zeppelin magazine | no #72

The sparrows tree
Listen to what you see

In an urban setting filled with wire and cables hanging from posts bent over welded fences, imprecisely stuck among broken tiles and cracked pavement, along coloured panels, iron sheets and trestles connected by pavement chains, tens of phone cabins sort of melt until getting transparent. Abandoned carcases, increasingly turned futile, outdated by the technological progress, an urban species on the stage of extinction, phone cabins are all bundled into a lumber of small things currently called the public space of Bucharest.

One should not stay a long time in Venice to notice that the city is not willing to reveal its contemporary face. The reason is quite simple: in the last 300 years, Venicians were not particularly attracted by the “new” architecture, having already a rather dense and coherent place, needing interventions occasionally and, when these became inevitable, they have very quickly taken a local shape. Sporadically, interventions pointed out by architects such as Carlo Scarpa or Vittorio Gregotti brought something “new”, but Venice has no element to mark the present so far.

Many donkeys-little donkeys across the leading article as you have never seen before. First thought was to publish the Austrian FELD72 group in this issue. Last autumn in Sofia, I had seen one of their presentations that among others included the project of a hotel named “Million Donkey”.