CityLab: How the 1964 Olympic Games Changed Tokyo Forever

The 1964 Olympics were a rare chance for officials to implement the kind of rapid, sweeping changes that would disrupt lives and require cultural sacrifices. Visitors found not a war-scarred city but a modernizing metropolis, with state-of-the-art transportation whizzing between an upgraded airport and smart new hotels. More than that, the enormous footprint of military facilities in Tokyo’s southwest became the city’s new economic and cultural center—emblems of a peaceful, prosperous future. [...]

The government accelerated work on roads including the Metropolitan Expressway, which weaves between buildings, balances over rivers and ducks underground—a cheaper and quicker building method than buying up private land. It improved water systems and expanded the subway. Buildings sprouted up like weeds and luxury hotels—such as the 17-story Hotel New Otani, Japan’s largest building at the time—were built to accommodate foreign guests. Western-style flush toilets, then uncommon, were promoted.[...]

The games attracted young people to Shibuya, Yoyogi and Harajuku—neighborhoods that today remain ground zero for Japanese youth culture. National broadcaster NHK built new headquarters nearby, drawing in other networks, businesses and shops. Eventually the Olympic Village was converted into Yoyogi Park, one the few large city parks suited to activities like jogging and picnicking, and hugely popular for its proximity to Shibuya and Harajuku. Luxury hotels also helped turn the area into a destination for leisure and business travelers. [...]

Tokyo’s unprecedented urban transformation in the lead-up to 1964 provided a roadmap for rising cities like Seoul and Beijing, Olympic hosts in 1988 and 2008 respectively, that sought out the games for economic benefits and an introduction to the world stage. As criticisms about Olympic-related development mount—from the costs to gentrification—organizers have been looking for a new model. The Japanese capital seems to have missed its chance to provide that vision this time around, and strengthened questions about the games’ value for mature cities.

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CityLab: A Park-Building Revolution Is Transforming a Russian City

 Six years after Fishman-Bekmambetova’s arrival, a massive initiative often referred to as a “green revolution” has dramatically reshaped this city 450 miles east of Moscow. Tatarstan’s Public Space Development Program, launched by Fishman-Bekmambetova and Tatarstan President Rustam Minnikhanov, has created or upgraded more than 420 projects throughout the republic, including parks, walkways, gardens and other kinds of landscaped areas. [...]

The most ambitious project in the works for Fishman-Bekmambetova’s team is the Kazanska River Strategy, a plan for a 22-kilometer stretch of urban river and 68 kilometers of embankment running the entire length of Kazan; it’s one of the largest landscape projects in Russia.

The effort has garnered much international attention: In 2019, Kazan hosted the World Urban Parks conference; that same year, the Aga Khan Foundation awarded Tatarstan’s public space development program its prestigious Architecture Award. But according to Fishman-Bekmambetova, the team’s most meaningful achievement has been to democratize the design process. The Tatarstan initiative adopted a process known as participatory environmental design, a discipline pioneered by U.S. architect Henry Sanoff. Each project is preceded by extensive public meetings and surveys, even though this kind of outreach can delay projects and result in time-consuming revisions.

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National Public Radio: California City

 Deep in the Mojave Desert, there is a little town with a big name and a bizarre history: California City. For decades, real estate developers have sold a dream here: if you buy land now, you'll be rich one day. Thousands of people bought this dream. Many were young couples and hard-working immigrants looking to build a better future. But much of the land they bought is nearly worthless. In this new podcast from LAist Studios, host Emily Guerin tells a story of money, power and deception.

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PolyMatter: India's Privately Owned City

 

CityLab: Inside the ‘Tartarian Empire,’ the QAnon of Architecture

For some, it’s too fantastical to believe … or perhaps not fantastical enough. A dedicated group of YouTubers and Reddit posters see the Singer Building and countless other discarded pre-modern beauties and extant Beaux-Arts landmarks as artifacts of a globe-spanning civilization called the Tartarian Empire, which was somehow erased from the history books. Adherents of this theory believe these buildings to be the keys to a hidden past, clandestinely obscured by malevolent actors. [...]

The Tartaria storyline is not directly related to the adrenochrome-harvesting Satanic-pedophile cabal that lies at the heart of QAnon, the unfounded conspiracy theory that crashed into the real world in 2020. But it shares some of what Peter Ditto, a social psychologist at the University of California-Irvine who specializes in conspiracy theories, calls QAnon’s “cafeteria quality:” There’s no overarching narrative or single authorial voice interpreting events. It’s just a gusher of outlandish speculation; adherents can pick and choose which elements they want to sign on to. [...]

The Tartarian milieu is an intensely visual medium, occupied with riffing on photos and maps, picking out apparent inconsistencies and making one-off conjectures instead of weaving together comprehensive timelines. The theory is notably light on reasoning as to why and how the greatest cover-up in history was undertaken, but it does offer a few options for how Tartaria was erased and the great reset propagated. Many say that an apocalyptic mud flood buried its great buildings; some suggest the use of high-tech weaponry to tactically remove Tartarian infrastructure. A consistent theme is that warfare is an often-used pretext to wipe away surviving traces of Tartarian civilization, with the two world wars of the 20th century finishing work that may have begun with Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. [...]

At its core, the theory reflects a fear of how quickly things change. As they look at today’s cityscapes, Tartaria believers see an eerie and alienating place, filled with abstract monoliths that emerged out of nowhere in a brief period of time. They’re skeptical of the rapid rise and development of the U.S., and even more suspicious of how quickly Modernism came to dominate the landscape. One favorite case study, useful for illustrating this aesthetic whiplash, is the grand domed Henry Ives Cobb Chicago Federal Building, built in 1905. Like the Singer Building, it was razed after just 60 years in favor of an icy black Mies van Der Rohe tower. [...]

In fact, the governing ideology of the modern architecture that Tartarians despise was a critique of this system. Modernism argued for an egalitarian architecture that would help break the shackles of the past, rejecting backbreaking representational craftsmanship to honor omnipotent kings and divine beings in favor of simple, universal forms that would leverage restraint and efficacy into a broad uplift for the masses. Minus the weirdest stuff — the global mud flood, the ancient energy weapons, the vanished race of giants — the Tartaria theory is just an extreme form of aesthetic moralism, the idea that traditional architecture styles are inherently good and modern architecture is the product of a degenerate culture.

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City Beautiful: Why did railroad companies mass produce cities?

 Railroads founded hundreds of nearly identical towns in the American west. Why?

Kings and Things: America's Lost Classical Architecture

Despite being a relatively young nation, the United States of America has a wealth of great classical architecture. Some of these masterpieces have unfortunately been lost however, either due to natural disasters, or by being demolished. In this video, we will look at four such buildings. 

The Guardian Longreads: Penthouses and poor doors: how Europe's 'biggest regeneration project' fell flat

It has been billed as the world’s first swimming-pool bridge, a dazzling feat of acrylic engineering that will span the 14-metre gap between the two buildings and give residents the feeling of “floating through the air in central London”. But, although he lives in Embassy Gardens, Iqbal and his neighbours will never enjoy the thrill of going for an aerial dip. “We have a front-row seat of the Sky Pool,” he told me. “But the sad thing for us, living in the shared-ownership building, is that we will never have access to it. It’s only there for us to look at, just like the nice lobby, and all of the other facilities for the residents of the private blocks. Nobody expects these amenities for free, but we’re not even given the choice to pay for them.” [...]

The capital is well used to high-rise, high-end totems by now, but VNEB takes the iniquities of the real estate-industrial complex to extremes. It is a place where penthouses with private chapels and running tracks loom above crumbling council estates across the railway line, where scores of flats lie empty, held by secretive shell companies in off-shore tax havens, and where the division between absentee investors and owner-occupiers confined to poor doors could not be more stark. Dogged by allegations of cronyism and gerrymandering, it is the product of politicians in thrall to property developers, driven by a blind faith in the market – even when investors started to realise that they might have bought into a mirage. [...]

In one snapshot, looking at an agency that listed 35 new-build properties for sale during an eight-month period, the constant relisting made it look as if there were in fact 368 properties for sale. Rather than roughly £50m in market value of apartments advertised, the distortion would have made it appear as more than £500m. In another example, a £3.6m flat was re-listed 15 times in six months, making it seem like the average asking price in the area was skyrocketing. The manufactured flurry also gave the impression to potential buyers that flats were “flying off the shelves”, she said, when in fact the developers were struggling to offload them. The reality was that they were selling off homes in bulk at steep discounts to corporate landlords and institutional investors, with prices slashed by up to 38%.

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UnHerd: Why architecture is political

 Architecture is an inherently political act, which is precisely why it is so contested. It is the grandest and most permanent marker of a civilisation, and the clearest and most dramatic expression of a society’s relationship to power. Consider, on the one hand, Trump’s executive order, one of the last of his administration, mandating neoclassicism as the house architectural style of the US federal government; on the other hand, see the New Statesman’s neurotic fear of classical architecture as a form of fascism wrought in stone. Architecture is not just the expression of our positive political values, but also of the pathologies and debilitating culture wars enfeebling our civilisation. [...]

Yet leading up to the Acropolis, winding its way around the ancient hills of Athens, was an alternative vision of modernity, neglected, under-appreciated but far better suited to our current political moment. In the middle of the 20th century, the Greek architect Dimitris Pikionis was tasked with replacing the ugly asphalt road that led to the Acropolis. Hiring provincial stonemasons, accustomed to working in a vernacular style, and using as his materials marble blocks from 19th century buildings recently levelled to create the concrete cityscape of modern Athens, Pikionis fused his aesthetic interest in Modernist art with his appreciation of the old, the worn and characterful. [...]

Yet Critical Regionalism, as outlined by Frampton, is not a retreat into the vernacular, which he expressly warns against as lazily reactionary, and carrying within it the incipient threat of totalitarianism. Frampton cautions against the “demagogic tendencies of Populism” in architecture, “the simple-minded attempts to revive the hypothetical forms of a lost vernacular.” Instead, he argues, the task for architects is to achieve a “self-conscious synthesis between universal civilisation and world culture.”

In practice, this means marrying the best of the vernacular tradition — a sensitive appreciation of place, climate and culture, the tactility and warmth of natural materials, a rootedness in the specifics of the local and a suspicion of the bland totalitarianism of modernism — with an awareness that we cannot undo the Modernist moment; we are moderns, and any attempt to undo this basic fact will result only in a feeble and debilitating pastiche. [...]

Critical Regionalism is inherently post-liberal in its vision of the good; it is open to the world, not narrow and exclusive, yet rooted in the specifics of place and culture. Instead of defining itself by what it is not, and locking itself into a futile and mutually destructive cycle of opposition to liberalism, perhaps post-liberalism can be profitably reimagined as a form of political Critical Regionalism: alive and responsive to the values of community, tradition and localism, yet at the same time willing to take what is good from liberalism, what is genuinely superior to what came before it, and to reshape it to its own ends.

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Wisecrack: That Time Disney Built a Creepy Government

Disney World is beloved all over the globe for the pure escapism it offers. But the story behind this fantasy world is a lot weirder, and a whole lot less magical than it might seem. We'll explain in this Wisecrack Edition: That Time Disney Built a Creepy Government.

CityLab: How Fear Took Over the American Suburbs

 In his book, “Neighborhood of Fear: The Suburban Crisis in American Culture, 1975-2001,” Kyle Riismandel, a senior university lecturer in the Federated Department of History at the New Jersey Institute of Technology/Rutgers-Newark, argues that suburbanites of this era engaged in “productive victimization,” using their imagined and real fears as a means to hoard power and exert local control. It’s a phenomenon he observed growing up in the suburbs of Wanaque, New Jersey — 30 miles away from New York City, 12 miles away from Newark, “but in many ways a world away” — later, at graduate school in D.C., and now, from his home back in the New Jersey suburb of Montclair.

Over those three decades, cultural and political phenomena served to make suburbanites feel less like they were living in a bucolic paradise, and more like in a land constantly under assault — with threats ranging from toxic waste and cancerous household products; to burglaries and kidnappings; to satanic cults and explicit music. Riismandel traces the reaction to these perceived threats, through the weaponization of the environmental movement as a means to offload hazards to poorer communities, the rise of NIMBYs who feared overdevelopment in their backyards, and the advent of vigilantism as a response to crime and disorder. The book captures what Riismandel identifies as a growing anxiety that undergirded white suburban life. “Things aren’t necessarily happening” to suburbanites of the time, he says, “but there’s always a sense they they will.” [...]

This continued production of threat — even without the materiality or the reality of the threat being so big — is in part because it allows people to do things. It’s facilitated by the broader political culture of the rightward turn of the Reagan era and the New Right, saying, you should be scared; that we need more cops on the street. But also in response, you can exert more control as a homeowner, or as a parent, and you can police streets more effectively, or more privately. You can do all these things that allow you to work with, or even replace, the police or the state. [...]

Part of the privilege of living in the suburbs is controlling local space, not being victimized by an actual crime. That you might be victimized by the threat of crime, and the idea of crime, but that you should be able to live free from that fear. This is why I call it the suburban crisis, because it's really just a crisis of privilege. It is not the “urban crisis,” which is, you know, deeply-rooted and systemic and structural, that we see elucidated by a number of scholars, most famously, Thomas Sugrue’s book. They're quite different. One is one of systemic racism and disinvestment. Another is one of privilege and expectation.

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PolyMatter: -The Economics of LEGO

 

UnHerd: Must we always demolish the past?

 One Westminster politician in particular may have relished the banging, smashing news from Wrexham. In October, Robert Jenrick, Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, said that the Government’s new planning reforms will create a “big opportunity to demolish some of the mistakes of the recent past . . . empty derelict buildings in town and city centres that were put, often poorly constructed, not within the character of those places, particularly in market towns in the Sixties and Seventies.” [...]

There is though an irredeemable arrogance at play when it comes to the fate of buildings when a new generation takes against previous architectural styles it feels it has the cultural competence and a kind of divine right to dismiss and destroy. In 1961, Harold Macmillan, Conservative prime minister and arch moderniser, ensured the demolition of the Euston Arch. This monumental Greek Revival propylaeon, or triumphal gateway, designed in a severe Doric style by Philip Hardwick, fronted what had been the London terminus of Britain’s first long distance passenger railway, the London and Birmingham. Opened in 1837, this was the 19th century equivalent of a Roman road, the scale of its engineering epic, its architecture noble. [...]

Sometimes, just sometimes, there are balanced outcomes. The 1960s Preston Bus Station — cinematic, sculptural, heroic — designed by Keith Ingham and Charles Wilson of the Building Design Partnership, survived prolonged attempts to have it demolished to make way for more shopping. Between 2016 and 2018 it was renovated by John Puttick Associates. Against Wrexham’s and Jenrick’s grain, local people truly like this Sixties adventure in concrete.

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CityLab: Trump’s Defeat Didn’t Stop His ‘Ban’ on Modern Architecture

 President Donald Trump never signed that executive order, which would have banned modernist designs for new federal buildings. After a spate of outrage — it was roundly condemned by the American Institute of Architects, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the dean of architecture at the famously traditional University of Notre Dame and at least 11,000 architects who wrote to the White House — the order faded from view amid the many other crises of 2020. Last week, Trump lost his reelection bid, making the executive order a dead letter.

But the forces that his White House set in motion could outlive his administration: The GSA appears to have adopted a modernism ban, without any authorization in place. What seemed to be a pipe dream for admirers of classical architecture back in February now looks like procurement policy at the federal agency that manages office space and needs for the U.S. government. Design is already underway in Alabama for what might be Trump’s first mandatory classical courthouse. [...]

A classical mandate is also potentially limiting in terms of selecting qualified candidates for federal projects, which are often complex briefs with unique security and logistics needs. One firm, Jenkins Peer, which has prior federal experience renovating a courthouse in Charlotte, was shortlisted for both the Fort Lauderdale and Huntsville courthouses. Payne Design Group, which won the GSA bid for the Huntsville project, is a three-person firm, according to the sales intelligence service Dun & Bradstreet. The federal contracting site GovTribe lists just one federal contract for Payne Design — the Huntsville courthouse, a choice $3.7 million award. Otherwise the firm has largely designed traditional churches and schools in Alabama and Georgia. [...]

The strictly left-versus-right, modern-versus-classical argument reflects an old-fashioned view of architecture, an artifact from design salons of yesteryear. It’s at odds with the conversation in Europe, where policymakers have turned to the Bauhaus school for inspiration for a new aesthetic movement focused on achieving the goal of decarbonizing the continent’s building stock. In the U.S., today’s forward-thinking debates about design and planning center on social and environmental justice. Even the notion that classicism is fundamentally conservative is mistaken.

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CityLab: Prague’s Communist-Era Apartments Get a Second Life

Prague’s paneláks may stand in stark contrast to the city’s historic core, but they fit in with local architecture traditions more than you might assume. Interwar Czechoslovakia, the Czech Republic’s predecessor state, was a hive of modernist innovation in architecture, and many architects working on major projects after the Communists took power in 1948 had been part of the country’s aesthetic debate for some time. [...]

The real push for fully industrial building methods came from a speech by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in 1954, who specifically called for the use of concrete panel construction as an efficiency measure in a bloc-wide drive for more and better housing. Despite the Soviet incentive, the housing produced to meet this call was nonetheless not fundamentally different from much being constructed in the West at the time. The internal layouts of paneláks, and their arrangement into planned, self-contained neighborhoods, had clear contemporary counterparts in Western Europe , where Sweden, France, West Germany and Britain were also building mass housing projects on a grand scale. In keeping with this exchange of ideas across the Iron Curtain, the name given to this 1950s new wave of Czech architecture and design was “Brussels Style,” after Czechoslovakian architects gained international attention for their designs at the Brussels World Fair in 1958. [...]

For their new tenants, these panelák homes often represented an improvement. Coming from tenements heated with coal stoves and often lacking hot water or reliable plumbing, many residents were relieved to move in. These new units offered central heating, balconies and much more light than you might have gotten in Prague’s existing courtyard buildings (akin to Berlin’s Mietkasernen). They also had more modern conveniences than the cramped cottages previously occupied by migrants from the countryside.[...]

That is not what happened next. Following the ousting of the communist government, panelák apartments were transferred to tenants’ ownership at rock-bottom prices, turning from something allotted by the state into free market goods. And, in a surprising twist, their reputation was steadily rehabilitated in the years after the division of Czechoslovakia into two states, along with the buildings themselves. Panelák apartments have appreciated in value significantly more than ones in brick buildings, according to housing researcher Martin Lux.

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99 Percent Invisible: Ubiquitous Icons: Highways 101

 Our first point of interest is the classic American stop sign — you know the one: octagonal, red background, white print. But a fan wrote in after spotting a strange blue stop sign in Hawaii. The reason some stop signs are blue was a neat little story in itself, but the exception also got Kurt wondering: why are the rest red? [...]

While technically not a graphic icon as such (at least not until the digital age), there is a certain kind of iconic rural mailbox that dates back over 100 years. But to understand how this classic design came to be, we have to go back even further. It all started in the 1800s, when the United States Postal Service introduced Free City Delivery. [...]

That last story is something we pulled from the pages of our upcoming book, The 99% Invisible City, which is about everyday designs. In our research, we looked both globally and locally for compelling stories and characters, like a pavement expert from Halifax and the cat that inspired his life-saving invention — a device that went from being one man’s hobby to a mechanism for national defense during WWII.

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99 Percent Invisible: Podcast Episode

After the oil crisis, the global economy went into a recession. American unemployment hit 11 percent. And suddenly, middle-class families didn’t have money for name brands like Coke or Kellogg’s. Consumers wanted cheaper food. In response, supermarkets had to figure out how to make their store brands more appealing. One chain in France, called Carrefour, was developing a discount store brand when they had an idea. Instead of using bright colors, or putting their own name on the box, or using slogans or beautiful photos, their products were brandless. They would include just the name of the food, in black text, on a white background. This minimalist design was a brilliant marketing tool. It delivered the message that the food was cheap, and the savings were being passed down to consumers.[...]

The company hired a designer named Don Watt who created packaging that had a stark yellow background with plain black Helvetica type for every product. And Nichol didn’t just launch this new product line. He made it an entire store. The worst performing Loblaws stores were shut down and rebranded as No Frills. These new stores carried very few name brands and were dominated by No Name products. To make this painfully clear, the entire store was painted black and bright yellow. [...]

The generic brand became so powerful, it started showing up on the fringes of pop culture. In the sci-fi movie Repo Man, Emilio Estevez works in a grocery store that is slowly crushing his soul, and only stocks generic products. In one scene, Estevez eats out of a can simply labeled “Food.” Generic products represented the conformist direction of culture. These products were also featured in a music video by the punk band Suicidal Tendencies. And there was a whole series of books thrillingly called “No Frills Books.”

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CityLab: How Portland’s Landmark Zoning Reform Could Work

 That letter helped start a movement, and on Wednesday that movement achieved one major goal. With a 3-1 vote, the Portland city council approved the “Residential Infill Project” (RIP), a package of amendments to the city’s zoning code that legalizes up to four homes on nearly any residential lot and sharply limits building sizes. The changes pave the way for duplexes, triplexes, cottage clusters, backyard accessory dwelling units, basement apartments, and other types of affordable “missing middle” housing that have been banned in Portland since the adoption of the city’s first zoning code in 1924.

Developers will also now have the option to build as many as six homes on any lot if at least half of the resulting sixplex is available to low-income households at regulated, below-market prices — a so-called “deeper affordability option” that advocates estimate is the equivalent of a free subsidy of $100,000 or more per unit to nonprofit developers. Parking mandates that required builders to provide space for cars along with people are also now a thing of the past on most of the city’s residentially zoned land. [...]

But Portland’s project is unique and potentially more effective, experts say. RIP increases the allowable floor-to-area ratio (FAR) for multi-unit buildings, while reducing FAR for new single-family homes — a devilish detail that may be key for accelerating production, according to Michael Andersen, a senior researcher at the Sightline Institute, a research center focused on sustainability and urban policy. This sliding size cap will allow multi-unit buildings to take up more of their lots than single-unit buildings. The changes are also by-right, which means developers will be able to utilize them without neighborhood design reviews and appeals processes that can stymie new plans, as vividly seen in drawn-out local zoning battles in neighboring California. On Tuesday, Andersen wrote that Portland’s changes are “the most pro-housing reform to low-density zones in U.S. history.” [...]

But many environmental groups, including the local chapter of the Sunrise Movement, support the changes, as do anti-displacement activists who helped shape the sixplex amendment, which was added in 2019. Along with detailed changes to FAR that incentivize more low-income housing, the reforms are expected to “change the economics of displacement,” said David Sweet, a co-founder of Portland For Everyone, a coalition of housing nonprofits, residents and businesses that advocated for the infill change.

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Architectural Digest: The Future of Apartment Towers Is Coming to Singapore

A pair of fascinating 56-story residential towers will soon rise on the western edge of Singapore’s urban core. The addition of more skyscrapers to a densely populated city-state is hardly surprising, but Avenue South Residences will also feature a selling point that will separate the building from all the rest. Slated to be completed in 2026, the towers will be the world’s tallest buildings created with Prefabricated Prefinished Volumetric Construction (PPVC) technology—where semi-finished apartment modules are built in factories offsite before being stacked, Lego-like, on top of one another. [...]

Modular homes also require less physical bodies to be present on a building site. This is an asset at a time when the U.S. construction industry—which has struggled to fill open positions—has seen its pool of migrant labor sharply reduced due to closed borders. Lower labor costs, faster construction times, and economies of scale mean that modular housing can produce cost savings of as much as 15% in some cities, experts say. [...]

But PPVC homes aren’t always cheaper: The median price of an apartment at Avenue South Residences is just under $1.1 million. The condominiums cost about 5% more to build than if traditional methods have been used, says Cheng, whose firm recently worked on another 40-story PPVC tower in Singapore. That said, he notes that prices are quickly becoming more competitive as the technology evolves further and more developers and builders achieve expertise in PPVC construction.

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Architizer: The Power of Tradition: Russia Unveils a Massive Cathedral Dedicated to the Military

The Russian Revival style of architecture, which combines historical details with modern building materials and techniques, remains popular in Russia. In fact, one of the largest and most ambitious buildings ever created in this style was just opened last month.

The Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces is dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the Red Army’s Victory in the Great Patriotic War, which is what Russians call World War II. In addition to being a place of worship for practitioners of the Russian Orthodox faith, the cathedral is a monument to Russian military might, both in World War II and in all other historical conflicts where Russian armies prevailed. [...]

Clearly, the church was built with the intention that it would stand alongside St. Basil’s and other important Orthodox cathedrals as a significant Russian landmark. When the project was announced, in 2018, Russian President Vladimir Putin said it would be “one more symbol of the indestructibility of our national traditions, of our loyalty to the memory of our forefathers and their achievements,” according to a report in the Times of London. [...]

The dimensions of the church are symbolic. The diameter of the drum of the main dome is 19.45 meters, symbolizing the final year of World War II, 1945. The belfry is 75 meters heigh, representing the 75 years that have passed between 1945 and 2020, the year of the church’s consecration. And finally, the height of the small dome is 14.18 meters, reflecting the 1,418 days and nights that the conflict lasted. The steps to the cathedral are rumored to be clad in metal sourced from melted-down Nazi tanks.

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