A Different Point of View.

Photos by Simon Thorogood.

The Schönbuchturn, a lookout tower in the Schönbuch Nature Reserve in Baden-Württemberg, affords stunning 360-degree panoramas of the Swabian landscape. Yet, as well as an impressive physical structure, the tower also serves as a conceptual device that reminds us to perpetually re-orientate our view of the world.

The Schönbuch is Baden-Württemberg’s oldest nature reserve and one of southern Germany’s largest enclosed forests. It is home to a variety of wildlife, including many rare and protected species.

The Schönbuchturn itself was completed in 2018, as a result of a student competition at the Hochschule für Technik, Stuttgart, and built on the Stellberg Hill, near the towns of Herrenberg and Boblingen. Via corkscrew steps, visitors can make their way up the structure and contemplate the scenery from one of three viewing platforms. At the top, views are spectacular and depending on the weather, one can see for many miles in all directions, taking in the Schlossberg Plateau, the Hecken and Korngäu plains, the Swabian Alps, and the Black Forest.

The glued larch wood and steel form is designed to sway, with movement becoming increasingly perceptible the higher one ascends. On a very windy day the experience can be quite unnerving, but even on the clear and relatively still day as evidenced here, the climb to the very top was still unsettling.

And so the Schönbuchturn is analogous as a medium to theoretically see things differently. Here, the higher one wishes to climb, the more one seeks to alter one’s vantage point, the further one looks out, the more challenging the task can become, and the more one’s balance can be upset by the sway in the wind.

But, as per the remarkable views from the top, the effort is worthwhile. Whatever the weather may be, and whatever the mindset may be, the dividends can be revelation, variation, transition and improvisation. That’s got to be worth the climb.

Structural Adjustment.

Photograph by Simon Thorogood.

The current renovation work on the Jubilee Column in Stuttgart has transformed it from historical memorial to something more abstracted and intriguing. No longer a conventional public monument, the dressed structure now presents itself as a catechism, inviting us to question the nature and purpose of public buildings, spaces and interventions. It stands as a reminder that, like the column itself, our take on the world should be perpetually subject to renovation and adjustment.

The very first time I visited Stuttgart, some 16 years or so ago, I remember it being a miserable day, with a bleached out white sky. I remember, too, being captivated by the Jubiläumssäule, or Jubilee Column, in the city’s Schlossplatz. It was undergoing extensive renovation works and was covered in a steely web of scaffolding poles, walkways and ladders.

The memorial, about 35 metres in height, was built between 1841-1846 to commemorate the 60th birthday of King Wilhelm I of Württemberg. The column has four reliefs to its base depicting historical scenes, flanked by four allegorical figures, and with two attendant water fountains. The pillar is crowned with a figurative sculpture of Concordia, the Roman Goddess of virtue, loyalty, peace, justice, honour and happiness.

As it so happened, I was in Stuttgart a week or so ago on much the same type of day as before – a cold, bleak day with the same bleached out sky. Strangely enough the Jubilee Column was undergoing exactly the same renovations as before, with the same imposing scaffolding framework in place. Once again, the column’s details, reliefs and figurines could only be partially determined through the metallic mesh, which assumed differing compositions and configurations as one wandered around it.

It struck me that my engagement with the Jubilee Column has always been a peculiar one, where I have only really regarded it during episodes of restoration. For me, it has remained a strange mediation – not quite monument, not quite renovation, not quite architecture, not quite community project, not quite sculpture, not quite art; yet all of these things at the same time.

As a delusion, fabrication or chimera even, a ‘thing’ composed of different parts and understandings, the monument encapsulates all that I subscribe to in the arts. It conveys a particular alchemy conjured up through contradiction and unfinishedness; a thing having no clear starting or end point. But, more than just a compelling physical structure, its real potency is as conceptual trigger or motivating idea that can take us ‘elsewhere.’

If the monument is therefore hypothetical, of course it is not alone in this operation. Many other buildings in the city might function similarly, where they are not necessarily just examples of civic architecture – a town hall, a shopping centre, or a train station, for example.

So, the Domkirche St. Eberhard in Königstraße, is no less a concept than the distended Jubilee Column. Not only is it a refined modernist Catholic church, re-built in 1955 for local parishioners to attend mass again following its destruction by bombing in WW2, it also serves as a conduit for spiritual and philosophical energy and interpretation. The church provides physical shelter for its congregation but it also affords conceptual harborage for collective belief, faith, and matters of the mind. Its role, then, is to administer imaginary affordances – arguably the principal function of any religious site or place of worship, or any art gallery, theatre, cinema, or library.

And, as an aside, if the responsibility of religious architecture (or perhaps all architecture) is to make visible the invisible, is its task also to render the visible invisible?

Sometimes however, perhaps due to conditions of extended familiarity, we can fail to acknowledge a building, development or form as something more than architectural exercise, however modest, imposing, unsightly or visually impressive it may be. We can forget that a building, especially where this might be implied by a lesser-seen interior, can purposefully prevail as figment, premise, or hypothesis.

And that is why the ‘vested’ Jubilee Column resonated with me so much. On the two separate occasions I experienced it, I found the monument to be neither quite one thing nor another. But, through its eccentricity it became something far more stimulating, something far more expedient, and something far more useful.

I am reminded, then, how important exercising one’s imagination is as a medium of invention and discovery. As we might agree upon, a creative procedure is very often not about fully understanding something, but about a strategic encounter that is able to reveal or ‘renovate’ something within us. Engaging Martin Heidegger’s notion of ‘stimmung,’ or attunement, the aggrandized Jubilee Column can immediately speak of many other things in the world - the appalling and ongoing conflict in Ukraine, for instance.

But for me, the monument is distinguished as negotiator of an uncertain relationship between an uncertain structure and an uncertain observer facing an uncertain future.

The Wild Ones.

Photos by Simon Thorogood.

The German Swabian-Alemannic Fastnacht or Fasnet carnival, as featured in a previous post, culminates in the Fasching or ‘eve of Lent’ festival.

With pagan folk traditions that hark back to Medieval times, Fasching serves as a last coming together of local Fastnacht communities before Lent – the 40 day stretch of prayer, fasting and almsgiving, which represents an important religious observance in the German liturgical calendar. The original imperative for the carnival, the processions, costumes and masks was a concerted, communal effort to drive out evil spirits during the dark days of winter. For Catholic towns and communities, Fastnacht is a prominent public holiday period.

Then, as now, the carnival is conducted with great zeal, becoming the focal point of a particular host village or district every weekend throughout the Fastnacht season. Although, street processions are highly visual spectacles and make for great family entertainment, there can be an undercurrent of menace or impropriety that permeates proceedings.

Here, there are clues within the name. Some believe ‘Fasching’ is derived from the German word Fastenschank, meaning the last serving of alcoholic beverages before Lent. Others, maintain the name stems from an old word fasen, meaning to be foolish, wild, or silly. The word, fasnach, closely approximated to fastnacht, roughly translates as “night of being foolish.”

In fact, all three interpretations are legitimate. But, the imminent abstinence of drink and fasting prompts many devotees to overindulge whilst they have license to, and hence become foolish, wild, or silly. Once dressed up, fuelled by alcohol often consumed quickly, and roused by cumulative ardour, crowds readily assume the rubric of ‘wilde leute’ or wild people.

Interestingly, the final Fasching Carnival parade in mid-February can register quite different energy levels from festivities at the very start of Fastnacht. Whilst Fasching itself can evidence increased conspicuous indulgence on one hand, it can reveal a noticeable decrease in carnival vitality on the other, as preceding weekends of merrymaking (since Epiphany of January 6th) takes its physical and psychological toll.

But, to reprise the concluding point in my previous post on this subject, Fastnacht arguably exemplifies the very best attributes of creative culture. Essentially, it is a framework is which to exercise ‘difference.’ It represents a unique opportunity to connect with others, to dress up, to assume alternative personas, to be misplaced, to challenge commonly-held assumptions, to ask complicated questions of oneself and society, and to test out being someone, something, and somewhere else.

Fastnacht can remind us how crucial ‘opting out’ is for us, in some form or shape, and for some period or other. It also tells us how critical the arts and humanities are as both instrument and portal to enhanced human existences, storytelling, and the crafting of surrogate worlds and mindsets.

And, in much the same way that UNESCO awarded the Basel Fastnacht ‘Intangible Cultural Heritage’ status, singular places, practices and mechanisms of ‘otherness’ should be celebrated and nurtured as mediums for divergence and variance.

Such places have traditionally included enlightened universities, art schools, design colleges, theatre companies, or local community groups, to give just a few examples. However, regrettably these are the very places that appear at risk of being devalued by a world seemingly focusing on standards of acquisition and certainty over rituals of emprise and conjecture. Surely, such operation is foolish and silly.

Weather Permitting.

Photos by Simon Thorogood

The exquisite weather of the last ten days or so has noticeably transformed the surrounding landscape. Light and colour is brilliant – the sky is a sustained proud blue, sunshine inclines young crops to a vivid yellow-green, and the exposed soil softens from a wintery brown to subtle shades of khaki.

The change has been enjoyed by all – humans and wildlife alike. Walkers and wayfarers in the countryside have multiplied, the sky is filled with sailplanes and hovering birds of prey, and hares race through the fields.

Yet, we are be reminded that this is not yet Spring, and that the bleakness of Winter may be reinstated at any moment. But until such time, the fine weather is to be savoured, and prompts us to be somehow changed and transformed ourselves.

Conversion Therapy.

Photographs by Simon Thorogood.

After a few weeks of colourless and drab weather, the landscape and one’s own mindset has been adjusted by the fresh snowfall.

Although temporary, the fleecy blanket changes much and difference abounds. Light levels are adjusted; sounds are both muffled and amplified; the blanched ground slips into the ashen sky; tracks and movements of animals and machines are revealed; and a familiarity with surroundings is modified.

One can engage with one’s environment anew, and the task of the arts and humanities is entrusted to the fields and trees around a small village in Baden-Württemberg.

Wonderful Copenhagen.

Through his Copenhagen Interpretation experiment of 1920, Danish physicist Neils Bohr (with Werner Heisenberg), advanced a description of quantum mechanics as a phenomenon that could only be captured, or made real, when a researcher exercised their imagination and positively determined a decision or result. Therefore, he proposed that any event or conclusion should always be considered unfixed, fluctuant or variable, and determined only by the particular frame a researcher chooses to places around the experiment.

In other words, a ‘something’ can exist in all possible states rather than just one. Completion, outcome, or ‘the something’ is summoned into existence only when we think we find it, where there are no definitive facts, only interpretations. Bohr’s theory may offer us a paradigm whereby creative experiments and discoveries are made in analogous ways by ‘design augurs.’

Here, the resolute augur might no longer look to just create conventional, customary or functional fashion garments, artefacts, spaces, experiences, or networks. Instead, they may look to cultivate and advance a particular abstracted argument, concept or manifesto, in the same way that some utopian 20th-century architecture was conceived as purely conceptual and never intended as completed buildings or developments. 

Not All There.

The human attributes that we might most admire in other people, whether it is their personality, vitality, integrity, honesty, openness, intellect, compassion, or wit are principally formless and abstract characteristics. Where and how can the things we value otherwise be formless and abstract?