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Post by lagatta on Sept 5, 2009 13:30:38 GMT
I'd probably need a Brompton or some other kind of not-too-heavy folder. (Want one anyway, but they are pricy).
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Post by bixaorellana on Sept 5, 2009 16:52:13 GMT
I haven't posted this here before, because it's in Spanish.* It's something I saved because I was so thrilled to find it on the internet. This is the area where my family lived in Madrid from mid 1956 through mid 1959. The first painting is very likely the front garden of the house where we lived. There is quite a bit of in-depth information to be found with an internet search of Ebenezer Howard, so I'll just put this snippet here. I am assuming that La Campagne à Paris was an outgrowth of Howard's proposals. In 1898, Ebenezer Howard, appalled at the very unpleasant living and working conditions in the late 19th Century towns and cities, wrote a book outlining his ideas for a completely new way of living. The book, 'Tomorrow, A Peaceful Path to Real Reform', was later republished as 'Garden Cities of Tomorrow' in 1902.
Ebenezer Howard believed that the very best of both town and country life should be married together in small Garden Cities, each with its own greenbelt. He promoted well-planned towns with careful land zoning and a quality of life. * translation of a section of the page: During the 1920s there appear on the edge of Madrid a series of settlements of single-family houses managed according to a series of specifications that bestowed a more or less uniform character. They are the so-called ‘colonies’ whose birth is tied to the international movement of the garden city. The first examples appear on the northern zone of the city, determining their growth and the actual expansion of the city. The one called Ciudad Jardín Madrileña is formed by the grouping of lots situated in the municipality of Charmartín de la Rosa. Of all the operations carried out, the most interesting is that completed by the company Fomento de la Propiedad S.A., a Catalan urbanization society established in Madrid in 1915 which at times carried out a series of direct promotions, and at other times sold land to other cooperatives or promoters.
In the architectural aspect, various types of houses predominate: duplexes, rowhouses, and single-family. Their architecture is based, in general, on regional and historical concepts, tied to the characteristic styles common to the regions of Spain. The consolidation of the nucleus of Ciudad Jardín spans a wide period between the years 1919 and 1936, and can be divided into two groups similar in chronology & type.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 5, 2009 18:14:42 GMT
There were quite a few utopians in Europe who believed that workers should live in nice places. One of course was the architect Le Corbusier. There was also a certain Jean-Baptiste-André Godin who created La Familistère de Guise, a sort of self-contained workers' paradise. It still exists and may be visited.
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Post by bixaorellana on Sept 5, 2009 19:11:49 GMT
I'm basing my guess about La Campagne à Paris and Howard's influence on the age of that area. This article is very long, but covers most if not all of the residential visionaries of the 19th and 20th centuries. Here's what it has to say about La Familistère de Guise: Godin’s settlement attempted to unite the agricultural society with the industrial society, and to abandon the communal life and to provide a house for each family. Thus the autonomy of the family was established. These are the significant novelties, introduced by Godin. ‘Familistere’ was established in Northern France in 1959 in the garden of eighteen hectors located in a woodland near Godin’s factory, which could shelter a worker group of 1000 persons. Familistere was separated with a dense green area and a river; the connection between the work place and the residence was provided through two bridges. Familistere, having three big residences connected with each other, was composed of a hospital, crèche, kindergarten, primary school, theatre, a gymnastic hall, laundry, bathroom and various service facilities, and of warehouses, vegetable and fruit gardens, play areas and pools. The residence blocks were the big square buildings, the courtyard of which were sheltered by a glass covered metal structure. The ground floor of the building, located in the center, was allocated for consumption stores and bureaus. The right and the left parts of the building covered water, electricity, sewerage and heat mountings and 300-unit residences, each of which also had flues. In the familistere, the participants were provided comforts of the period; and it was designed together with the common entertainment and relaxation areas Like Fourier, as also Godin believed in the importance of communication in the life style of this new class, he thought that the flats that were reached by corridors/streets, which were open to a wide and bright common area that was protected from the external environmental conditions, would strengthen the solidarity and friendly relations in the daily life among people. Godin realized this thought in the establishment and management style of Familistere, and he organized these facilities in the operation of the cooperative business system, established under the ownership of the workers, working in the factory. Phalansteres were the preliminary design work for the public housing and mass housing concepts, and thus they are significant for utopian architecture. If you click on the article you can see a plan and cross section of La Familistère. I can't find La Campagne à Paris in the article, which is not to say its founders weren't influenced by some of the utopian principles.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 5, 2009 20:19:04 GMT
That would be 1859 rather than 1959!
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Post by bixaorellana on Sept 5, 2009 20:26:09 GMT
Ha! You're right, of course. You can see whoever translated that article was pretty much sweating blood, and didn't catch the mistake in the year. It's so amazingly modern! This is from the French website, but it's in English: www.familistere.com/site/english/utopia/prog_utopia.php
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Post by patricklondon on Sept 5, 2009 20:54:07 GMT
I see from my little book that all the Vélib stations in the area are around the edges, at the bottom of the slopes.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 5, 2009 21:04:23 GMT
You are absolutely right. But perhaps the Tour de France will put it on their itinerary some day as a mountain stage.
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Post by lagatta on Sept 5, 2009 23:51:39 GMT
Oh thanks for this (bixa and others)! I'm too tired to read long articles this evening, but I certainly will. I also have a book (in French, translated from the Italian - and not from German - about "Red Vienna" and all the experimental housing for workers, much of it still standing. If anyone remembers the film "Julia" in which Lilian Hellmann goes in search of her anti-Nazi resistance fighter friend (Julia is Vanessa Redgrave and Lilian is Jane Fonda) a key scene is the Viennese workers defending their housing estates (Hof or courtyard) from fascist goons.
Nowadays I think most of us (including urban dwellers like me, and I live in a housing co-operative) would find a setup like La Familistère doesn't afford enough privacy, but we also have to think of what workers' housing conditions were like at the time.
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Post by lagatta on Sept 6, 2009 11:54:23 GMT
Drat, bixa. There is no way I can read the tiny print in the Housing typologies in the context of urban utopias (and I'm really interested in this stuff). Is there any way a .pdf file can be made to appear larger on screen? (I have a Mac if that makes any difference). Urban Idade is very interesting. I posted stuff about the Viennese housing "Hof" a while back on another blog and will try to drag it up.
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Post by bixaorellana on Sept 6, 2009 14:17:14 GMT
LaGatta ~~
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Post by lagatta on Sept 6, 2009 14:59:40 GMT
bixa, I don't have that on my toolbar, and don't see it among the choices to personalise it. When I try to go to increase font size, it is grey upon grey indicating it is inactive for .pdf files. (I use Safari). I'll have to ask someone who knows the software how to do it; as it must be possible somehow.
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Post by bixaorellana on Sept 6, 2009 17:23:19 GMT
Try this: hold down Control (extreme bottom left of your keyboard) while hitting the equals/plus button (= +). Be sure to count how many times you hit it it so you can reduce your page to normal size later. (using Control and the minus [-] button). With firefox, you can use Control and the zero button to instantly return the page to regular size.
You may also need to update your Adobe reader.
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Post by lagatta on Sept 6, 2009 20:43:11 GMT
I have tried that. Funny, when I receive a .pdf in an e-mail, I have absolutely no trouble resizing it as you say. It is just .pdfs on the Internet server.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 6, 2009 20:50:52 GMT
Have you tried saving it and then opening it from your hard drive?
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Post by lagatta on Sept 6, 2009 21:24:43 GMT
I'd have NO idea how to do that. I tried to copy it so I could make it into a word document or something, but it wouldn't copy. (.pdfs received via e-mail copy fine).
But I am hopeless in terms of tech issues. (Yeh, I know, I know, that is why I'm a Mac person)...
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Post by bixaorellana on Sept 6, 2009 21:36:05 GMT
Have you tried using a browser other than Safari?
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Post by patricklondon on Sept 7, 2009 10:55:06 GMT
Lagatta
kerouac's suggestion would be the simplest: go to the original link that opened the PDF in Safari. In other browsers, if you use the right-click button on the link, you get a menu which includes the option to save the file to your own computer and/or to choose the program to open it with. Either option will allow you to use your usual PDF reader program.
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Post by Deleted on May 25, 2013 9:58:28 GMT
Sorry for dragging this up from the mists of the past, but I returned to La Campagne à Paris this morning to stroll around. It has become super easy now that the tramway passes right in front of it. I'm afraid you're going to see some new versions of exactly the same scenes as last time, but my camera is better now, so perhaps a few of the pictures will be better.
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Post by Deleted on May 25, 2013 10:07:29 GMT
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Post by Deleted on May 25, 2013 10:15:58 GMT
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Post by lagatta on May 26, 2013 3:21:25 GMT
It is adorable. By the way, tech problems solved by more recent computer...
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Post by nautiker on May 30, 2013 10:34:16 GMT
thanks for the update - as regards that group: maybe they've been triggered by reports on a certain travel board? ;D
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Post by fgrsk8r1970 on Jun 7, 2013 15:24:53 GMT
I love this !!! I doubt I'll be able to check it out around Christmas, but I'll surely will put it on my list Thanks for bringing this one back as I missed it the first time around!
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Post by Deleted on Aug 17, 2015 20:44:38 GMT
Through no fault of my own, I found myself here again this morning. I was actually on the tramway going to a new important photographic pursuit, but I suddenly pulled out my camera and discovered that the battery was dead. I always keep it fully charged but there have been times when it turns itself on in my pocket and uses up all of its energy uselessly. Because I am clever (?) or lucid (?), I had actually brought one of my emergency cameras with me and figured that it was good enough to take a few new shots of the area.
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