Brüsel by Schuiten & Peeters

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The Palace of Justice, Brussels.

Brüsel (1992) by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters follows La route d’Armilia as the next major work concerning the Cités Obscures. As with La Tour, this is a longer story where it isn’t immediately apparent that we’re in the Obscure World at all, although Brüsel is clearly an alternate version of our Brussels. The unfinished Palace of the Three Powers in the city centre is modelled on the Palace of Justice in Brussels, and both buildings share architects by the name of Joseph Poelaert.

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The Palace of the Three Powers, Brüsel.

Brüsel is a “small man” tale of Constant Abeels, a would-be shopkeeper preparing to launch a business selling a new and modern innovation: plastic flowers. Abeels suffers from a persistent cough, and it’s a combination of his health problems and business problems—the water for the shop is disconnected—that causes him to become enmeshed in schemings to radically transform the city, and the resistance to those plans. The tale is also a satire on the overly-optimistic march of progress of the late 19th and early 20th century, with all the problems of trying to impose sudden architectural change on a change-averse community. Inhabitants of Brussels have a long history of sudden architectural change, the huge Palace of Justice being constructed only after residents of the area had been forcibly evicted. In the 1950s and 60s, the flattening of old quarters in order to build New York-style office blocks was so destructive that the French coined the term “Brusselisation” to describe a brutal remodelling of a city against the wishes of its citizens.

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La fièvre d’Urbicande by Schuiten & Peeters

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La fièvre d’Urbicande (1985) by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters is the second volume in the Cités Obscures series. This was the one which captured my attention the most when I first saw it. The book opens with a foreword by the central character, Robick, chief architect of the city of Urbicande, in which he discusses his plans to unify the city’s separate halves by extending the design of the city’s southern half into the chaotic northern section.

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Urbicande is built on the steeply-sloped banks of a wide river. The rational, rectilinear southern bank is exposed to the sun while the northern bank is a place of shadow and mists; traffic between the two halves is strictly controlled by the administrators of the south who fear the chaos the north represents. The style of the southern region is a superb imagining of an Art Deco metropolis, the physical and psychological opposite of the north bank which is revealed as an older place of winding lanes and dishevelled buildings. In Robick’s foreword he refers to former “masters” who happen to be people from our world: architect Étienne-Louis Boullée and architectural renderer and theorist Hugh Ferriss. Mention of Ferriss was a surprise since he isn’t so well-known outside the architectural sphere. I’ve previously discussed his Metropolis of Tomorrow which is an evident influence in the style of some of Schuiten’s skyscrapers.

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The art of George Barbier, 1882–1932

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Les Chansons de Bilitis (1922).

I’ve posted examples of George Barbier’s Art Deco drawings before but online examples of his work outside the world of fashion illustration have been difficult to find. The Bunka Women’s University Library corrects that with a collection of high-quality scans which include a book about the artist, George Barbier, Étude Critique (1929) by Jean?Louis Vaudoyer. There’s also his adaptation of the Sapphic classic by Pierre Loüys, Les Chansons de Bilitis, from 1922. The drawings there lack the customary ardour of other adaptations but they’re marvellously elegant nonetheless, with some beautiful page designs.

Note: these books can’t be linked to individually, you need to follow the links from “Art Deco illustrated books” in their site menu.

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Nijinsky (1913).

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Poèmes en Prose (1928).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
The Decorative Age
Images of Nijinsky

Battersea Power Station

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A photograph of the control room of Battersea Power Station, London, by Michael Collins, one of a series which will shortly be on display at the Royal Institute of British Architects.

The images show Battersea Power Station as what Collins describes as a “twentieth century ruined castle” – a building that was built to last, with a high quality structure and interior, including Art Deco walls and ceilings.

Giles Gilbert Scott’s enormous temple of heavy industry continues to sit decaying on the banks of the Thames while property developers come and go. The latest of these, Real Estate Opportunities, has fallen into debt which means proposals to develop the site are once again on hold. A part of me likes the idea of the building sitting there unused and purposeless year after year, like some vast Steampunk Stonehenge; Giles Gilbert Scott’s other Thames-side power station, Bankside, was successfully transformed as Tate Modern, but we know from various proposals that the fate of Battersea, whether as theme park or shopping centre, is likely to be a lot less edifying.

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It took redevelopment to transform Bankside from temple of industry to temple of culture but Battersea’s unmistakable presence has a powerful cultural history of its own. Everyone knows the Hipgnosis sleeve design for Pink Floyd’s Animals (1977); less familiar is the photos of the control room which Hipgnosis used for Hawkwind’s Quark, Strangeness and Charm the same year. I tend to prefer the back cover of this sleeve to the front; that octagonal readout device is more interesting than the rather unconvincing sparks and exchanges of energy. And speaking of energy, my former employers are still active, unlike the rancorous Floyd.

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There’s a page here listing other uses of the power station, including its many film appearances which date back to the 1930s. That list mentions the control room’s use as a background for the “Find the Fish” sequence in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983) but they omit an earlier Monty Python appearance when you briefly see the building in operation during And Now for Something Completely Different (1971). It was closed down a few years later. So here it is, then, belching fumes over west London on a profoundly gloomy winter afternoon.

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Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The album covers archive

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The Sonic Assassins
The Bradbury Building: Looking Backward from the Future

Caldwell & Co

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A cosmic pendant lamp by New York lighting manufacturer, Caldwell & Co, created for the Rockefeller Center in 1932. The company’s Art Deco-styled designs for that building feature a number of other flying saucer pendants although none as striking as this one. The photo is one of many made available by the Smithsonian Institute on a site which catalogues the company’s history.

Edward F. Caldwell & Co., of New York City, was the premier designer and manufacturer of electric light fixtures and decorative metalwork from the late 19th to the mid-20th centuries. Founded in 1895 by Edward F. Caldwell (1851–1914) and Victor F. von Lossberg (1853–1942), the firm’s legacy of highly crafted creations includes custom made metal gates, lanterns, chandeliers, ceiling and wall fixtures, floor and table lamps, and other decorative objects that can be found today in many metropolitan area churches, public buildings, offices, clubs, and residences.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Hugh Ferriss and the Metropolis of Tomorrow