The Olympic Games From Berlin To London

I've never been to the Olympics - maybe some day - but I have been to former Olympic grounds. In Atlanta, and in Berlin. I’ve been to Germany twice.

The first time was in the fall of 1994. I was studying abroad in Florence. During the mid-semester week break, I journeyed to Stuttgart to see Sir James Stirling’s Neue Staatsgalerie, an art museum designed by the British architect that had been highly praised and carefully studied by my architecture school faculty. My sketches, below, are not gorgeous. But I tried to see the building, and remember it - with plans, sections, perspectives, and axonometrics.

Neue Staatsgalerie designed by James Stirling. Sketches, 1994.

The second time was in the summer of 2000. I had received a travel fellowship grant for a month of study and wandering. It was nearly a decade after German reunification. I visited Berlin and then Hamburg and Hanover, while the world exposition was underway. Hannover’s Sprengel Museum had a vast retrospective on Kurt Schwitters, the greatest collage artist ever. I was in heaven.

Before my second year of grad school, I was not yet interested in cities or urban design, not really. Sure I adored Florence and I refused to commute to work by car, but I was no Jane Jacobs.  When I traveled, I made a beeline from Corbu building to Mies building to Stirling building, sometimes traveling for days to see a single building, passing through beautiful historic cities with blinders en route to a modern masterpiece.

In Berlin I traveled by train and bicycle, all over the city. There was construction everywhere, new embassies, new apartment blocks, new government buildings. The Reichstag’s new glass dome was open to visitors like me. Sketch, collage, photograph, nonstop. I took the rail out to the former Olympic grounds primarily because there was a Unite by Le Corbusier built there - one of only 4 identified in the Le Corbusier Guide as being authored by him.

At the grounds I came face to face with the power or Nazi architecture. While it can be easy to find the architectural remnants of authoritarian regimes - like fascist architecture in Italy, and colonial architecture in India - Nazi architecture is less abundant. Most of it was bombed and destroyed and wiped from the earth. The Olympic grounds are that rare ensemble that has survived. Theses grounds hosted the famous 1936 Summer Olympics, with a backdrop of European political turmoil and dramatic performances by American Jesse Owens, winning 4 gold medals. When I visited, the 100,000 seat stadium was being rehabilitated for football matches in the coming years. The massive clock tower was joined by 4 other slender towers at the long axis of the stadium. The site planning was designed to be vast and scaleless and imposing.

Seven years ago I was living in London when they assembled their Olympic host city bid. The good news of winning was greeted with a morning of terrorist bombings, right in my neighborhood.

London now hosts its third Olympics, 76 years after Hitler and Jesse Owens. Europe is in economic turmoil, and authoritarian regimes and their architectures prosper the world over.

However: the internet and cheap oil are producing the most informed, educated, and well-traveled generations ever. Gen X, Gen Y and the Millennials will eventually power the world. I’ve worked with and studied with colleagues from dozens of countries, including the host nations for the Berlin, Beijing, London, and Rio games. If we're lucky, we'll get things sorted out in time, for the next time London or Berlin hosts the games.

I Used To Have A Travel Journal

The years fly by. It has been nearly a decade since I first had a blog, which I thought was better called a travel journal. I'm not a lifelong diarist, but I did keep a detailed travel journal during a semester of college spent abroad in Florence, Italy, and briefly thereafter. I wanted to remember that experience beyond the evidence in my sketchbooks.

I was about to move to London, and enlisted my longtime mate Mitch Goldstein in setting up a website for me that had a blog component. The website had a great homepage, but little usability other than the blog and an email account. My old website was www.christopherpizzi.com, which I have since abandoned. The blog could have helped me keep in touch with family and friends, but it didn't. It was really a travel journal loosely linked to my frequent weekend travels and related Ofoto postings - which were where the real updates surfaced, via brief narrative introductions to the photo albums.

That old blog was lost, along with its contents, due to my digital ambivalence and Mitch's metamorphosis from closeted visual savant to design world wunderkind. And all the Ofoto postings were eventually deleted by Kodak. Though maybe it all lives on in one of Google's server farms in exurban Oregon.

I wanted to call this blog TravelSketch - connecting traveling with sketching as a way to enhance and retain memory - but that was already taken. I settled on using my name as the blog address, for directness and clarity, while inserting TravelSketch after my name in the title.

I was in London for over two years. I worked at a small but renowned architecture firm in Bloomsbury, travelled frequently, took thousands of pictures, and designed often. But I did very little proper sketching, like this composition of sketches from a sunny Saturday afternoon at Pitzhanger Manor, the weekend home of architect Sir John Soane.

For many years I've been looking, albeit casually, for the right online place to share thoughts - writings, drawings, pictures. I think this may be the right place.