'A warm grey fabric lined on the inside with the most lustrous and colourful of silks': dreams of airships and tropical islands

Journal of Architecture

Volumn 12, Issue 5, 2007, Pages 525-542

  Engels Schwarzpaul, A Chr ^a  

^a AUCKLAND UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY   (New Zealand)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 65849386191     PISSN: 13602365     EISSN: 14664410     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13602360701722533     Document Type: Review

References (98)

1. o, 9].
2. C. Slessor, 'Super Blimp', The Architectural Review, no. 1266 (2002), p. 56. The CargoLifter dome was designed by Achim Hupfauf, Verena Thiels, Martin Hautum and Jürgen Grothe of SIAT Architektur und Technik GmbH & Co. KG, Munich, and engineered by Arup GmbH, Düsseldorf: it opened on 25 November 2000.
3. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, op. cit., p. 405 [L1,3]: 'Dream houses of the collective: arcades, winter gardens, panoramas, factories, wax museums, casinos, railway stations.'
4. o,9].
5. o,5].
6. Ibid., p. 116 [D8a,2].
7. A. Eames, Welcome to Germany's Pleasure Dome (The Sunday Times, May 21st, 2006 [accessed 6th September, 2006]); available from http://travel. timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,10290-2187529,00.html.
8. Market Place (Tropical Island Management GmbH, 2005 [accessed 26th December, 2006]); available from http://www.my-tropical-islands.com/village/souvenirs-e.htm.
9. See Benjamin, 'One-Way Street', in, P. Demetz, ed., E. Jephcott, trs., Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (New York, Schocken Books, 1986), p. 75.
10. 'Thresholds do not just mediate between two worlds, they also create them. Seemingly pre-existing opposites may even be produced through mediation.'; W. Menninghaus, Schwellenkunde: Walter Benjamins Passage des Mythos (Frankfurt a.M., Suhrkamp, 1986), p. 55.
11. At the resort, a negative is enfolded into a positive, as the 'world' is brought into an interior space: see A.-Chr. Engels-Schwarzpaul, '-13.833333/-171.73334 in 51.466667/14.766666. Whose Tropics, Whose Fale?', in, T. McMinn, J. Stephens, and S. Basson, eds, Sahanz 2006 Contested Terrains (Fremantle, Society of Architectural Historians, Australia New Zealand, 2006), pp. 119-126.
12. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, op. cit., p. 214 [l1a,4].
13. Ibid., p. 89 [C3,6], Benjamin distinguished threshold from boundary. 'A Schwelle is a zone. Transformation, passage, wave action are in the word schwellen, swell, and etymology ought not to overlook these senses.': equally important are, however, 'the immediate tectonic and ceremonial context which has brought the word to its current meaning.' (p. 494[O2a,1]).
14. Benjamin, 'Surrealism', in Demetz, ed., op. cit., Reflections, p. 181.
15. Benjamin's later work was concerned with a 'fluid multiplicity of ephemeral mythologemes', in which spatial figures contain Utopian potential (Menninghaus, Schwellenkunde, op. cit., p. 111). His interest in the immediate experience of the every day, and his materialist aesthetics, expanded the symbolic space of the worlds of objects.
16. See also G. Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1996), p. 13.
17. Benjamin, 'One-Way Street', op. cit., p. 62,
18. and 'Surrealism', op. cit., pp. 178f.
19. See also Menninghaus, Schwellenkunde, op. cit., pp. 52, 107-8.
20. See Benjamin's (technically incorrect) etymological conjunction of Schwelle (threshold) and schwellen (to swell) in Note 12 above.
21. S. Banze, Weltniveau in Brandenburg [Online Journal] (Welt am Sonntag, 12th December, 2004 [accessed 5th June, 2006]), available from http://www.wams.de/data/2004/12/12/373674.html.
22. In 2007, Colin Au's assumption that Berliners would be attracted by the exotic shows seems unfounded: the psychological threshold between Berlin and the resort remains strong. According to the current marketing manager (personal comment, January, 2007), Au did not understand the Berliners' partiality for their metropolis' own cultural scene.
23. Benjamin, Berliner Chronik (Frankfurt A.M., Suhrkamp, 1970), p. 25.
24. Compare this to the giant locomotives guarding the Hall des Machines at the 1855 Paris Exhibition, creating an expectation of wonders to come (Benjamin, The Arcades Project, op. cit., pp. 188-9 [G8a,2]).
25. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, op. cit., p. 88 [C3,4]. See also the 'fallen household deities' that flank the entrance to the bourgeois interior (p. 214 [l1a,4]).
26. A 'hen that lays the golden praline-eggs', a 'mechanical fortuneteller' and 'slot machines' (ibid.).
27. The Bali Split Gate (Tropical Island Management GmbH, 2007 [accessed 3rd March, 2007]), available from http://www.my-tropical-islands.com/village/bali-tor-e.htm.
28. See Benjamin, 'One-Way Street', op. cit., pp. 75-6.
29. My Day in Paradise (2007) (Tropical Island Management GmbH, 2007 [accessed 5th March, 2007]), available from http://www.my-tropical-islands.com/paradies-e.htm.
30. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, op. cit., p. 116 [D8a,2].
31. For €225, visitors can spend 'an absolutely "royal" day at the Tropical Islands! During 24 hours you will enjoy all the privileges normally reserved to an island's maharajah.' My Day in Paradise (2005) (Tropical Island Management GmbH, 2005 [accessed 15th September, 2005]), available from http://www.my-tropical-islands.com/paradies-e.htm).
32. H. Heynen, Architecture and Modernity. A Critique (Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 1999), pp. 3, 76. Modern jets almost extinguish the globetrotter, 'the extreme form of the nineteenth-century flâneur', for, while enabling travellers 'to traverse the world more rapidly' than ever before, they do not increase their 'harvest of experience; in fact, the reverse is true': P. Missac, Walter Benjamin's Passages, trs., S. Weber Nicholson (Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 1995), p. 193.
33. The modern tourist 'is not really interested in the place he holidays in. He buys a certain aspect - of the whole country he expects only one thing for a week: that the trains work, as well as the hotel and the weather. Basically, he creates a 3D realm of illusion in a synthetic country. He is already in virtual space. The fact that he has to fly his body there only reinforces the illusion.': K. Thimm and J. Scriba, 'Sadomaso in Reinform. Spiegel Gespräch mit Peter Weibel', in Der Spiegel, no. 27 (2000), p. 138.
34. The Great Evening Show (Tropical Island Management GmbH, 2005 [accessed 12th November, 2005]), available from http://www.my-tropical-islands.com/show/index-e.htm. Other shows included: 'Call of the South Sea', 2005;
35. 'Yussara Caribbean Show', 2005; 'Alma Latina - Salsa Cubana', 2006;
36. 'Yussara Arja Barong', 2006.
37. Benjamin noted an intermingling and confusion of day and night rhythms (Menninghaus, Schwellenkunde, op. cit., p. 41). Whereas during the 1855 construction of the Hôtel du Louvre, 'entrepreneurs used electric light on the site, in order to double the day's labour' (Benjamin, The Arcades Project, op. cit., p. 167 [F7,2]), the light is used here to proliferate entertainment in a 24/7 environment of fun.
38. Eames, Welcome to Germany's Pleasure Dome, op. cit.
39. A poster in the entrance area shows a couple watching the show. The man is so fascinated that he keeps pouring wine into an already overflowing glass.
40. Benjamin's fluid Bildraum exceeds narrative in its immediacy, uniting 'experience and imagination, memory and dreams' and combining 'restorative and utopian moments'. See E. Curthoys, 'Benjamin's Imaginary. Review of Kia Lindroos, Now-Time/Image-Space: Temporalisation of Politics in Walter Benjamin's Philosophy of History and Art', Theory & Event, vol. 3, no. 2 (1999), §6.
41. Half of the €60 million for the CargoLifter-hangar, plus €15 million for the Tropical Island resort, were put up by tax payers.
42. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, op. cit., pp. 183-4 [G6; G6a,1].
43. th, 2004 [accessed 21st September, 2005]), available from http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi-qn4153/is-20040624/ai-n12087761.
44. 'Because "they hardly have to leave home" to be in the tropics.', K. Connolly, Germans Get Taste of Tropics an Hour's Drive from Berlin (Travel VideoTV, 2004, 21.12. [accessed 1st May, 2006]), available from http://travelvideo. tv/news/more. php?id=A3758-0-1-0-M.
45. In 1924, a German writer associated a longing for sun, deep in the Germanic soul, with Germanic power, which would ultimately lead to German dominance over the world and its tropical islands: see K. DiPaola, 'Samoa - "Perle" der Deutschen Kolonien? "Bilder" des exotischen Anderen in Geschichte(n) des 20. Jahrhunderts' (PhD dissertation, University of Maryland, 2004), p. 252.
46. A. Benjamin, 'Tradition and Experience: Walter Benjamin's "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire"', in, A. Benjamin, ed., The Problems of Modernity (London, Routledge, 1991), p. 123.
47. Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis, op. cit., p. 126.
48. M. Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trs, W. McNeill and N. Walker (Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 93.
49. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, op. cit., pp. 105-6 [D2a,1].
50. However, the weather increases chances to get bored: see ibid., pp. 101 -2 [D1,3] and p. 104 [D1a,9]).
51. Ibid., p. 461 [N2a,1].
52. o,6] Despite their vastly different proportions, there is also a phenomenological correspondence between the shape and construction of the CargoLifter-hangar and the Samoan Fale.
53. Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis, op. cit., pp. 10, 103.
54. CargoLifter AG, Premiere: Freie Fahrt für großvolumige Fracht (epilog Magazin, 1997 [accessed 12th March, 2006]), available from http://www.epilog.de/GeT/Luftfahrt/T1 /CargoLifter-Logistik-971100.htm.
55. M. Steere, The Baron's Big Balloon. A German Aristocrat-Businessman Is Relaunching the Age of the Airship, Armed with Millions in the Bank and a Team of Crack Engineers. Can Superblimps Rise Again? (On Newsstands Now, Issue 8, 8th Aug, 2000 [accessed 13th May, 2006]), available from http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.08/airships. html. Ironically, the scheme may have been a response to a Thai economist's claim 'that Europe was incapable of innovation and doomed to decay' (ibid.).
56. Ibid.
57. Eames, Welcome to Germany's Pleasure Dome, op. cit. In its functional versatility, the 1851 Crystal Palace prefigured Tropical Islands' constellation. The Crystal Palace could be used for almost anything, so that one proposal for its use after relocation, following the end of the world exhibition, was to turn it into a bathing establishment (Benjamin, The Arcades Project, op. cit., p. 162 [F5a,1]).
58. Part of its formal impact was due to its vaulted central hall integrating existing elm trees on the site (p. 158 [F4,2]). While Tropical Islands' exterior makes no references to nature or culture, its interior is rife with them and offers pleasures 'strangely akin to a nightmare' (p. 190 [G9a,4]).
59. th, 2005 [accessed 4th June, 2005]), available from http://www.gizmag.com.au/go/3677/. 'The hangar's aerodynamic outline represents the clearance required for two airships moored side by side. ... The cylindrical central section is divided into four bays supported by five trussed tubular steel arches at 35 m centres springing off concrete plinths that also act as covered entrances.' (Slessor, 'Super Blimp', op. cit.).
60. See Menninghaus, Schwellenkunde, op. cit., p. 27. One of the promotional images of the CargoLifter shows it hovering over mountains and a jungle topped by palms.
61. See CargoLifter AG, Luftschiff-Werft in Brandenburg. Cargolifter baut eine der weltweit größten freitragenden Hallen (epilog Magazin, 1997 [accessed 12th March, 2006]), available from http://www.epilog.de/GeT/Luftfahrt/T1/CargoLifter-Werft-Fundament-990810.htm.
62. Slessor, 'Super Blimp', op. cit.
63. The 'massive hangar' is one of several gigantomanic economic failures in Brandenburg (Eames, Welcome to Germany's Pleasure Dome, op. cit.).
64. Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis, op. cit., p. 104.
65. J. Steffen-Schrade, 'Exkurs: Samoaner Im Frankfurter Zoo', in, G. Kroeber-Wolf and P. Mesenhöller, eds, Talofa! Samoa, Südsee - Ansichten Und Einsichten (Frankfurt, Museum für Völkerkunde, 1998), pp. 376, 81. The same troupe also gave performances in Berlin.
66. Ibid., p. 379.
67. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, op. cit., pp. 189-90.
68. T. Mitchell, 'Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order', in, N. Mirzoeff, ed., The Visual Culture Reader (London, Routledge, 2002), p. 497.
69. One wonders what the scholars would have made of the 'chronometric turk' at the 1844 Paris exhibition, 'who marked the hours by the numbers of his somersaults' (Benjamin, The Arcades Project, op. cit., p. 190 [G9a,4]).
70. Compare this with the potential of the theatrical stage as a visual field, or image-space (Blickraum), capable of altering perspectives and rescuing the world from reification and fragmentation, as discussed by D. Thomä, 'Benjamin, Wittgenstein. Schwierigkeiten beim Philosophieren gegen den Fortschritt', in, K. Garber and L. Rehm, eds, Global Benjamin (Munich, W. Fink, 1999), pp. 1232-5.
71. A fundamentally different relationship between actors and audience from that at the resort shelters and saves harassed dramatic figures, allows them to 'draw breath, bathes them in a new air' (Benjamin, 'One-Way Street', op. cit., p. 91).
72. See Benjamin, The Arcades Project, op. cit., pp. 214 [l1a,4], 182 [G5a,1] and 188 [G8,4].
73. ibid., p. 201 [G16,6].
74. 'Falling asleep is perhaps the only such experience that remains to us. (But together with this, there is also waking up.)'. Benjamin quotes Aragon about how 'mankind loves to remain transfixed at the very doors of the imagination!' (ibid., p. 494 [O2a,1]. And while thresholds are immanent in transformation, passage, and action, their immediate and ceremonial context remains important.
75. Ibid., p. 118 [D9a,4].
76. Ibid., p. 108 [D3,7].
77. Benjamin, 'The Storyteller. Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov', in, H. Arendt, ed., Illuminations (New York, Schocken, 1969), p. 91.
78. o,18]).
79. Instead of juxtaposing the grey of boredom with colour, boredom can be seen, as can grey, as a site of potentiality, as a threshold that holds possibilities in suspense: see A. Benjamin, 'Boredom and Distraction: The Moods of Modernity' in, A. Benjamin, ed., Walter Benjamin and History (New York, Continuum, 2005), p. 165.
80. The 'individual becomes a site of conflicting forces', and boredom, or its overcoming, is no longer simply about an opposition between a grey and its coloured inside (ibid., p. 163).
81. o,26]. The mediated experience of dialectical images relies on force fields of conflicting time registers and different perspectives on history.
82. See S. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge MA, The MIT Press, 1989).
83. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, op. cit., p. 459 [N1a,4], Moments of such sudden flashes are easily missed. When I passed the Tropical Village stage during a break, I noticed a bizarre display: two life-size golliwog dolls were decorated onto chairs; as soft toys without rigidity, they looked like newly dead bodies. Backstage, a group of Cuban dancers rehearsed their performance. As I stealthily framed a snapshot of the golliwogs, two women dancers came out and moved into the frame. When I asked for permission to take a photograph, to my surprise they did not move away but spontaneously posed in front of the camera. They seemed interested in a chat but, taken by surprise, I was unresponsive. Picture taken, we exchanged salutations and parted.
84. R. Sieburth, 'Benjamin the Scrivener', Assemblage, no. 6 (1988), p. 9.
85. See G. Hartoonian, looking Backward, Looking Forward: Delightful Delays', Architectural Theory Review, vol. 10, no. 1 (2005), p. 23.
86. Benjamin, 'Boredom', op. cit., p. 163.
87. Sieburth, 'Benjamin the Scrivener', op. cit., p. 9.
88. In Menninghaus' view, this aesthetics of social lifeworlds is the most innovative and powerful aspect of Benjamin's critique of myth (Menninghaus, Schwellenkunde, op. cit., p. 113).
89. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, op. cit., p. 447 [M16a,4], as opposed to aura as an appearance of distance.
90. Hartoonian, 'Looking Backward, Looking Forward', op. cit..
91. See Benjamin, The Arcades Project, op. cit., pp. 963-4.
92. Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis, op. cit., p. 11.
93. Modernity's promise of progress, abundance and freedom from necessity and fate, was already distorted 'in the architecture, fashion and commodities of the nineteenth century' (p. 105) - albeit differently in different parts of the world.
94. See Benjamin, The Arcades Project, op. cit., p. 923.
95. o,4]). Truth, Benjamin believed, is revealed in an object's obsolescence and afterlife, where one can 'recognise today's life, today's forms' in the 'apparently lost secondary forms' of an epoch (Benjamin, The Arcades Project, op. cit., p. 458 [N1,11]).
96. See also Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis, op. cit., p. 110.
97. See N. Leach, 'Mimesis', Architectural Theory Review, vol. 10, no. 1 (2005), p. 94.
98. Ibid., p. 97.