Day Trip to Dresden

Today we went on our last class sponsored excursion to the city of Dresden, Germany. Prior to the train ride, however, the class made a trip altering discovery. The McDonalds in the Hauptbahnhof had ice and free refills. Now to all those reading in this from America, you may not realize the significance of this. Well just to inform you, Germany (and most of Europe) have not excepted the advent of ice in ones beverage as well the concept of free refills. Therefore, I found it was the American way to enjoy an icy cold cola before the train ride.

The first building we saw in Dresden was the UFA Cinema Center (above) by Coop Himmelblau. Usually I find there buildings incredibly intriguing and well done but this one did not satisfy. At first glance it appeared cool and dynamic how they were using the lobby of the theater as a sort of spectacle but once one started analyzing the details they realize thats its just an erratic mess. For the stair alone I counted 5 different types of connections to perform the same task. I'm no big shot architect but even I know thats bad. So either they were purposely being scatterbrained for some "deconstructivist" reason or they just told the contractor to "make it work." Either way the final product was disappointing.

Next was the VW Glass Factory (above). This building was alright as all it was was a glass box with some irregular forms plugged in. So not bad just not as phenomenal as it could have been.

The next building was meant to simply be a walk by, however, we were lucky enough to receive an impromptu tour from an employee. The school, St. Benno Grammar School (above), was designed by Gunter Behnisch who also design the Academy de Kunst near our apartment. The school was really well done all the way down to the details with a fantastic atrium and roof garden.

After eating eating at "Schitz " for lunch we walked over to this new Synagogue. It was a really nice subtle building which rotated from the site geometry to the orientation at which to pray.

Last we got to take a tour of the Semper Opera House. And I know some of you are saying to yourselves, "thats a really pretty old building," and you my friend have been "Schinkelled." Schinkelling refers to the late architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel who commonly used fake finishes rather than the real thing. In other words, it is an architecture of lies. In his defense, this was a common practice of the time period but still a cop out in my opinion. Either way this building was built in the 1950s after it was bombed in WWII rather than the era its exterior suggest. This has become common practice in most of the heavily bombed German cities we have seen and I do not believe it was necessarily the right thing to do. I can appreciate clinging to one's history and wanting to honor but building a replica is not doing that. I think that they could have instead built a completely new building that still honored the old traditions without copying them.