Postcards with their horizontal format might have been invented for images of bridges. Today’s offering is a selection of Bridges of France in postcard form. There are viaducts, footbridges, turning bridges, lifting bridges, bridges of stone and bridges of iron and steel. Hardcore postcard collectors take bridges very seriously. Geoffrey Goldberg has over 6,000 examples of which a few can be seen here. And, if you want even more then over on flickr, bridgepix is displaying a fine collection.
This is a fold-out card of the type dismissed by postcard collectors as beyond the pale. But, when they’re good, like this one, they are little packets of visual delight. The ones to avoid are devoted to the dubious pleasures of such places as the Bunga-Bunga Apple Blossom Parkway or the Coypu National Memorial. Until 1963 the Overland Route ran from Omaha to San Francisco and the folder offers portraits of some of the stations encountered en route and some rather dull generic views of outdoor activities, not shown here. Union Pacific is a monster among railroads. Passenger trains ceased in 1971 but as a carrier of freight it remains the largest railroad in the US. Alone among major railroads it has employed the same colour scheme for locomotives since 1934. The favoured colour is known as Armour Yellow having been pioneered by the Armour Meat Company on refrigerated cars. Finally we have two examples of corporate advertising showing some confusion about the demographic.
This house is best seen in afternoon sunshine when it looks truly resplendent with its imposing height and breadth, enormous twin horseshoe-arched first floor windows and, above all, its startling colour imagery on the façade. It was built on a double plot in 1897 for the artist, Albert Ciamberlani, at 48 rue Defacqz off avenue Louise. Ciamberlani designed the spectacular Symbolist imagery and it was executed in sgraffito (a technique of incising designs in coloured plaster) by artist and poster designer, Adolphe Crespin. The medallions on the entablature represent the Labours of Hercules, set in a frame of decorative urns and sunflower blooms. The circular floral motif is repeated for a third time in the cast-iron balcony rail. The architect was Paul Hankar, a close friend and associate of the better known Victor Horta. Four years later, Hankar’s premature death in 1901 would end his promising career his and only a few examples from his relatively small output survive.
Four years earlier in 1893, Hankar designed and built his own house and studio at 71 rue Defacqz. At the same time, on the next street, the Hôtel Tassel was being constructed to a design by Victor Horta and these two events are often described as the birth of the Art Nouveau house. Hankar’s plan prefigured Horta’s design for his home by dividing the building vertically into a studio and working area on the left and living accommodation on the right. The studio section was formed from rustic stonework on the ground floor with mostly ironwork and glass above. The accommodation section was mainly brick with polychrome window surrounds. Sgraffito decoration, again by Crespin, is present on both sections and the two are unified by sharing common brickwork. Art Nouveau was notable for its brevity but Hankar was spared the painful task of adjusting to a post-Art Nouveau world and never experienced the critical odium that would descend upon the style.
Chris Mullen has written at Visual Telling of Stories of the travelling band of assorted players and extras that seem to accompany the itinerant postcard photographer. Right on cue they assemble a facsimile of street life in front of the photographer’s tripod, carrying ladders, pushing handcarts, engaging total strangers in animated conversation, admiring their reflections in shop windows, addressing remarks to a wayward child. The contrived effect is often ruined by a passing bonehead who insists on staring directly into the camera lens with feet planted apart and rooted to the spot. This small selection of cards come from occasions when the photographer had no need of this repertory company and feature crowds, posed and unposed – the vastness of the crowd is, in effect, the subject of the picture.
The reconstruction of Antwerpen-Centraal station began in 1998 and the extended and enhanced station opened at the end of 2007. The central platforms were removed (leaving six platforms at ground level) and deep excavation left a void large enough to accommodate two new levels of underground platforms, each level having four platforms. The lowest platforms enabled through trains to continue their journey via a newly constructed 2.36 mile rail tunnel under the city from Berchem to the south and Luchtbal to the north where it regains the surface. This epic remodelling of the station has created some thrilling and vertiginous spatial sensations. The subterranean levels are supported by uncluttered geometry that rests comfortably with the Baroque extravagance of the original station. More about the project can be read at the Railway Technology website.
Comparisons with the transformation of St. Pancras are interesting. Both projects involved creating new levels but while Antwerp has preserved clear sightlines of its architectural magnificence, this did not happen at St. Pancras where security and passenger segregation priorities were placed much higher and resulted in more enclosed spaces. The carefully preserved symmetry and open aspect of Antwerp allows a spectator on the concourse to stare down to the very depths of the station. Likewise, even at the lowest level, the concourse façade can be glimpsed in its distant and dizzying splendour. No such experience is available at St. Pancras where an asymmetrical plan was imposed with the Eurostar platforms pushed to the east. Spatial clarity and integration were also sacrificed at St. Pancras by banishing the Midland Mainline services to a basic box bolted on to the north west of the station. The result is that St. Pancras is a fragmented and discontinuous experience that will always lack the brilliant sense of coherence that Antwerp offers.
Cultural contrasts are also on display. St. Pancras reflects two British obsessions – retail and national security. Entering the station, the initial sensation is one of emerging into a glitzy shopping mall, overshadowed by the gruesome Champagne Bar. Locating the Ticket Sales is a serious challenge in an environment of colossal visual confusion. In Antwerp, a city where trading runs as deep in the collective DNA as anywhere, almost all the retail activity is confined to the arcades that run down the flanks of the station. This sort of discretion would once have been typically British – now we must travel abroad to escape the insolent vulgarity of commercial triumphalism.
Each station offers something unique. Extreme Gothic Revival at St. Pancras and the cavernous space of the foyer in Antwerp are rich and unique experiences. But Antwerp would be my preference, not least because it offers easy ground-level access to the city of which it is part via many exits and entrances while St. Pancras seems to exist in a bubble with hideously constrained access via unnecessarily mean spirited entranceways. A new feature length semi-documentary film Antwerpen-Centraal (2011), directed by Belgian film-maker Peter Krüger celebrates the station taking W G Sebald’s book, Austerlitz as a starting point. Follow this link to read more and to view a fascinating piece of time-lapse photography based on the station.
It would be a wonderful thing if Monkey Brand were to reappear on the supermarket shelves if only for the pleasure of watching our mighty brand character shoulder aside today’s feeble examples. When times were good for Monkey Brand our simian friend missed no opportunity to remind the public of his extraordinary powers – full page magazine advertisements and inserts were accompanied by trade cards, of which these are typical examples. He’s a jester, a juggler and the Ancient of Days, all in the service of The World’s Most Marvellous Cleanser and Polisher. Victorian advertisers were notorious for embracing bizarre concepts and one of the most troubling to the present day observer is the use of the unclothed infant form. In this instance the child, in all its chubby innocence, is surrounded by an admiring flock of winged and disembodied monkey heads, introducing us to another singular peculiarity – the hairy angel. The Monkey Brand soap opera has been extensively explored in these pages, most recently, here.
The Great Globe can be found perched near the cliff edge in Durlston Country Park near the Dorset resort of Swanage. It was carved in sections out of Portland Stone in 1887 in Greenwich and transported to Dorset by sea. Weighing over 40 tons it is described as one of the largest stone spheres in the world. In 1891 a group of stone slabs were placed around the globe and inscribed with some handy facts about the natural world. Geopolitically it is frozen in the late Victorian era and likely to remain so. It makes an unusual visitor attraction – it possesses no associations with the great and good, it commemorates no historic event, there are no religious or spiritual connotations – all it has is curiosity value. Publishers of postcards found a ready demand for images of the globe and this little group was assembled very quickly with no great effort involved. I went to see it about twenty years ago and will post some photographs when I locate them. It may be time for a return trip – the globe was restored last year.
