Travel Reports
Vietnam
Indonesia
I'm a quadruplet, and one of my same-day birthmates is my brother, Palmer, who teaches English in Bandung, Indonesia. If I'm an architecture fetishist, he's mad for Indonesian music, and he has an amazing blog about his travels. Anyways, he probably wouldn't admit this, but one day while looking over my Almaty project, he declared that such a thing would be impossible in his adopted city. We discussed why Almaty was so well suited to my cataloguing approach, what with its Soviet history and centrally-planned aesthetic, but meanwhile I was wondering: Couldn't Bandung be picked apart just as easily? My approach is simple. Walk a lot, with your eyes wide open, keep note of patterns in the built environment, document them with photos and try to understand their breadth. I've used this method now in several cities, from Tbilisi to Abu Dhabi, and it's been fun finding just how fruitful each city has been. With Bandung I was especially eager to see what I could find, because I was on an extended holiday and would be staying for a whole month. That's a lot of time to explore and dissect.
I certainly noticed, upon my arrival in Bandung, that there was a greater diversity in its architectural forms than in Almaty, where you often see so many of the same shapes and surfaces. Yet because I had grown so accustomed to Almaty's texture, I could instantly see that Bandung had some features that were remarkable. For example, many of its small neighborhoods, called kampungs, are built on the sides of hills, and with this topography you're often given a great vantage point over a kampung's roofs. What you'll see is pretty consistent, and it's definitely a sight you'll never see in Kazakhstan: tiles, ceramic tiles, overlapping on and on. The tiles, called genteng, come in different shapes with names like kodok ("frog") and garuda (a mythical bird that serves as a symbol of Indonesia). But my favorite kind of tile was the genteng kaca, glass tiles that you'd see inserted into a roof where an older tile had broken, like a lone gleaming scale on a dragon or like kintsugi, the Japanese art of fixing pottery with gold lacquer. Though the genteng kaca is a modern innovation, tiles made of clay were once a hallmark of Javanese palace architecture, where you'd often see ornate filials called wuwungan atop the roof ridges. These days, the tiles can be found on even the most modest of brick homes, and wuwungan too.
I certainly noticed, upon my arrival in Bandung, that there was a greater diversity in its architectural forms than in Almaty, where you often see so many of the same shapes and surfaces. Yet because I had grown so accustomed to Almaty's texture, I could instantly see that Bandung had some features that were remarkable. For example, many of its small neighborhoods, called kampungs, are built on the sides of hills, and with this topography you're often given a great vantage point over a kampung's roofs. What you'll see is pretty consistent, and it's definitely a sight you'll never see in Kazakhstan: tiles, ceramic tiles, overlapping on and on. The tiles, called genteng, come in different shapes with names like kodok ("frog") and garuda (a mythical bird that serves as a symbol of Indonesia). But my favorite kind of tile was the genteng kaca, glass tiles that you'd see inserted into a roof where an older tile had broken, like a lone gleaming scale on a dragon or like kintsugi, the Japanese art of fixing pottery with gold lacquer. Though the genteng kaca is a modern innovation, tiles made of clay were once a hallmark of Javanese palace architecture, where you'd often see ornate filials called wuwungan atop the roof ridges. These days, the tiles can be found on even the most modest of brick homes, and wuwungan too.
Another feature of local architecture I liked were these exposed trusses, called kuda kuda, found on gabled homes. The Indonesian word for the feature, which I'm not totally sure about, literally means "horses"...there must be some mythology behind it, but I wasn't able to find it during my brief research session with some architecture books in Bandung. Mostly, I was faced with the same problem as I am when researching homes here in Kazakhstan: texts are devoted entirely to large institutional buildings, but neglect to discuss any features of the structures where people actually live. The tresses, by the way, often hold another archetypical feature of Bandung homes, stained-glass windows, featuring fish or egrets or geometrical whimsy. The stained-glass phenomenon, I suspect, comes from Bandung's heyday as an eastern Art Deco powerhouse. But again, when vernacular architecture is so understudied, these things are hard to confirm.
When we first got to Bandung, one of the first words Palmer taught us was angkot, which is short for angkutan kota, or "city transportation." Angkots are small rideshare vans that run along set routes in Bandung , like the marshrutki that used to run in Almaty, and they're a constant feature of the local landscape. What makes them a welcome addition to the street scene, instead of an exhaust-farting eyesore, are their mudflaps. Who knew that mudflaps could be this magical? These rubber banners hanging from the back of the vans showed lyrical landscapes, kitschy like Bob Ross, along with colorful text, usually some kind of non-sequitur from the driver. They were a constant reminder that even the most dull of devices, like a grimy van, can be brightened up with art and creativity. My girlfriend and I rented a motorbike for the month and chased these angkots all over town, creeping up behind them when they stopped at their waypoints so that we could snap a close-up of their mudflaps. We got a lot of strange looks, to say the least.
The mudflaps were just part of what seemed to be a country-wide folk art phenomenon, where people took pride in decorating their surroundings, art-school be damned. Modest street-food tents were painted to the nines, kampung walls were coated in goofy graffiti, and public-transport tricycles called becak were dressed up in psychedelic canvases, with every last bar on the things coated in a different primary color. And yes, even the tricycles had awesome mudflaps. While some would call this kind of decoration tacky, I see only exuberance, and it strikes me that streets everywhere should show off this kind of thoughtful ornament. It's a public good. I certainly encourage it in Almaty, photographing handpainted signs where ever I see them, along with tenderly-painted gates or mailboxes and the like. Yet Bandung certainly has more of it, and I wonder what it is that makes any one culture more fun and fearless than the next.
Malaysia
When I'm walking a new place, I'm usually able to draw up a short list of streetscape elements that interest me, and I focus on gathering a nice collection of examples. In Almaty, as you can see from the encyclopedic list to your left, I've had enough time to document dozens of phenomena. When I got to Malaysia, however, I was so drawn to one feature of the local architecture that I became obsessed. How did these carved fascia boards from Almaty, I gasped, end up in Malaysia???
Karnizy [карнизы], as they're known in the Russian-speaking world, are a defining feature of Almaty's ornamented cottages. I've collected over a hundred examples during my Almaty wanderings. Then I got to Kuala Lumpur...and it was as if tsarist woodworkers had once upon a time smuggled themselves to Southeast Asia, where they set about replicating their art form in a region better known for roofs made of hatch and ceramic. Or perhaps we shouldn't be too Eurocentric; maybe it was the Malaysians who trekked to Russia and planted the seed!
One is left to dream up such conspiracies when presented with the undeniable confluence. It turns out that in much of Peninsular Malaysia, from Kelantan to Pahang to Melaka, local architecture is renowned for its ukiran ["carving"], and especially for the luscious fascia boards that hang from local eaves, known variously as papan pemeleh or tumpu kusau. Indeed, just as in Russian circles, the decorations are divided into two sorts based on their production method. Some carvings are designated tebuk, meaning a tool has been used to perforate the board and make designs with negative space. In Almaty, this style would be called propylnaya rezba [пропильная резьба]. Elsewhere, patterns are simply etched into the surface of the wood - terukir in Malay or glukhaya rezba [глухая резьба] in Russian.
I was in Malaysia for only a week, but I was in love, so smitten that I tracked down a foundation that does restoration work with these kinds of architectural treasures. I will send them a link to my discovery. Perhaps an international woodcarving alliance could be in the works?
One is left to dream up such conspiracies when presented with the undeniable confluence. It turns out that in much of Peninsular Malaysia, from Kelantan to Pahang to Melaka, local architecture is renowned for its ukiran ["carving"], and especially for the luscious fascia boards that hang from local eaves, known variously as papan pemeleh or tumpu kusau. Indeed, just as in Russian circles, the decorations are divided into two sorts based on their production method. Some carvings are designated tebuk, meaning a tool has been used to perforate the board and make designs with negative space. In Almaty, this style would be called propylnaya rezba [пропильная резьба]. Elsewhere, patterns are simply etched into the surface of the wood - terukir in Malay or glukhaya rezba [глухая резьба] in Russian.
I was in Malaysia for only a week, but I was in love, so smitten that I tracked down a foundation that does restoration work with these kinds of architectural treasures. I will send them a link to my discovery. Perhaps an international woodcarving alliance could be in the works?
The Philippines
March 12, 2015
What I like about traveling is learning new nouns. Learning a language wholesale is a serious endeavor, and though always admirable, it’s not always realistic for a short-term visit. It’s the nouns that carry the real weight. They are the objects of your new world, given names and made familiar.
To travel in the Philippines, it’s not enough to know planes, trains, and automobiles. Transportation in this isolated archipelago requires a whole new vocabulary. To cover long distances between islands, for example, you might use a RORO. You take a bus until the land runs out, and then you Roll On to a ferry. The bus keeps moving on its path, but now its afloat, and when it gets to the next port it Rolls Off. Roll On, Roll Off. RORO. There’s a whole “national highway” that’s been organized this way, roadways disappearing into the sea, where they become dotted ferry routes and continue back on shore. The ferry ride must be to Filipinos what the road trip is to Americans. It’s no surprise that Pinoys dominate the world’s seafaring staff.
For shorter trips, you can take a bangka. The bangka is the traditional outrigger canoe of Pacific people, with two ballasts on both sides of the boat keeping you balanced. This way you can never tip over - why aren’t all boats built like that? These days the bangkas have engines on the back, so they’re sometimes called pumpboats. Island hopping, the national tourist pastime of the Philippines, isn’t so much about the actual islands you snorkel around as the bangkas you zip on between them. They’re small enough that you get to know the strangers you share them with, but if you want solitude, you can sit on the stern and bump along with the waves, feeling like the fierce carving on a Viking vessel, made flesh.
On land, you’d imagine that originality is limited. A car is a car, a truck is a truck. But in the Philippines, personal automobile ownership is limited. Islanders have never had much use for them, because what are you gonna do, drive in circles? Public transpo is king, and the king of public transpo is the Jeepney. The Jeepney is like a shiny metal art car, a GI war machine turned into a stretch limo for the masses. They are moving museums of hand lettering, with Catholic slogans rendered in bright colors that positively pop against the silver sheen of the carriage. When the Pope visited the Philippines during our visit, he rode a Popemobile made from a Jeepney. The spiritual leader of this devout country deserved nothing less.
What I like about traveling is learning new nouns. Learning a language wholesale is a serious endeavor, and though always admirable, it’s not always realistic for a short-term visit. It’s the nouns that carry the real weight. They are the objects of your new world, given names and made familiar.
To travel in the Philippines, it’s not enough to know planes, trains, and automobiles. Transportation in this isolated archipelago requires a whole new vocabulary. To cover long distances between islands, for example, you might use a RORO. You take a bus until the land runs out, and then you Roll On to a ferry. The bus keeps moving on its path, but now its afloat, and when it gets to the next port it Rolls Off. Roll On, Roll Off. RORO. There’s a whole “national highway” that’s been organized this way, roadways disappearing into the sea, where they become dotted ferry routes and continue back on shore. The ferry ride must be to Filipinos what the road trip is to Americans. It’s no surprise that Pinoys dominate the world’s seafaring staff.
For shorter trips, you can take a bangka. The bangka is the traditional outrigger canoe of Pacific people, with two ballasts on both sides of the boat keeping you balanced. This way you can never tip over - why aren’t all boats built like that? These days the bangkas have engines on the back, so they’re sometimes called pumpboats. Island hopping, the national tourist pastime of the Philippines, isn’t so much about the actual islands you snorkel around as the bangkas you zip on between them. They’re small enough that you get to know the strangers you share them with, but if you want solitude, you can sit on the stern and bump along with the waves, feeling like the fierce carving on a Viking vessel, made flesh.
On land, you’d imagine that originality is limited. A car is a car, a truck is a truck. But in the Philippines, personal automobile ownership is limited. Islanders have never had much use for them, because what are you gonna do, drive in circles? Public transpo is king, and the king of public transpo is the Jeepney. The Jeepney is like a shiny metal art car, a GI war machine turned into a stretch limo for the masses. They are moving museums of hand lettering, with Catholic slogans rendered in bright colors that positively pop against the silver sheen of the carriage. When the Pope visited the Philippines during our visit, he rode a Popemobile made from a Jeepney. The spiritual leader of this devout country deserved nothing less.
Less iconic than the Jeepney is the equally outrageous tricycle. This is a motorcycle with a one-wheeled sidecar attached (hence the three-wheeled name), except the sidecar and the motorcycle itself are enclosed in a mini frame, turning it into something that gives the impression of an automobile but has the dimensions of something unheard of. They are just as clever in their decorations as the Jeepney. Windshields are often painted with the names of drivers’ children - “I’m doing this for them”, one tricyclist explained. The rubber mud flaps are cut with razor to make them into groovy shapes, and the most tricked-out tricycles often have sound systems that would be better suited for a full-size truck. They are the motorcycle made communal. They defy classification.
So to move in this country means to learn whole new ways of moving, new nouns for transportation objects from an alternate reality or a dystopian future. But just to survive here is to learn even more words, because you need to eat, and to eat you need to put nouns in your mouth. Nouns like bibingka, banana cue, bihol express. Sure, you could just as well play lunch roulette with your menu, pointing at random items and hoping for the best; or you could visit a turo-turo, which actually means "point-point" because there’s a lineup of buffet trays and you point to what looks tastiest. Yet doesn’t knowing a cuisine mean more than just pointing and tasting? Don’t you need to know the recipes, the history, and yes, most essentially, the names? Things are more delicious with context. And once you learn these words, you can read entire menus that are written in a foreign language, as if you’re some kind of linguistic savant that’s taken command of a tongue in a week. You rest happy with your secret. All you’ve done is eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner for several days straight while taking meticulous notes.
So to move in this country means to learn whole new ways of moving, new nouns for transportation objects from an alternate reality or a dystopian future. But just to survive here is to learn even more words, because you need to eat, and to eat you need to put nouns in your mouth. Nouns like bibingka, banana cue, bihol express. Sure, you could just as well play lunch roulette with your menu, pointing at random items and hoping for the best; or you could visit a turo-turo, which actually means "point-point" because there’s a lineup of buffet trays and you point to what looks tastiest. Yet doesn’t knowing a cuisine mean more than just pointing and tasting? Don’t you need to know the recipes, the history, and yes, most essentially, the names? Things are more delicious with context. And once you learn these words, you can read entire menus that are written in a foreign language, as if you’re some kind of linguistic savant that’s taken command of a tongue in a week. You rest happy with your secret. All you’ve done is eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner for several days straight while taking meticulous notes.
Sometimes learning a food noun is more extraneous than useful - Filipinos insist on calling coconuts buko, for example, even on English language menus where everything else has been translated. Can’t we just call a coconut a coconut? Buko must sound more exotic. For a foodstuff so ubiquitous here, it’s a good turn of branding. But what if the food in question is itself an unknown entity? If you want to learn what ube is, you can’t plug it into Google Translate and find out it's something familiar, like a coconut. Ube is ube. It’s a purple starchy thing that Filipinos use to make purple ice cream and purple cakes and purple everything. Same thing with pandan. Pandan is pandan. It’s a palm that’s used to flavor jelly and soups. Or calamansi. It’s a citrus included with lots of foods for spritzing, like a mini-lime. To know a calamansi, the only thing you can do is remember its name.
But of course, as a fan of distinctive architecture, I was most interested in learning nouns for the built environment around me, and here there were plenty of new phenomena to document. In the Philippines, there's a menu of materials all around you, architectural surfaces that at first seem foreign but make easy acquaintances because they’re all over the place, they’re everywhere you go. If a Midwesterner takes red brick for granted, the Filipino would shrug at sawali. This is the national facade, bamboo woven into building-sized mats. The mats are sold wholesale in giant rolls. You take a knife, slice it to your dimensions, and boom - tropical wallpaper. Because it's been commodified this way, you usually just see the same simple pattern, warp and weft meeting in a simple criss-cross pattern. Elsewhere, though, you'll see incredibly complex arrangements, and it's worth a minute to stop and stare at the wall and give a head nod to the weaver who, at some obscure point in history, figured it all out.
But of course, as a fan of distinctive architecture, I was most interested in learning nouns for the built environment around me, and here there were plenty of new phenomena to document. In the Philippines, there's a menu of materials all around you, architectural surfaces that at first seem foreign but make easy acquaintances because they’re all over the place, they’re everywhere you go. If a Midwesterner takes red brick for granted, the Filipino would shrug at sawali. This is the national facade, bamboo woven into building-sized mats. The mats are sold wholesale in giant rolls. You take a knife, slice it to your dimensions, and boom - tropical wallpaper. Because it's been commodified this way, you usually just see the same simple pattern, warp and weft meeting in a simple criss-cross pattern. Elsewhere, though, you'll see incredibly complex arrangements, and it's worth a minute to stop and stare at the wall and give a head nod to the weaver who, at some obscure point in history, figured it all out.
Plant products don't just cover the walls, but the windows too. I was enthralled by the bamboo lattices that hid rural windows, letting light in during the day, but not too much, and at night letting light out, but again not too much, so that houses glowed warmly, without aggression. This kind of breezy ventilation made sense in a tropical country, and I'd see it repeated in various forms throughout our travels, in concrete blocks and walls punctuated by slits. But the lattice structure was most beguiling, as it remains nameless. I asked around. I found nothing. It's a thing without a noun, so it's something without history or association, which is bizarre, because with something so commonplace, you'd expect somebody, somewhere, to talk about it, tell its story, celebrate it, and make it a national point of pride. If there is such information, in a rarely-read encyclopedia entry perhaps, I haven't found it. For now it remains a glitch in my project.
Things like the lattice demand names because they seem so primitive, and primitive objects, with their ancient histories, have had enough time to collect an identity. The wooden houses they appear on are often called bahay kubo, for example, and the form of the house is iconic in the Philippines. It's all organic, made from the woods, and so it is ripe for exaltation by people who are homesick for a simpler time. But when architectural forms of the past get enshrined as "traditional architecture", it's easy to lose sight of the fact that traditional architecture in this narrow sense is now extremely rare, and it begins to feel a bit dishonest to ignore the modern stuff, of iron and cinderblocks, that has popped up in its place. The bahay kubo, with its sawali walls and anonymous window grids, is these days a bit player. Materials of the modern age have taken its place.
The metal gate, for one, is not something that many Filipinos would highlight as a national symbol, or something that architectural reviews of island architecture would devote much space to. But personalized wrought iron gates are more common that anything bamboo. I saw them on every island we went to, fences and portals with initials stamped on them, family names and organizations. They suggest a kind of pride of ownership that I find endearing, an unabashed announcement that THIS HERE IS MINE and ALL THEE WHO ENTER IT SHALL TAKE NOTE. It's unrecognized, but the personalized gate is vernacular architecture to the tee: built by local artisans, and indeed local to the extreme, probably found more here in the Philippines than anywhere else in the world.
The metal gate, for one, is not something that many Filipinos would highlight as a national symbol, or something that architectural reviews of island architecture would devote much space to. But personalized wrought iron gates are more common that anything bamboo. I saw them on every island we went to, fences and portals with initials stamped on them, family names and organizations. They suggest a kind of pride of ownership that I find endearing, an unabashed announcement that THIS HERE IS MINE and ALL THEE WHO ENTER IT SHALL TAKE NOTE. It's unrecognized, but the personalized gate is vernacular architecture to the tee: built by local artisans, and indeed local to the extreme, probably found more here in the Philippines than anywhere else in the world.
With the last architectural element I'd like to highlight, my naming quest again comes up empty. But again I see them as a distinctly local, extraordinarily common expression of Filipino taste, and one that has defied recognition. Concrete balcony panels may sound familiar to some readers, as there is a remarkably similar trend in Almaty. The panels in the Philippines weren't put up by any central planner, though, but bought individually by every builder, and their ornament is mostly not low relief, but carved through, so that they function as ventilation. Like many modern elements of vernacular architecture, they're a bit kitschy, borrowing classical ornamental motifs like cartouche and acanthus, trying to lend grandeur to buildings that are anything but grand. Yet especially when they're painted, I find them quite attractive, and I think they should be given a proper Filipino name and entered into the canon of traditional design. They may be concrete and not bamboo, but definitions of local architecture must be accommodating to new forms, and the balcony panels is one of the most widespread.
For every RORO or ube or sawali I learned about, there was a lattice or a panel that somehow resisted being named, but after so much effort to learn nouns I realized that it sometimes hardly matters. It's a thrill, actually, to discover the nameless, like a scientist finding a rare new bug. But unlike those rare bugs, these details are everywhere, and what actually is rare is that anybody pays them attention. Somehow that can be assuring, knowing that I can notice these things and keep them for myself, that the landscape can have its own meaning for me and only for me. The Philippines becomes a place not just named in Filipino, but tagged with my own memories, noted with my own mental language, and in that way it has become intensely familiar.
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
December 23, 2014
Abu Dhabi and her sister emirate Dubai tend to evoke images of oil-drenched wealth, fast-forwarded modernity and urban planning ambition. In all that buzz and glamour, you might forget that large cities tend to be fascinatingly heterogenous, and indeed, there's more to discover there than just sheikhs and skyscrapers. I was in Abu Dhabi last week to give a talk on falconry, and I made sure to find time to go on a couple extensive walks, not just to the places with the postcard vistas, but to the neighborhoods where average folk really live. After months and months of walking Almaty, it was refreshing to take off my Kazakhstan blinders, to see a new city with a whole new landscape to read.
Just walking a town and taking notes can lead you to learn a lot about a place's political and social system. In Abu Dhabi, for example, one of the first things visitors notice are the sheikh portraits, omnipresent dedications to the country's royal leaders. There sheikhs are so widespread that it doesn't take long to recognize their faces. There's Sheikh Zayed, the late patriarch of the country who shot it into worldwide fame; Sheikh Khalifa, his son and the current president and emir of Abu Dhabi, and Sheikh Mohammed, another son, the PM, and the emir of Dubai. Especially because I came the week after their independence day, these three guys seemed to follow me everywhere I go. They were on posters at schools, banners hung from homes, decals on car windows, flags . I could never imagine Obama portraits crowding Los Angeles streets, but then again, royalty inspires a different kind of loyalty.
Abu Dhabi and her sister emirate Dubai tend to evoke images of oil-drenched wealth, fast-forwarded modernity and urban planning ambition. In all that buzz and glamour, you might forget that large cities tend to be fascinatingly heterogenous, and indeed, there's more to discover there than just sheikhs and skyscrapers. I was in Abu Dhabi last week to give a talk on falconry, and I made sure to find time to go on a couple extensive walks, not just to the places with the postcard vistas, but to the neighborhoods where average folk really live. After months and months of walking Almaty, it was refreshing to take off my Kazakhstan blinders, to see a new city with a whole new landscape to read.
Just walking a town and taking notes can lead you to learn a lot about a place's political and social system. In Abu Dhabi, for example, one of the first things visitors notice are the sheikh portraits, omnipresent dedications to the country's royal leaders. There sheikhs are so widespread that it doesn't take long to recognize their faces. There's Sheikh Zayed, the late patriarch of the country who shot it into worldwide fame; Sheikh Khalifa, his son and the current president and emir of Abu Dhabi, and Sheikh Mohammed, another son, the PM, and the emir of Dubai. Especially because I came the week after their independence day, these three guys seemed to follow me everywhere I go. They were on posters at schools, banners hung from homes, decals on car windows, flags . I could never imagine Obama portraits crowding Los Angeles streets, but then again, royalty inspires a different kind of loyalty.
Charismatic commercial and institutional buildings tend to get all the attention in architectural reviews of a place, but I tend to be drawn to residential structures instead. For one thing, there tends to be more of them, so it's easier to find patterns in their design, but also, they receive less attention and maintenance than bigger buildings and have that layer of history and decay that I'm really attracted to. In the middle-class neighborhood of Al Zahraa, I instantly fell in love not with the newer, shinier homes but with these slightly scruffy relics from the 80s or 90s, when decorative masonry was apparently a big thing. Screen blocks are familiar to me because they were a staple of mid-century modernist architecture in Southern California, and in Abu Dhabi as in Palm Springs, it was heat that made them practical. The blocks give some privacy and block sun while letting in cooling breezes, and their ornamental function is only a plus. In Abu Dhabi, house after house used screen blocks to draw angular arches on their facades, suggesting the sacred architecture of local mosques.
The heat may shape the city in other ways as well. I noticed that residential lots were laid out in such a way so that there were narrow alleys between the homes, and these spaces not only provided detours from street to street, but kept pedestrians cooler than out on the wide, sandy streets. I like these in-between places. They tend to be weedy and trashy and ignored, but they give privilege to the adventurous walker. Every narrow path summons that greatest of questions: "Hm, I wonder where this goes?" In Almaty, lots tend to be entirely smushed together, but in some hoods you can find secret paths, unmarked on maps, that lead you over small creeks and up hills. With these enticing alleyways, exploration is made infinitely more exciting than on the right-left-right-left of a city grid route.
There was one more Almaty-Abu Dhabi convergence that was too good not to share. I've spent a lot of time in Almaty staring at the space under my feet, keeping track of paving tiles in all their variety, from hourglass shapes to clovers and honeycombs. Who knew that Emiratis had the same taste in tesselated pavement? In fact, they use a brick design that's also common in Almaty, the so-called volna [волна], or "wave", a shape that looks like a normal brick that's been warped with jagged wrinkles. This brick has absolutely colonized Abu Dhabi! And it got me thinking...how do these kinds of design memes spread? Who cast the first volna? Is there some volna brick mastermind who's got municipalities in both Kazakhstan and the UAE hooked on his pattern? As I've travelled the world, I've realized that I'm not just entranced by what's unique to a place (its aluminum facades or its sheikh photos), but by things that turn out to be curiously global.
Astana, Kazakhstan
December 1, 2014
Astana is Kazakhstan's magisterial planned capital, a place built for spectacle first and inhabitation second. Its sleek ministries weren't just plunked down in the middle of the steppe, but built on the "Left Bank" of the River Ishim, across the way from an older planned city, called Tselinograd in Soviet days, a hub for young communists who came to the north of Kazakhstan to sow its virgin soil, or tseliny. Virgin Soil City, as you could call the older town, is your average Soviet grid, housing projects and squares and parks. It's somewhat pleasant to walk around. The other side of the river, meanwhile, where the "new" city is being built, is a pedestrian's nightmare. It looks great on postcards or cruising around in a car, but you get the sense that that's how the buildings here were meant to be viewed, framed by a windshield. Walking around with your own two feet and a pair of eyes, the buildings are terrifyingly out of proportion, because it's not a place built to human scale. It feels like it was copied directly from a diorama the president keeps in his office.
The president's office, I imagine, is climate-controlled, but out in the real thing, on site, the weather can distract from his vision. They say they're planting trees on the outside of Astana to block the Siberian winds, but for now the flatness of the setting seems to invite the turbulence right in, no hills or nothing to block it, and the powdery snow here can hardly stay in place. It gets blown up into snow tornados and shifts in layers on the streets, so that the wind here is something you can see, like wind in cartoons.
But the windy weather in this part of town is not the walker's worst enemy. That would be the city planner, the Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa. In effect, Kurokawa ghettoized walking. The city's greatest architectural icons are positioned on an axis, one after the other, from the president's palace to his interior ministry to his Baiterek sculpture to the circus-tent shopping mall, Khan Shatyr. Along this axis, Kurokawa envisioned a "pedestrian zone", and this part of the city got an awkward name in English, "Water-Green Boulevard", but an awesome one in Kazakh "Suly-Nuly." The boulevard, we can allow, is certainly a success, as "walking the boulevard" has become an Astana past time, and there are so many young families with strollers that the scene looks like it was photoshopped for an architect's mock-up.
Astana is Kazakhstan's magisterial planned capital, a place built for spectacle first and inhabitation second. Its sleek ministries weren't just plunked down in the middle of the steppe, but built on the "Left Bank" of the River Ishim, across the way from an older planned city, called Tselinograd in Soviet days, a hub for young communists who came to the north of Kazakhstan to sow its virgin soil, or tseliny. Virgin Soil City, as you could call the older town, is your average Soviet grid, housing projects and squares and parks. It's somewhat pleasant to walk around. The other side of the river, meanwhile, where the "new" city is being built, is a pedestrian's nightmare. It looks great on postcards or cruising around in a car, but you get the sense that that's how the buildings here were meant to be viewed, framed by a windshield. Walking around with your own two feet and a pair of eyes, the buildings are terrifyingly out of proportion, because it's not a place built to human scale. It feels like it was copied directly from a diorama the president keeps in his office.
The president's office, I imagine, is climate-controlled, but out in the real thing, on site, the weather can distract from his vision. They say they're planting trees on the outside of Astana to block the Siberian winds, but for now the flatness of the setting seems to invite the turbulence right in, no hills or nothing to block it, and the powdery snow here can hardly stay in place. It gets blown up into snow tornados and shifts in layers on the streets, so that the wind here is something you can see, like wind in cartoons.
But the windy weather in this part of town is not the walker's worst enemy. That would be the city planner, the Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa. In effect, Kurokawa ghettoized walking. The city's greatest architectural icons are positioned on an axis, one after the other, from the president's palace to his interior ministry to his Baiterek sculpture to the circus-tent shopping mall, Khan Shatyr. Along this axis, Kurokawa envisioned a "pedestrian zone", and this part of the city got an awkward name in English, "Water-Green Boulevard", but an awesome one in Kazakh "Suly-Nuly." The boulevard, we can allow, is certainly a success, as "walking the boulevard" has become an Astana past time, and there are so many young families with strollers that the scene looks like it was photoshopped for an architect's mock-up.
But outside of this impressive strip of real estate, walking is a hazard to be discouraged. Huge arterial streets have no crosswalks for blocks and blocks, so people hesitate on the side of the road and then dash to the icy median, where they hesitate again before dashing to the other side. The newest highrise apartment blocks (жилые комплексы; zhilye kompleksy) usually don't have storefronts on their ground floors, and without this commerce the streets are dead. When you do step up to a building, the entrances are usually paved in marble or faux-granite, a slippery invitation to crack your tail-bone. People put down sheets of cardboard where you can plant your feet.
Half the Left Bank, it seems, is under construction, and the corrugated metal fences that surround the construction sites are almost all covered up with vinyl screens [баннеры; bannery], digitally printed with nature scenes or artistic renderings of the future site. I walk Almaty and find dozens of curiosities to document (just look at the menu on the left), but in Astana this was the only pattern that I could latch on to. I guess in the harsh winter weather, there was something that tickled me about seeing lush forests, reproduced out of scale, lining every sidewalk. The fence screen, I realized, is a kind of fantasy to soothe people while the future is deferred. It's a way to obscure the messy sight of creation, allowing us to jump right from empty lot to finished product without needing to know the details of how we got there. But this whole city is a work in progress, isn't it? Perhaps if we wrapped a screen around Astana and waited for it to sprout, we could forgive it its growing pains, its wind and dead streets and cardboard welcome mats. Some day the fence would come down and the city would be as green as the trees in the picture, and the people of Astana would have made this place to look at a place to live in.
Half the Left Bank, it seems, is under construction, and the corrugated metal fences that surround the construction sites are almost all covered up with vinyl screens [баннеры; bannery], digitally printed with nature scenes or artistic renderings of the future site. I walk Almaty and find dozens of curiosities to document (just look at the menu on the left), but in Astana this was the only pattern that I could latch on to. I guess in the harsh winter weather, there was something that tickled me about seeing lush forests, reproduced out of scale, lining every sidewalk. The fence screen, I realized, is a kind of fantasy to soothe people while the future is deferred. It's a way to obscure the messy sight of creation, allowing us to jump right from empty lot to finished product without needing to know the details of how we got there. But this whole city is a work in progress, isn't it? Perhaps if we wrapped a screen around Astana and waited for it to sprout, we could forgive it its growing pains, its wind and dead streets and cardboard welcome mats. Some day the fence would come down and the city would be as green as the trees in the picture, and the people of Astana would have made this place to look at a place to live in.
Manhattan Beach, California
November 1, 2014
If I think about it, my love of Almaty is a reflection of where I grew up. Manhattan Beach, California is a privileged slice of American suburbia, a beach town where someone took a stick and scraped lines into sand dunes and crammed the grid with single-family homes on compressed little lots. Almaty is another world. With its stretched-out housing blocks and urban commotion, it’s somehow an antidote to a hometown that never really inspired me. The difference isn’t just in layout, it’s a difference in feel, in how quirks of landscape find a way to stimulate my imagination. In Kazakhstan, an average stroll rewards me with handpainted addresses and handcarved windowframes and materials stamped with ornament. There’s a DIY charm here, borne out of necessity, I’ll admit, but it’s a charm that I find missing back home. In Manhattan Beach, first of all, a stroll is somehow a shameful thing to take, something for sad people without cars, but if you do venture around the block, all you find is houses built on spec and design outsourced to some big box store with house and garden goods. Another world, indeed. I was back to that world for a bit last month, family visit, and I walked the streets looking for something to redeem my sour attitude. As it turned out, it was the streets themselves that gave me something to wonder at. To be more precise, it was the curbs.
Almaty is chock-full of unrecognized folk artists, from domestic plasterers to metalworkers, but if I had to find that kind of ingenuity in Manhattan Beach, I'd have a list of just one guy, and that would be Dave Gailbraith. Dave is a curb painter. In Almaty, addresses are visible right from the street, whether from a city-maintained plaque or a homeowner's chawk scrawl, but back home the houses can be set back on their lots, the address hung next to the door, with a lawn in the way, so people long ago took to spray painting their numbers on the sides of curbs so pizza guys and police officers could find their destination at a glance. It used to be college kids who'd do it, working in cheap B&W two-tone, drumming up a little beer money, but then Dave came along and in twenty years he's painted thousands of curbs himself and invented a new suburban art form. This being suburbia, the art is heavy with kitsch. Palm trees and surfers and the picturesque municipal pier are found in nearly every tableau, “beach life” in bright and blurry tones, reminding every visitor how good folks have got it, as if the mansions up over the curbs don’t give that away. Like so much in America, the Manhattan Beach curb must eventually become a place to declare your individuality, to stake out your identity, so people ask Dave to add in the logo of their alma mater, or a silhouette of their dog, or mermaids and seashells and whatever else suits their taste. The variety does make it fun to curb watch. In my walks, I collected dozens of unique designs.
If I think about it, my love of Almaty is a reflection of where I grew up. Manhattan Beach, California is a privileged slice of American suburbia, a beach town where someone took a stick and scraped lines into sand dunes and crammed the grid with single-family homes on compressed little lots. Almaty is another world. With its stretched-out housing blocks and urban commotion, it’s somehow an antidote to a hometown that never really inspired me. The difference isn’t just in layout, it’s a difference in feel, in how quirks of landscape find a way to stimulate my imagination. In Kazakhstan, an average stroll rewards me with handpainted addresses and handcarved windowframes and materials stamped with ornament. There’s a DIY charm here, borne out of necessity, I’ll admit, but it’s a charm that I find missing back home. In Manhattan Beach, first of all, a stroll is somehow a shameful thing to take, something for sad people without cars, but if you do venture around the block, all you find is houses built on spec and design outsourced to some big box store with house and garden goods. Another world, indeed. I was back to that world for a bit last month, family visit, and I walked the streets looking for something to redeem my sour attitude. As it turned out, it was the streets themselves that gave me something to wonder at. To be more precise, it was the curbs.
Almaty is chock-full of unrecognized folk artists, from domestic plasterers to metalworkers, but if I had to find that kind of ingenuity in Manhattan Beach, I'd have a list of just one guy, and that would be Dave Gailbraith. Dave is a curb painter. In Almaty, addresses are visible right from the street, whether from a city-maintained plaque or a homeowner's chawk scrawl, but back home the houses can be set back on their lots, the address hung next to the door, with a lawn in the way, so people long ago took to spray painting their numbers on the sides of curbs so pizza guys and police officers could find their destination at a glance. It used to be college kids who'd do it, working in cheap B&W two-tone, drumming up a little beer money, but then Dave came along and in twenty years he's painted thousands of curbs himself and invented a new suburban art form. This being suburbia, the art is heavy with kitsch. Palm trees and surfers and the picturesque municipal pier are found in nearly every tableau, “beach life” in bright and blurry tones, reminding every visitor how good folks have got it, as if the mansions up over the curbs don’t give that away. Like so much in America, the Manhattan Beach curb must eventually become a place to declare your individuality, to stake out your identity, so people ask Dave to add in the logo of their alma mater, or a silhouette of their dog, or mermaids and seashells and whatever else suits their taste. The variety does make it fun to curb watch. In my walks, I collected dozens of unique designs.
If you look down the curb from one of Dave's personalized postcards, you might see more spray paint, but this time it isn't meant to look pretty. These aren't tidy stencils like in the curb art, but sloppy marks that are obviously there for utility and not your aesthetic enlightenment. This other spray paint is confusing at first, a conspiratorial code written on the ground in red and orange, yellow and blue, arrows and lines and the letters "USA." Those letters, it turns out, are not some kind of patriotic declaration but an acronym for "Underground Service Alert", an annotation of subterranean plumbing that's required by law before any excavation. There are entire companies devoted to "utility location." They come out with radar machines to scan the ground and then make their marks with special cans of spray-paint that are made to shoot upside down. Green paint means sewer, yellow means gas, and the letters often stand for local utility companies, like SCE for Southern California Edison and VZN for Verizon. Before I looked into it, I was always curious about how, in a visual landscape that was otherwise so strictly tidy, mowed lawns and neatly-built homes, the streets of Manhattan Beach seemed to have been vandalized by inscrutable gangsters. Now the mystery is solved. In Almaty, by the way, we don't see these marks because there simply isn't such an overabundance of caution, but also because not so many utilities are undergrounded - even gas lines, after all, still run along the roads.
I would love to see what a native Almatian, with their fresh perspective, would be drawn to in Manhattan Beach. What do I take for granted? What have I stopped seeing? My eyes have scanned California streetscapes for too long and the scene has lost its color. Perhaps that's why I lowered my head and flirted with the ground, finding something neat in the ground beneath my feet. It was the last place I hadn't looked.
Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan
September 28, 2014
At its most elemental level, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan is really quite similar to Almaty. Also a former republican capital, Bishkek consists of the same prefabricated forms and the same scruffy neighborhoods of chastniki, or private homes. Therefore, it's a lot of fun finding the material differences. It's a process where you mind follows your gut: "This place certainly feels a little different, but why?" Ah, I exclaimed, the Soviet planners here used lots of marble but not so much limestone. Ah, there are less Stalinki here. Ah, the pavements here are choppier, not so fastidiously tiled. And those little variations were just in one ecosystem, the neighborhoods with mass housing. I lived in Bishkek for a year, doing research about falconry, and that was all I had seen, but now I decided to head to the rows of private homes outside of the center, to cruise around and see if things in the suburbs tasted different.
In the neighborhood of Mayevka, I instantly latched onto a pattern, a recurring building material that I only rarely saw in Almaty: psychedelic yellow brick. These Bishkek bricks aren't made with the deep red clay I was used to, but some kind of golden loam, swirled and striped with orange and auburn. In English masonry, I learned, these bricks might be called "multi stock" for their variegated palate, while a Russian speaker might describe them as pyostry [пёстрый], or "spotted". No doubt these splotchy bricks are used because they are cheaper than their solid cousins, but I found them really attractive. I saw several homes built with the pyostry bricks, but mostly they were used to build walls, the same walls everywhere, all over Maevka, segments ten bricks long punctuated by columns wearing metal hats. Masons call these columns "piers" and their pyramids on top "pier caps." The Russian translation is wonderfully appropriate - they call pier caps kolpaki [колпаки], a word that actually comes from old Turkic, so that the word for all these Kyrgyz metal caps is almost the same as kalpak [kalpak], the conical headgear of Kyrgyz people.
At its most elemental level, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan is really quite similar to Almaty. Also a former republican capital, Bishkek consists of the same prefabricated forms and the same scruffy neighborhoods of chastniki, or private homes. Therefore, it's a lot of fun finding the material differences. It's a process where you mind follows your gut: "This place certainly feels a little different, but why?" Ah, I exclaimed, the Soviet planners here used lots of marble but not so much limestone. Ah, there are less Stalinki here. Ah, the pavements here are choppier, not so fastidiously tiled. And those little variations were just in one ecosystem, the neighborhoods with mass housing. I lived in Bishkek for a year, doing research about falconry, and that was all I had seen, but now I decided to head to the rows of private homes outside of the center, to cruise around and see if things in the suburbs tasted different.
In the neighborhood of Mayevka, I instantly latched onto a pattern, a recurring building material that I only rarely saw in Almaty: psychedelic yellow brick. These Bishkek bricks aren't made with the deep red clay I was used to, but some kind of golden loam, swirled and striped with orange and auburn. In English masonry, I learned, these bricks might be called "multi stock" for their variegated palate, while a Russian speaker might describe them as pyostry [пёстрый], or "spotted". No doubt these splotchy bricks are used because they are cheaper than their solid cousins, but I found them really attractive. I saw several homes built with the pyostry bricks, but mostly they were used to build walls, the same walls everywhere, all over Maevka, segments ten bricks long punctuated by columns wearing metal hats. Masons call these columns "piers" and their pyramids on top "pier caps." The Russian translation is wonderfully appropriate - they call pier caps kolpaki [колпаки], a word that actually comes from old Turkic, so that the word for all these Kyrgyz metal caps is almost the same as kalpak [kalpak], the conical headgear of Kyrgyz people.
The other architectural elements that consumed me in Mayevka were the gables, beautiful gables everywhere! I'd noticed gables before in Almaty, indeed I have an entire album of them, but the gables here were different. They all had a strip of vertical wooden slats at the bottom, about a meter high, which were then topped by a herringbone pattern. This fad, of a vertical-slat apron with a mostly herringbone facade, was on house after house, as if they were all built at the same time. In fact, they very well might have been: a man I talked to said that many of the houses in his neighborhood were built for workers at a Bishkek furniture factory. Other features these roofers liked? Onion-shaped recesses, tiny little balconies, and spade-shaped talismans at the gable's peak. It was a delight to explore the variety, and I took a couple dozen photos for you to explore yourself.
In sum, the landscape of Bishkek was only marginally different from the landscape of Almaty, and I'm sure that applies to the surrounding areas. After all, if you take the four hour drive between the two cities, it's not as if there is any sharp line where the aesthetics diverge. This of course makes sense: both cities were centrally planned by the same Russian and Soviet overseers, both used similar materials and methods that grew out of pan-regional specificities. Almost all the albums you see on Walking Almaty could just as well be copied and pasted onto a Walking Bishkek site. Yet what I find fascinating is these tiniest of glitches, these little trends that go unexplained. Contractors from the furniture factory might have had a handbook that taught them aproned gables; Bishkek brick plants must be tapping a certain sedimentary layer not found in Kazakhstan, and their wall-building partners must have a deal with metal kolpak providers that Kazakh wall builders never got around to striking. If you track a variation in landscape, you always end up at the same place: histories that fluctuate at the human level, roofmakers and brick-cookers and wall-toppers, all making decisions that shape the face of a city.
Tbilisi, Georgia
September 7, 2014
I learned this week that not all Soviet capitals are the same. I’m a USSR fanboy with a Central Asian fetish, which means I had been to Almaty, Bishkek, and Dushanbe and relished their central planning, their mosaics and mikroraions. I had travelled quite a bit in this old empire, I thought, and had a pretty good idea of what a Sovietopolis was like. They all seemed pretty similar to me. Then a city in Georgia came and slapped some sense into me. “Hey, Tbilisi here,” it said. “Get out of your bubble. You’ve got some exploring to do!”
It turns out that a Central Asian Sovietopolis like Almaty is an unfair basis for comparison. A lot of these cities in Nomadland were built on a nearly-clean slate, in places with only a scattering of settlements. The capitals were Russian outposts made into modernist dreamtowns. Cities like Tbilisi, on the other hand, had a past, and a topography, that resisted the dominant grid. It had an old town that was curvy and compact; beautiful buildings from the 1800s that no one dared demolish; an existing legacy of permanent architecture. It had a strong sense of place before the Bolsheviks burrowed in, and it kept that aura after. Walking Almaty, one finds that the USSR’s legacy lives on every block. Walking Tbilisi, one finds a Soviet chapter that’s an afterthought.
So when I came to the Georgian capital on vacation, I fell in love with its doors, perhaps because they were a taste of something new, something more ancient than the hammer and sickle. Of this dating I'm quite sure; they're too bourgeois to be socialist. Yet they show the same devotion to craftsmanship that makes me start skipping when I see windowframes in Almaty, and the same ubiquity that defines most of the collections in this project. I had that familiar “Wait, these things are everywhere!” moment, and then my camera couldn’t stop snapping.
I learned this week that not all Soviet capitals are the same. I’m a USSR fanboy with a Central Asian fetish, which means I had been to Almaty, Bishkek, and Dushanbe and relished their central planning, their mosaics and mikroraions. I had travelled quite a bit in this old empire, I thought, and had a pretty good idea of what a Sovietopolis was like. They all seemed pretty similar to me. Then a city in Georgia came and slapped some sense into me. “Hey, Tbilisi here,” it said. “Get out of your bubble. You’ve got some exploring to do!”
It turns out that a Central Asian Sovietopolis like Almaty is an unfair basis for comparison. A lot of these cities in Nomadland were built on a nearly-clean slate, in places with only a scattering of settlements. The capitals were Russian outposts made into modernist dreamtowns. Cities like Tbilisi, on the other hand, had a past, and a topography, that resisted the dominant grid. It had an old town that was curvy and compact; beautiful buildings from the 1800s that no one dared demolish; an existing legacy of permanent architecture. It had a strong sense of place before the Bolsheviks burrowed in, and it kept that aura after. Walking Almaty, one finds that the USSR’s legacy lives on every block. Walking Tbilisi, one finds a Soviet chapter that’s an afterthought.
So when I came to the Georgian capital on vacation, I fell in love with its doors, perhaps because they were a taste of something new, something more ancient than the hammer and sickle. Of this dating I'm quite sure; they're too bourgeois to be socialist. Yet they show the same devotion to craftsmanship that makes me start skipping when I see windowframes in Almaty, and the same ubiquity that defines most of the collections in this project. I had that familiar “Wait, these things are everywhere!” moment, and then my camera couldn’t stop snapping.
It turns out I wasn’t the only one who was sensitive to architectural patterns in ex-Soviet cities - I found in a gift shop my kindred soul. An artist named Nodar Sumbadze has taken hundreds of photos of door handles, staircases, balconies and the like, and lined them up into beautiful collages. His book, Herbinarium Tbilisiensis, is a real treasure. Though our projects are quite similar, it was fun to see how Sumbadze’s approach differed. I like to delve into a phenomenon’s roots and explore its iterations; Sumbadze prefers to view every artifact as a prop in the grand human drama. A coffin is carried down a staircase. Mothers watch from windows. The sound of children’s laughter weaves through iron gates. Tbilisi's history, the author wants us to see, is a history of built things and people, passing through time in harmony.
The intricate doors and metal gates, the marble entryways, the carved balconies; they all give Tbilisi a classier touch than Almaty. Yet there's a lot the two cities share in common. Like in Almaty, Tbilisi's air conditioning units are out in force. It has plenty of cast-iron fences, even more beautiful, perhaps, than ours in Kazakhstan. The metal downspouts, too, are more grand in Tbilisi. You see the same manhole covers. Commemorative plaques are around, for sure, but not nearly as many as in Almaty. Utility boxes are quite different, but telephone poles are mostly the same. It was fun to walk through this new Sovietopolis and compare and contrast, and now you can too. Check out the photos I took for you, and compare them with my Almaty collections. There's lots to be discovered!
