http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwqB-VlveBY
In the past two weeks, I was able to
perform a small escapist experiment. By pure chance, I've stayed at
my grandma house, in the provincial town. The house is practically
abandoned since both my grandma and grandpa passed away a long time
ago. However it is still a liveable structure, although it lacks
internet connection and the electrical wiring begs for replacement.
The town itself, was a quiet little
town but with great potential. It is situated beneath a dead volcano
so the scenery and geological structures are very dramatic. It also
has a bunch of hot springs and mineral waters that are bottled there.
The architecture itself, was old, most of the buildings are built
around 1920 or so. Unfortunately, the socialistic period brought the
infamous socialistic architecture which is, again, the copy of
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret also known as Le Corbusier, mental
masturbation, style of architecture which is devoid of all sanity and
identity. These buildings are actually, gigantic concrete hives,
monolithic boxes that have no connection what so ever with their
surroundings. In the US these structures are known as the projects
and have many iterations out of which the glass cubes in the form of
skyscrapers are the latest one. The general idea behind these
monstrosities is to strip a nation of its identity, cause at the time
when it was conceived, memories of the horror of World War One were
still fresh. The national identity and the whole pre world war one
history was seen as the main cause for the war itself. So in a way,
this new architecture supposed to strip the nation of its history,
thus eliminating the cause for future wars. You know, new building
types, new cities...the clean slate. However, this idea was quickly
subverted and for one reason only-the buildings were simply super
ugly.
But, after the second world war ended,
this type of architecture found the fertile ground in the war torn
Balkans, and quickly the mindless gigantic box shaped hives started
to accommodate new inhabitants. To keep the long story short, the
hives hatched the most bizarre behaviour, by creating mindless drones
and the one of the secrets of communistic endurance lies exactly in
the architecture that produces these drones.
Same thing was done to my provincial
town, but the lack of money, stopped the development of the hives.
All that changed, once the mineral
water plant was privatised and sold out. For the small town, the
sudden cash inflow, meant the only “rational” thing in the free
market economy-a housing boom. So the mindless boxing returned.
Instead to corner off the historical town centre and make it free of
traffic, the overbuilding resumed, wrecking out the architectural
fabric of the city. The net end result of this sudden avalanche of
modernisation was that in the main street all historical buildings
are torn down and instead of yards with trees and flowerbeds new
shopping centres and malls were built. The entire city was
transformed into the giant shopping mall. And then the sprawl
continued towards my neighbourhood. Villas with yards were torn down
and replaced with the, slightly scaled down copies of the hives.
Those copies were smaller but equally ugly and dehumanising. The
yards were paved over with concrete, trees and greenery disappeared
and with it the temperature and the noise lever rose.
In order to fill up the void that was
created by this, our old friends were brought in. The dogs, the big
ones. So the once quiet neighbourhood was transformed into a concrete
hive and as the icing on the top of the cake, the noise from the
endless barking now echoes between walls of those modernistic
structures.
Up on my return to the capital city,
I've learned that the stray cat that was living underneath my window,
lost all four kittens, due to cars and dog attacks, and that cat
colony at the building across mine was destroyed by the new owner
with the German shepherd. So instead of one killer now I have two.
The destruction is complete and once
again, points out at the fact that in every process of destruction,
dog is always a necessary companion.
