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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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. 

CNN: Inside Europe's stunning abandoned churches

 Across Europe, hundreds of churches that were once filled with worship and song are now at the mercy of the elements. With religion's role declining sharply around the continent in recent decades, the most promising outcome for many of these centuries-old structures is being reincarnated as residential or commercial properties.

Hoping to capture their faded splendor before it's too late, French photographer Francis Meslet has spent almost a decade documenting abandoned churches, chapels and priories in varying states of disrepair. His stunning images show dilapidated pipe organs, overgrown cloisters, long-empty pews and sunlight pouring into naves strewn with dust and rubble. [...]

Featuring images shot across France, Belgium, Germany, Italy and Portugal, his new book, "Abandoned Churches: Unclaimed Places of Worship," offers an eerie tribute to a building type he describes as "very special in the history of architecture and the history of men." Meslet, who once wanted to be architect, has a sharp eye for structural symmetry, with his collection spanning styles from gothic to neoclassical.

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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: How Reykjavik's Sheet-Metal Homes Beat the Icelandic Winter

 This housing’s relative newness still reveals a striking factor that distinguishes Iceland from the rest of Europe: Though Iceland has been inhabited for almost 1,200 years, only a modest number of its surviving domestic buildings predate the late 19th century.

That’s partly because, as Iceland emerged from centuries of hardship, it turned its back on traditional building types associated with poverty, leaving them to deteriorate. Until the late 19th century, most Icelanders lived in turf houses. Compensating for a lack of local trees, which grow slowly in Iceland, these houses built up walls of earth and grass-growing sod around timber frames. The few remaining survivals look delightful under their coating of lush grass. To live in, they were frequently damp, dark and poorly warmed by a single kitchen hearth, while the walls needed regular repair or rebuilding to remain solid and watertight. “People think of turf houses as like regular ones but with grass-growing roofs” says Icelandic TV host, former city councilor and campaigner Gísli Marteinn Baldursson, “but in fact living in one was almost like living in a hole in the ground.” [...]

These houses became the default type both in Reykjavik and elsewhere in Iceland. When the city experienced a major fire in 1915 that left metal-clad houses largely unharmed, the city made this trend into law, requiring a corrugated coating for all new houses built close together. Kept in place until the mid-1920s, this bylaw ended up giving Iceland’s capital the largest cluster of metal-clad buildings in the world.

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The Guardian: Tudormania: Why can’t we get over it?

 Right now, the Tudors hold the nation in an especially fearsome grip. In the British history section of my local Waterstones, in a not terribly royalist part of London, I measured four shelves of Tudoralia, covering the period from Henry VII’s snatching of the crown on Bosworth field in 1485 to the death of Elizabeth I in 1603. (The next most popular period was the 19th century, with two-and-a-half shelves.) The Tudor titles were mostly variations on a very limited set of themes: The Six Wives of Henry VIII; Henry VIII: King and Court; Elizabeth the Queen; The Elizabethans; Young Henry: the Rise of Henry VIII; Six Wives: the Queens of Henry VIII; Elizabeth’s Women. [...]

The Tudors are the first people in British history into whose eyes we feel we can gaze. We slip into their world – or what we imagine to be their world – with ease. They were the first people to have lived in recognisable houses, rather than in the draughty great halls and militaristic castles of their medieval forebears. There is something comfortingly domestic and ineffably English about these dwellings, which is surely why mock-Tudor has been, since the late 19th century, such a persistently revived vernacular architecture. Some of the inhabitants of these houses had even been women, whose characters were a little more than cyphers (such as the redoubtable matriarch Bess of Hardwick who, with her four husbands, rivalled Henry VIII in marital energy if not murderous tendency). Hans Holbein’s portraits of Henry’s court carry an air of realism verging on the photographic; even those stiff, flat-as-a-pancake Elizabethan portraits of country squires and their be-ruffed wives have something bewitching about them. Unlike their forebears, they spoke what we can recognise as our language, the language crystallised by England’s most towering and inescapable literary figure. [...]

The different ways in which the Tudor period was used by past generations can throw light on the way we see them now. Take the narrative of Hampton Court, which was opened to the public by Queen Victoria. The 19th-century tourist clutching the standard guidebook, published in 1841, would have received a completely different view of the palace from that conveyed today. The palace had “a striking lesson” to teach “on the mutability of human greatness”. Its hero, however, was not Henry VIII or Anne Boleyn, but Cardinal Wolsey. Henry gets short shrift – a single brief chapter, as opposed to Wolsey’s six. The Victorian story was much more invested in the lad who pulled himself up by his bootstraps, attained the chancellorship of England – and “fell a sacrifice to his own ambition”. The message was that worldly desires should be tempered by “humility and piety” – a lesson quite absent from our present dealings with the 16th century, whose protagonists provide spectacle rather than moral instruction. [...]

This secularisation, as well as perhaps a discomfort with the idea of revolution, explains how relatively little thought we give, as a culture, to the following century – the century of the English civil war. Martin Davidson told me that for him and his colleagues at the BBC, historical periods have certain textures; they serve as “story engines” for different kinds of narratives. “This place, this time that we call Tudorland, Tudorville has irresistible ingredients,” he said. “It is sex becomes death, via intrigue … I wish we could do more on the civil war, to be honest. But it’s difficult to find attractive characters, and it doesn’t help that they have zero sex lives,” he said. And, besides, the 17th century is too complex. “In a 60-minute programme, you spend 57 minutes explaining the rump parliament, ship money, the Irish issue.” Had we more confidence in the Westminster parliament now, perhaps, like the Whig historians of the 19th century, we would have more fondness for its 17th-century champions.

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Architectuul: FOMA 38: Five Examples of Sacral Architecture in Kaunas

 A choice to turn a church into a warehouse is rather interesting, since a warehouse had a symbolic meaning in the Soviet Union. Some researchers believe that converting churches into warehouses “was not the abolition of the holy but, so to speak, its replacement. The warehouse is just as ideal an order in the material world as the church is in the spiritual world. The warehouse is a materialist church, but instead of collecting people who are seeking in prayer an exalted form of the soul, it houses a multitude of objects that have found a precise inventoried form.”[2]

Nevertheless, according to various data from 1953 to 1959 nearly 15-20% of churches were closed while some of sacral buildings went through radical transformations. Vilnius Cathedral Basilica (1783) by Gucevičius was closed in 1949. During 1950 sculptures of saints, which were on the rooftop were removed and destroyed. Since the Cathedral was closed a lot of artifacts were stolen while the interior was ravaged. The Cathedral become part of the Museum of Art and was in1956 transformed into a gallery. The building was returned to the Catholic community in 1988. [...]

Kaunas Mosque also known as Vytautas the Great Mosque is one of four remaining mosques in Lithuania. Its design reminds the mosques in Northern Africa, a compact, small-volume mosque combines historical forms with oriental motifs like an elliptical dome and a small minaret, which was never used for its traditional purpose.

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The Atlantic: A Solution to the Confederate-Monument Problem

Once they are down, must they go straight to the smelter? Certain charmless totalitarian ideologues have enjoyed obliterating evidence of their predecessors—think of Wahhabi grave-leveling, the denuding of churches by Protestant zealots, the erasure of enemies of Stalin. Not wanting to be like Stalin is good. Certain hemming-and-hawing, bien-pensant types have proposed that we “put them in a museum.” The problem is that museums are also sometimes sites of veneration, and in a museum Lee could retain his dignity, unless he is perhaps used as a coat rack, or put on a mechanically rocking pedestal so children can ride him if they insert a quarter (U.S. currency only, please). [...]

Or, if Virginia must honor its heritage with museum treatment, it could emulate another eerie European site—this one untainted by genocidal associations. In Copenhagen, Denmark, one of my favorite landmarks is a bronze statue, Agnete and the Merman, which is installed permanently at the bottom of one of the city’s canals. Passersby can see it under the surface if they stop to look, but most of the time no one is looking at all—and because it is submerged, it remains present but locked away in another world. The water is usually clear. [...]

Ridding ourselves of history is a fantasy—in this case a fantasy of absolution, as if any place could be washed free of its sins by a single act of iconoclasm. But history can be managed in more and less graceful ways. Either of these would create a public space without consecrating one—and make the statues’ final home redolent of history without stinking of it.

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City Beautiful: Train stations are making a comeback. But why?

In Denver and cities across the United States, historic train stations are getting a new lease on life. Many are anchoring downtown redevelopment projects as well.

Quartz: America’s most controversial office-lobby mural has been resurrected

In 1933, an office mural caused an uprising in New York City. Man at the Crossroads, a large fresco by celebrated Mexican painter Diego Rivera, was meant for the lobby of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, but a rogue figure in the composition caused the entire mural to be censored and eventually destroyed.[...]

Haskell’s excitement is understandable. Flanking Rivera’s impressive 5 ft x 15 ft, three-panel painting are two original sketches which are being shown publicly in the US for the first time. The sketches show how Rivera, a member of the Communist party, almost imperceptibly yet radically altered his proposal, by slyly adding a portrait of Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin to the right of the central figure. [...]

“The interesting thing about the commission is that both the Rockefellers and Rivera came into the project with misconception,” explains Haskell. The Rockefellers relied on Rivera’s track record of producing murals for other capitalist enterprises with little controversy. Rivera, who was heralded as the “star of the Mexican school” and world-renowned at that point, thought his corporate patrons would cede to his artistic whim.

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The Guardian: German court rules antisemitic carving can stay on church wall

A court in Germany has rejected a case calling for a local church associated with the Protestant firebrand Martin Luther to remove an ancient antisemitic carving from its wall.

Known as the Judensau (Jews’ sow), the 13th-century bas-relief on the church in Wittenberg, Saxony-Anhalt state, depicts a rabbi peering into a pig’s anus, while other figures suckle from its teats. [...]

A panel of judges at the state’s superior court in Naumburg found the image “did not harm Jews’ reputation” because it was “embedded” in a wider memorial context, the presiding judge, Volker Buchloh, said, according to regional broadcaster MDR. [...]

Many churches in the Middle Ages had similar Judensau carvings, which were also aimed at sending the stark message that Jews were not welcome in their communities.

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The Guardian: When Soviets met Stans: the tower blocks of central Asia – in pictures (3 May 2019)

Shares 544 Two Italian photographers, Roberto Conte and Stefano Perego, documented Soviet-era buildings in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan – and saw how Eastern characteristics crept into the brutal USSR designs.

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Failed Architecture: The Far Right’s Obsession With Modern Architecture

Today, this traditionalist tendency is gaining renewed momentum in various corners of the European Right. In the Netherlands, far-right nationalist politician Thierry Baudet frequently derides the “ugly architecture” that is, in his mind, corrupting Dutch society. And in Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party has spawned a movement of revivalist architecture by individual practitioners obsessed with Saxon mythology and pitted ideologically against the metropolitan built environment. Amid the rising tide of populism in Europe, Western chauvinists and white supremacists are attempting to re-valorise traditional Western architecture in order to advance their reactionary and exclusive politics. [...]

The motley crew of right-wing architecture critics owes much to the work of Roger Scruton. Scruton positions himself as part of an older conservative philosophical tradition and a stalwart supporter of all things traditional. His gentlemanly demeanour is frequently played up by the British media, including the BBC, who allowed him to host the documentary Why Beauty Matters in 2009. In the documentary, Scruton repeatedly refers to the “crime of modern architecture”, and in one scene argues sardonically that the architects of a dilapidated office block were as much vandals as those who later graffiti-tagged the place. The argument of the documentary more polemically restates the general thesis of his 1979 book The Classical Vernacular: Architectural Principles in the Age of Nihilism — where “nihilism” may as well be an indeterminate synonym for “left-wing”. Here, Scruton argues that architecture lost its way somewhere in the early 20th century by attempting to forge a new aesthetic style less dependent on classical and gothic features.[...]

The aim of the architectural aspect of such a war is to herald a ‘return’ to aesthetic order. This can mean two things. On the more moderate edge, the ‘return’ signifies the aesthetic move to a bygone era that divorces a building from its social context. This is visible in how Scruton’s commission suggests that the housing crisis is a problem solely of aesthetics, and that we can house more people if we build in an architectural vernacular more accustomed to a specifically-conceived ‘public’. This is a ridiculous claim, which ignores the bigger, structural problems of land, wealth, inequality and systemic oppression and exploitation that right-wing governments of the day at best wish not to address and at worst actively encourage. [...]

The proposal of Baudet and other right-wing thinkers to return to vernacular building traditions is as historically ill-informed as it is deplorable. This comes across in the form of basic errors. Watson, for instance, makes no distinction between the opposing styles of modernism and postmodernism. It also manifests in their lack of understanding of why the traditionalist style they favour took hold in the first place. During the nineteenth century, neoclassical, gothic and renaissance styles frequently masked the squalid living conditions and poor construction quality of newly-erected tenement houses in Europe’s industrial cities. Meanwhile, in places like Paris, the introduction of grand, classically-influenced architecture to the city’s centres was predicated on the displacement of millions of working-class people, and the destruction of centuries-old medieval buildings, much to the chagrin of contemporary conservationists.

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UnHerd: What my Polish town taught me about localism

This is great news, but prosperity, even on a modest scale, brings new problems. Economic progress enables the homogenisation of urban spaces as multi-nationals, chains and developers move in, vulture-like. I have wondered if the distinctive character of Tarnowskie Góry can survive the town’s success. [...]

Globally, men and women have been struggling to find a place for local character and human scale amid modernity. Localism is a term that has nostalgic connotations, conjuring up images of traditional communities which, for all their charms, are hard to recreate: rural hideaways, farmers’ markets and fêtes. In practice, localism can be an elite exercise. Wealthy citizens can isolate themselves from society with local produce, services and cultural establishments that are prohibitively expensive for the common man. [...]

This may strike people as kitschy, and to some extent it is, but in a post-modern world identity inevitably entails some level of knowingness. In-group solidarity is fostered through a cheerful absurdism, which acknowledges our smallness in the face of the grand metropolises of Poland, Europe and the world that we see through television and the Internet — but also embraces that smallness as a proud alternative. It might not be New York City, but it is ours.

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Places Journal: Churches and States

Many commentators have looked to precedents that could offer some solace, especially to the histories of great buildings that had been rebuilt after fire. (On the day of the fire, the Teatro La Fenice, in Venice, tweeted in solidarity: “We burnt twice but twice we have risen from our ashes stronger. We are at your side, friends, so fear not!” 2) Here I would like to offer a largely forgotten yet remarkably suggestive historical parallel: the accidental fire that in July 1823 destroyed the immense early Christian basilica of San Paolo fuori le mura (Saint Paul’s Outside the Walls). 3 Like Notre-Dame, the fourth-century San Paolo, just south of Rome, was a holy site of the highest stature: the burial place of Saint Paul and, with St. Peter’s and the Lateran basilica, one of the three most important churches in Rome. San Paolo was also, before the fire, the biggest and best preserved church to have survived from the heroic era when Christianity, formerly outlawed, became the state religion of the late Roman Empire. [...]

The debates and commentaries that followed the two fires strike similar notes. The fire at San Paolo also occurred during a period of crisis — a long via crucis of occupation, humiliation, insult, and upheaval that had threatened the very survival of the Roman Catholic Church. The crisis had begun three decades earlier, in France, when an atheistic Revolution transformed the country traditionally known as the Church’s “eldest daughter” into its mortal enemy. In the tumultuous years that followed, Rome would endure two desecrating occupations, one pope would die in a French prison, another would be bullied into a series of enfeebling international agreements, and many church buildings in the city would be damaged or even demolished. After the fall of Napoléon, in 1814, Church leaders confronted what seemed an unrecognizable social, political, religious, and economic landscape. Catholic observance was in decline across Europe; political liberalism was ascendant; rights and privileges the Church had long enjoyed abroad were truncated or gone. The Church was collapsing financially, while the Pontifical State had become little more than a stagnant welfare state — a feudal relic surrounded by neighbors transitioning to industrial capitalism. The fire at the Roman basilica could scarcely have avoided being perceived as a supercharged metaphor. [...]

Opposition to this plan arose immediately among clerics and scholars who argued instead for an exact reconstruction of the old basilica, which came to be known as the in pristinum solution. At the time this was unprecedented. In earlier centuries new buildings had sometimes made formal references to older ones, while repairs or extensions sometimes sought to preserve harmony with an existing building. But a complete replica of a destroyed building was unheard of. 24 Valadier’s response was blunt: You cannot resuscitate the past. What is lost is lost. What had been most valuable about the old basilica, in his view, was the patina, the aura of antiquity, and that was irretrievably gone. All you could reconstitute were the mere physical forms, and these he regarded — as had most historians for centuries — as self-evidently inferior to any new design rooted in the Vitruvian classical tradition. Far better, Valadier wrote, to memorialize the destroyed basilica with a scale model, and to mount its surviving antique columns along the interior walls of a modern design that would “do honor to the 19th century.” 25 [...]

The key difference now was that the faithful would have to be persuaded to donate voluntarily to San Paolo. Accordingly, the in pristinum faction argued that a replica reconstruction would appeal far more to the ordinary faithful than would a tasteful church in the modern style. This point proved decisive for Leo XII, who longed to launch a popular Catholic revival that might heal the wounds of recent years. The fundraising drive for San Paolo became a centerpiece of that revival: an international crusade calling for obedience, sacrifice, and a cheerful spirit of Pauline devotion. Letters were circulated from Rome to be used by the clergy in making appeals at Sunday masses. What resulted was the first global fundraising drive in history. For several years, the Church collected money not only throughout Europe but also in the United States, Canada, China, the Philippines, Brazil, and Latin America. Lists of donors were published every six months in the Diario di Roma, and these were then reported in local papers from Baltimore to Tasmania — a publicity circuit which in turn fueled more donations. 48 With authority centralized in Rome and outreach extended to the hinterlands, this effort would prove to be one of the wellsprings of the great Catholic cultural and political revival that marked the second half of the 19th century. For it helped compel Rome finally to accept popular religiosity, which opened the way to the great upsurge of Marian devotion marked by the pilgrimages inaugurated at La Salette and Lourdes; the Catholic press soon expanded all over Europe, Pope Pius IX became the focus of a personality cult, and Catholic political movements gathered momentum. Catholics, in short, felt empowered as members of their Church as never before. 49

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The Calvert Journal: Bucharest modernism

Many of the houses in Anghel’s collection are designed by Marcel Janco, one of the founders of the Dadaist art movement. Janco and his Romanian contemporaries trained in Zurich, Paris, and Vienna before bringing International Style back home to Bucharest. Their repertoire is simple: flat roofs, layered cuboid shapes, porthole windows, glass brick, rounded corners. Some of the houses incorporate more traditional or art deco features. But generally speaking, their clean contours turn their back to the flourishes of Art-Nouveau; their stripped down lightness contrasts with the heavy neo-Romanian and neo-gothic style of the buildings that nestle side by side on central Bucharest’s streets.

Much of the modernist architecture in Bucharest, however, differs from the other, similar movements sweeping Europe at the same time. In Vienna, Berlin, and Frankfurt, the International Style was not purely an aesthetic concern, but a political project. Many of the era’s leading architects were motivated by the idea that beautiful housing should be open to the working classes as well as the rich. Aesthetics and politics were inextricably linked. They built functional, affordable, bright, large-scale social housing. In contrast, Romanian architects mostly served private clients. Janco and others returned from Western Europe to find Bucharest a fertile ground for their aesthetic projects: the capital’s educated urban elite were infatuated with modernism and commissioned the architects to design small residential blocks and private villas. [...]

Their opaque legal status explains the buildings’ wounds and exposed brickwork: many of the structures are now crumbling. Anghel says he doesn’t know anyone who lives in these houses due to their architectural merit. The people who care about these modernist structures can’t afford to buy them. Even listing these homes as architecturally valuable (as many already are) can’t save them, as it makes restoration an expensive business. There are those among Bucharest’s political and business elite who are simply waiting for these buildings to collapse, so that they can use the valuable land beneath to build bigger, more lucrative apartment blocks, Anghel tells me.

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Mental Floss: A Lost Japanese Village Has Been Uncovered in the British Columbia Wilderness

The site is located on the Lower Seymour Conservation Reserve, about 12 miles northeast of Vancouver. It’s approximately the size of a football field and contains the remains of more than a dozen cabins, a bathhouse, a road made of cedar planks, and a cedar platform that may have been a shrine. Muckle and his students have also unearthed more than 1000 items, including sake and beer bottles from Japan, teapots, game pieces, medicine bottles, clocks, pocket watches, clothing buttons, coins, and hoards of ceramics. [...]

Muckle believes that at least some of the 40 to 50 camp inhabitants chose to remain there, protected from rising racism in Canadian society, until 1942, when the Canadian government started moving Japanese immigrants to internment camps in the wake of the outbreak of World War II.

Muckle thinks the residents must have evacuated in a hurry since they left so many precious and personal items behind. “When people leave, usually they take all the good stuff with them,” he told North Shore News. His team even uncovered parts of an Eastman Kodak Bulls-Eye camera, a house key, and an expensive cook stove that someone had hidden behind a stump on the edge of the village. “They were probably smart enough to realize people might loot the site,” he added.

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The Calvert Journal: Inside Warsaw's fixation on the Palace of Culture and Science

The Palace’s origin story is part of the problem. It was framed as a direct gift from Stalin (although he died two years before construction was completed in 1955), designed by the Soviet architect Lev Rudnev, and largely built with Soviet machinery and labourers. It clearly resembles the “Seven Sisters” skyscrapers in Moscow — the largest of which, Moscow State University, was also a Rudnev design. Despite the incorporation of Polish national elements into the structure — the result of an architectural tour of the country that Rudnev undertook with Warsaw chief architect Józef Sigalin — the Palace is an indelible reminder of a post-war settlement that some Poles consider shameful. In Murawski’s words, “people were more negatively disposed towards it in the communist era because it was a direct expression not only of communism, but more so of Russian domination.” [...]

To simply equate the towering Palace with the oppressions of state socialism, however, is far too reductive. It was in no way universally disliked under communism, for one. This Stalinist edifice was the place where regular Poles were most likely to encounter Western culture: The Rolling Stones, Leonard Cohen, and Miles Davis played there; the bookshop of the Polish Academy of Sciences was the best place to buy foreign journals. As Murawski puts it, the Palace “always had this weird, double function.” His research suggests that, counter to popular opinion, it is precisely those Warsaw residents who have strong recollections of communism who are more likely to appreciate the Palace than “young people who have the bizarre, jaded idea that communism was all about Stalinist jackboots.” [...]

This is what Murawski hails as the “still-socialist” nature of the Palace, arguably its defining characteristic. He points out that the idea of “post-socialist” Eastern Europe ignores the fact that “a lot of powerful residues of the socialist period which completely transformed those countries continue to exist. The Palace is a socialist ghost or zombie which continues to haunt the reality of the capitalist city. Warsaw is a wild capitalist place: everything’s being privatised, there are huge billboards everywhere, children are being turfed out of their kindergartens so that aristocrats can move back into their stately homes. The Palace is an island exuding a kind of still-socialist publicness over the debris of the discombobulated city.” [...]

The Palace’s future as a beacon of public-mindedness in a hostile urban and political environment is far from guaranteed, though it has proven remarkably resilient thus far. Whatever the results of this autumn’s parliamentary elections — where left parties are predicted to gain up to 15 per cent of the vote — it will continue to serve as a lightning rod for Poles’ conflicting emotions about communism and capitalism alike. A more nuanced understanding of the nation’s past is sorely needed; the Palace proves that it is also more honest.

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The B1M: Why Europe Doesn't Build Skyscrapers

The Guardian: The lesson from the ruins of Notre Dame: don’t rely on billionaires

Barely has the fire been put out before some of the richest people in France rush to help rebuild it. From François-Henri Pinault, the ultimate owner of Gucci, comes €100m (£90m). Not to be outdone, the Arnault family at Louis Vuitton put up €200m. More of the wealthy join the bidding, as if a Damien Hirst is going under the hammer. Within just three days, France’s billionaire class has coughed up nearly €600m. Or so their press releases state.

A few folk question this very public display of plutocratic piety, but we are of course professional malcontents. Some of Paris’s 3,600 rough sleepers protest at how so many euros can be found for a new cathedral roof yet not a cent to put a roof over their heads – still, what do the poor know of the sublime? From all other seats, the applause is deafening. “Billionaires can sometimes come in really handy,” remarks the editor of Moneyweek. “Everybody is at our bedside,” says French TV celeb Stéphane Bern. Flush with cash, French president Emmanuel Macron vows the gothic masterpiece will be rebuilt within five years. Front pages scored, studio hours filled, the world moves on. You almost certainly haven’t heard the rest of the story – yet you should, because it comes with one hell of a twist. [...]

Advertisement Whether in France or Britain or the US, the rich give money to the grand institutions at the heart of our cultures to secure their social status in plaques and photo opportunities. In much the same way, they fund our political parties, then enjoy the kickbacks when they form a government. As Julia Cagé, an economist at Paris’s SciencesPo, points out, some of the same people pledging donations to Notre Dame were also among those who funded Macron’s rise to the presidency. In her recent award-winning book, to be published in English next year as The Price of Democracy, Cagé calculates that 600 wealthy people in France gave between €3m and €4.5m to Macron’s election campaign. In other words, 2% of all donors made up between 40 % and 60% of all En Marche funding. Within a few months, the new president cut taxes on the wealthy, giving his richest donors “a return of nearly 60,000% on their investment”. Just as with Notre Dame – a tiny deposit, a lot of influence and one hell of a payout.

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