hôtel Particulier being a grand, detached townhouse in French. A wealth and successful petro-chemical engineer named Édouard Hannon in 1902 commissioned an architect friend to design him a home in the city. The house was transformed into a showcase for some of the finest art of the period, with fine frescos and mosaics, stained-glass from the Tiffany tradition and Émile Gallé, who contributed lamps, vases and other bric-a-brac. Tragically, the family only were able to reside there a couple of years and the mansion was left to decay, until having purchased the property, the borough opened house as a museum in 1989 after extensive restoration.

moisture farmers ou puit aerien

Around 1900, a Russian engineer by the name of Friedrich Zibold made the conjecture that ancient structures found on Greek outposts on the Crimean Peninsula were a sort of air-well, designed to harvest enough moisture from the atmosphere to sustain a small settlement. Despite initial successes with models based on the Greek buildings, Zibold was unable to sustain the condensation and collection of water for very long.  Later archaeological studies determined that the mysterious structures were actually burial mounds (this being around the time when interests were captivated by the idea of the Ark of the Covenant as a battery and the death ray of Archimedes), but that did not dissuade others from trying to build their own air-wells after Zibold’s calculations.
One such hive-like well (puit aerien) was erected in Trans-en-Provence in the 1930s (reportedly, a UFO scorched the fields of this community in 1981) in the département of the Var by Belgian inventor Achille Knapen. The site was abandoned when it also failed to collect water in the expected volumes, but this early experiment helped engineers build better and functional condensing units that help supplement the rains in places all around the world today.

atlas obscura

Messy Nessy Chic shares her discovery in a beautiful and winding gallery of the amazing art nouveau backdrops of Belgian illustrator François Schuiten.
Son to a dual-architect family and with echoes of the surreal, Schuiten was able to conjure up fantastic urban landscapes the graphic novel series Les Cités obscures that debuted in the early 1980s and whose franchise—with spin-offs and with different collaborators over the years—continues to this day about the splintering of a parallel humanity into sovereign city states that fosters unique cultures and styles—sort of like the future that some internet tycoons have imagined of ocean-plying floating islands (or lassoed asteroids) of independence and popular consent. Schuiten’s imaginative artwork is furthermore a revolt (especially in the volume called Brüsel) against the phenomenon known as Bruxellisation, one not exclusive to his native city and perhaps a rejuvenation effort that his parents were complicit in (or rallied against), wherein historic district were demolished in favour of utilitarian, almost brutally so, modern buildings—perhaps the vision of the above tycoons. Browse the extensive arcade of images and learn more about Les Cités obscures and their contributing civil engineers at the link up top.

royal prerogative or we are not amused

It’s been speculated for some time that the media mogul become presidential contender—and perhaps the next US president, might be a sort of Manchurian Candidate installed under the auspices of a once and future syndicate, engineering to propel the opposition into power. Though this conspiracy seems quite far-fetched, maybe it’s not beyond the realm of political possibilities, a parallel scenario, judging by recent events, seems almost assuredly more likely in its absurdity.
I think the Queen may use this opportunity to seize back the powers eroded of the monarchy and run her majesty’s own government for the time being rather than letting the presumptives and heirs-apparent take office. Perhaps (and I’d venture for a lot of the voters who voted leave, respect for the royal family is also a shared demographic and would submit to rule by some unelected German and some unemployed Greek on public-assistance) it would be a dereliction of her duty to faithfully defend the kingdom not to. What do you think? I recall how a few years ago Belgium was suffering a constitutional-crisis for failure to cement a coalition government and elevate a prime minister—for a period surpassing war-torn Iraq going without a formal leader, and me wondering why the Belgians were so concerned, with already having a king and being the seat of the EU parliament.  Winkie-winkie.

allthing or all that’s fit to print

Boing Boing’s Iceland correspondent reports on a wonderful and antithetical response to the scourge of off-shoring and out-sourcing (and indeed even proxy-wars) in the plan, having already secured parliamentary endorsement, to make the country a designated safe haven for the freedoms of expression and information.

Advocates, who hope to create a Switzerland of bits, hope that this stance will compel other governments to be more transparent and forth-coming about legislation and its enforcement. Cobbling together some of the best whistle-blower protection and anti-censorship laws from different jurisdictions—for instance, the attorney-client privilege that any conversation with a journalist enjoys in Belgium or the public registry of all government documents (even classified ones) in Estonia, is creating a forum where witness to corruption can come forward without fear of reprisal. As if meaningful reform and mindful democracy weren’t occasion enough, perhaps this new media landscape might be able to attract internet start-ups to recover some of the jobs-prospects lost to Iceland’s former dignities where laws are not biased towards copy-holders and a select few with political heft—besides, surely the land of fire and ice is probably an ideal place to operate with a smart labour pool and totally green geothermal energy to power it all.

the international society for the suppression of savage customs

Whereas previously European powers had been content to take out rat-nibbles of Africa on its coastal edges, towards the end of the nineteenth century, a constellation of circumstance coalesced and set off the so-called scramble for the Dark Continent. A collusion of the Ottoman Empire gradually ossifying, the Industrial Revolution and the voracious appetite to exploit new resources, and the Civil War in the United States that disrupted the cotton market for English importers (and the later effort to establish alternate supply-lines in the colonies that caused the oversaturated exchange to collapse) and empire-envy by the latecomers—Germany and Belgium, poor-relations—caused Portugal, fearing more intrusion on their age old bailiwick on all territory since the expeditions of Columbus to the east of Cape Verde Islands (that is—the entire “unclaimed” hemisphere outside of Europe to India and the Far East, while Castilian Spain could claim the Americas), to convene a summit.
Hosted by an ambitious Berlin and Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, this meeting would codify how Africa would be governed and the spoils partitioned. In his Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad referred to the Berlin Conference (oder die Kongokonferenz) facetiously by the above title and it really became a brutal seizure very quickly. With all of the vast continent already claimed—with the only the outpost of Liberia and the unconquerable Ethiopia (Abyssinia) remaining independent, Belgium and Germany had to settle unknown central Africa and relatively undesirable and out of the way lands. The formal suppression of Africa proved not only an alternate vent for Europeans to carry out latent hostilities, fighting by-proxy, but became a foil as well to counter-balance the advancing clout of the US and the Soviet Union after the Great War, and the process of decolonisation did not begin for most lands for at least six decades and more after the Berlin Conference—if ever.  Moreover, dividing up lands without respect to other affiliation and along arbitrary boundaries has led to no end of ongoing strife and suffering.

tintin and milou

During the height of the hunt for suspected accomplices to the latest wave of terror attacks, officials in capital of Brussels implored nervous residents and citizen-journalist not to sound-off about the ongoing investigation, lest they inadvertently tip off those they sought after. It’s a little amazing to think that commentary and the its meta-narrative can unfold in real time and there’s no single abiding and authoritative version, but some jump to make that claim. The people of Belgium obliged and there were no calls of a media blackout during the lock-down nor suspicions that the government was trying to conceal something and they obliged in kind by inundating the channels with feline missives—of the memetic variety to convey support for discretion. Many took the extended opportunity to remain calm and not cowering indoors but rather to defiantly dress up and remix their pets.

persistence of vision

The splendiferous Nag on the Lake directs our attention to a lovingly curated gallery of mesmerizing phenakistoscope animations, whose looping effect (and themes, perhaps) are not much different than what’s produced by GIFs (which I have been kind of obsessed with lately).
Debuting in the early 1830s, the invention of Belgian Joseph Plateau but with several other independent animateurs promoting their own spectacles, the phenakistoscope spread quickly across Europe, the engaged audiences viewing a spinning disk through a series of tiny slits to achieve the illusion of motion. Until opticians devised techniques of projection—which saw an explosion in phantasmagoria with similarly prefixed motion picture devices—spectators had the Greek root ϕενακιζειν, which meant deceptive. I hadn’t thought about it beforehand but the German term for an animated feature is “Trickfilm.”

five-by-five

quilting-bee: fantastic gallery of modern quiltmaking

corpse bride: vis-à-vis those paranormal paramours, a guide to posthumous marriage

rapper’s delight: woman walking her dog dances her heart out for a Bruxelles street performer

uncommon-grounds: coffee cups moulded from recycled coffee dregs

demarcation: a look at twenty-two plus international borders

b is for bruxelles—that's good enough for me

Philosopher Philippe van Parijs presents a rather brilliant lesson in the post-war history and civics that led—indecisively, to Brussels (Brussel, Bruxelles) becoming if not the de facto but customary capital of the European Union. Though the Belgian capital city had the support of the Western European powers, the nation was itself unwilling to accept that yoke, rallying for its own domestic seat of industry, the ancient town of Liège, as the union was constituted back in 1952 was focused on the efficient use of Europe's raw materials and iron and coal resources for rebuilding and remediation.
After much consternation, the political organs of the West became the journeyman body-politic that has endured to the present day, the court migrating from Strasbourg (with sufficient office space) to Luxembourg (an alternative to Paris, which only the French viewed as a natural consequence and the obvious choice), and ultimately to Belgium, too, and points further depending on its charge. It is strange how natural endowments became the stuff of toy kingdoms and the restoration of old boundaries. Liège never stood as a candidate as the Walloon population rejected the return of their exiled monarch, while the rest of Belgium was for it. Support evaporated as violence arose in Belgium, in response to the restoration of the king. In the turmoil, however, when no decision could reached, Belgium due to alphabetical order, gained order of precedence: Aachen was disqualified out of hand as German, as was Amsterdam as too much of a logistically accomodating challenge, as were others in the founding coalition of six. Brussels, realising that this indecision was likely to continue as commission powers expanded, acquired more and more viable space for the functionaries to meet, ultimately becoming the winter-quarters of this traveling greatest show on Earth, though the placement remains unofficial.