check out "vacant stare" at http://danielsp.tumblr.com/

I will keep the new blog updated, this one is archive only :)

Architecture and Politics and how the former is influenced by the latter has always interested me. A random glance at a poster in the tube during my recent visit to London brought me to the Royal Academcy of Arts and its exhibition on early Soviet architecture.

The website says:
This exhibition examines Russian avant-garde architecture made during a brief but intense period of design and construction that took place from c.1922 to 1935. Fired by the Constructivist art that emerged in Russia from c.1915, architects transformed this radical artistic language into three dimensions, creating structures whose innovative style embodied the energy and optimism of the new Soviet Socialist state.

In the courtyard a model of the Monument to the Third International (or “Tattlin’s Tower”), a grand monumental building envisioned by the Russian artist and architect Vladimir Tatlin, but never built. It was planned to be erected in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, as the headquarters and monument of the Comintern (the third international).

More Information:
Royal Academy Exhibition: http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/building-the-revolution/
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatlin%27s_Tower
Youtube Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3P18XmwRKgM

I'm dusting off this blog ... it's been lying dormant since 2005.

Last couple of years I have been living in Vienna, working as a consultant for EU research projects, now another change coming (stay tuned).

Soweit ich das aus dem Bonner Exil beurteilen kann, läuft man derzeit in Brüssel kopflos und vor allem ratlos herum. Dabei war eine Niederlage bei den Referenda (oder Referenden?) doch eindeutig vorherzusehen. Doch vielleicht hat die Niederlage auch ihr gutes: sie zeigt, dass Zustimmung zu Europa nicht mehr vorausgesetzt werden kann sondern das man sich aktiver um die Bürger bemühen muss .

Fürs erste triumphieren mal die Euro-Skeptiker: in Österreich hat H.C. Strache erstmal gut lachen. Linke Anti-EU Gruppierungen sollten sich mal anschauen mit wem sie da in einem Boot sitzen.

Ein Wochenende, das auf den ersten Blick nicht viel hergibt: kalt und regnerisch. Genau das richtige um mir mal die Bücher von der Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung - einer tollen deutschen Institution, wo man politische Bücher aller Art zu verbilligten Preisen bekommt – reinzuziehen.

Dabei fällt mir das Vorwort von Huxley zur „Brave New World“ ein, wo unter anderem auch der sinnlose Kapitalismus angeprangert wird. Jemand der in einem Raum mit einem Buch sitzt, sei kein guter Konsument, da im wirtschaftlichen Sinne unproduktiv. Sollten wir nicht alle mal wieder unproduktiv sein?

Or: on war, peace, and the European constitution



In today’s world you need to go where the jobs are and in my case this has led me to the city of Bonn, former capital of West-Germany. I spent the last weekend discovering this “small town in Germany” as it has been (sometimes derisively) called. As I walked through the green park outside the university building, with the students sitting on the grass, chatting away or playing football; as I used the city’s modern and efficient tram system and as I sat down on a bench on the banks of the river Rhine, watching the ships float by at a leisurely pace, one thought occurred to me: this is a city at peace.

It may not be a hub of activity such as London, Paris, Berlin or even Brussels but Bonn embodies the European normality of a city at peace – that is, if we define peace not just as the absence of war but as a concept where the notion that things could be less than peaceful rarely if ever enters the mind of the general population.

In 2005, a year which features the commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz and the end of World War II, war is conceived mainly as a historical concept. We are sometimes reminded (and rightly so) that this inconceivability of war between the nations that form today’s European Union is the crowing achievement of European integration.
However, nowadays we tend to take European peace for granted and tend to forget that, like democracy and human rights, peace is something that needs to be actively supported.

In the dark first half of the 20th century a European constitution seemed like a distant and rather utopian dream. Now we may be close to achieving this dream. Those who oppose the constitution on minor points (such as the proposed armaments agency), on vague allegations (such as its’ “neo-liberalism”) or on issues that have nothing to do with the constitution at all (Turkish membership, the enlargement, French domestic politics) need to be reminded of how much we have achieved and what they would throw away. European integration entails above all the capacity for compromise and the constitution is part of this process. One may not particularly like certain aspects of it, such as the armaments agency, but to reject the whole treaty because of that (as ATTAC does) seems foolish and irresponsible.

With the French referendum this Sunday European integration is once again at a crossroad, as it was when the European defence community was proposed (and rejected by the French) or when the Maastricht treaty was put to the vote (narrowly approved by the French). Even if opinion polls are less than positive about the outcome, let us hope for the best, so that in the end we will be one step closer to Kant’s perpetual peace – at least in Europe.