WORK|OUT European Students’ Review

EXPLORING EUROPEAN SPACES BY BIKE: A TRAVEL DIARY

What are the common denominators binding Le Corbusiers’s Parents together with Freddy Mercury, Charlie Chaplin, Sergej Diaghilev and Alexander Nobokov?

   | Dirk Louw. The answer to this, I discovered on a 5 month cycling tour through Europe. I am a South African Architect, living in Ireland. I started this bicycle trip on the west coast of Ireland in Galway, flew from Shannon airport to Belgium and continued from there. I have only done short trips before , and had no fixed route. The only criteria I had was to do it as cheap as possible, while my Shengen visa lasted.

   So I cycled, following a “derive” mode of experiencing a city as used by the Situationist movement, Baudelaire and the flaneurs and the ecrivain travellers. That means, I just did what I wanted. If I liked a place enough, I stayed for a few days or went back on my route and did it again. You can easily do that with a bicycle, if you pass a thing that looks interesting. With a car you will not always turn around, with a bike I always did.

   At the beginning of the trip, in April at the Hoek van Holland, the weather was still bad, it rained for days on end. I was a bit inexperienced, I had to much luggage and it was getting soaked. I had to stay out of the rain, and sat in bus stops and cheese shops. It was miserable. I stopped at every cycling shop I found and then procrastinated over the expensive protective rain trousers or gloves I bought. But after the Koninginne day festivities in Amsterdam, I was feeling better with each km I was cycling further.

   Different cultures define space differently: some like the ancient Greeks did not even have a word to describe the concept of open space. I was trying to experience this on a bicycle, by going to places, that was new to me. Certain cities are associated in literature by certain authors and artists. The love with what, these authors describe their cities, can be infectious. I was trying to experience this on a bicycle.

   Lorca describes how he loves walking late at night in the streets, how he knows this smell & darkness of the streets of his town and how he would be able to recognise it anywhere at any time. I found every new country had a distinctive smell and cycling conditions. After I crossed the Alps from Brigg in Switzerland to Lago Maggiore, Italy, I really felt I arrived in a different country, far removed from Switzerland, by means of the smell of the flowers and the more dangerous road conditions.

   The opposite statement was also true for me. When I was cycling from one country to the next, the landscape and vernacular architecture was gradually changing, and then one found oneself in a new country. The borders seemed arbitrarily, often the buildings looked the same on both sides of the border, as near Nieu Brisach in France and the Schwarzwald equivalent across the river. I was trying to explore, the link between cities as described in literature and urban design. Calw, in the black forest where the author Herman Hesse was from. Jacques Brel and cabaret in Brussells. The way that Leonard Cohen sings about “a bird on a wire” while living on the Greek island of Hydra All cities have peak periods of popularity. Cabaret & Kurt Weill in Berlin in the 1930’s relived by David Bowie and at another time by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in late 1980’s with the help of Wim Wenders movies. Vienna in the time of Alma Mahler Werfel, and her goings on with Kokoscka, Gropius and Gustav Mahler and Werfel, with the Witgenstein house, the coffee society & Freud (The same Mrs Werfel that had an obsession with geniuses and married 4 of them and hanged around famous coffee shops in Venice — is there a trace of Ayn Rand there, or Peggy Guggenheim or other benefactors, like the book store owner of Shakespeare and co. in Paris.) Who knows about the Carlos Scarpa and the secret garden in Venice? Who knows about the places James Joyce stayed in Trieste and Pula, Croatia or in Switzerland? The republic of Trento and Bolzano high up in the Italian mountains and more Austrian than Italian.

   Some of these cities are describe so vividly, that an enthusiastic reader can visualise and almost navigate without any further aids. M.F.K. Fisher describes Aix-en-Provence and Marseille so vividly that it reminds of Kevin Lynch’s urban design experiments with mental maps of cities . Ecrivain — Voyageurs as occurring in French literature and the Astonishing-Travellers Festival held in St. Malo every year, should be investigated. The Situationists and the derive as a way of travelling and experiencing a city in almost dada-surrealist manner, is fascinating. The notion of a medieval travelling master-craftsman as in the case of Villiard d’Honnecourt and Laon Cathedral, can be explored.

   Much more of a city can be experienced by using the “derive” mode of discovering how space works in different cities)The notion of teaching students about urban design in a architectural school is similar to following guide books or maps while travelling. I found sketching and studying town squares on my bike trip, much more enjoyable than at architectural school. I enjoyed Tuscany and the “Palio” in Siena, enough to stay for 5 weeks.

Certain universal clues can be gathered from cities, but it does not always hold true. Normally in the vicinity of the main train station, cheap hotel accommodation can be found. This rule cannot be followed in Prague or Amsterdam.

   Further more certain cities, reminds the traveller about similar circumstances in different neighbourhoods in different cities. I am not referring to cultural specific similarities between certain cities in the same country, but rather to geographic place making similarities. London, Prague, Paris, Dublin, Budapest, Florence in the broadest general sense are the same. A circle with a river dividing the better part of town from a unfashionable part across the river. There are Tel Aviv and Durban, South Africa: neighbourhoods reminding one of similar areas in New York and in Haifa, Laussane.

   The hardest part of my trip was the mountains in Austria, 1000km in 10 days from Vienna to Bregentz. The total km reading was 6700km when I got back to Dublin!