All posts filed under: Place

Vignettes des Vestiges
Part II: Joseph Roth (c)

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Marseille / Place
warehouse or arsenal

In this age of digital nomadism, we often forget how intense and ambiguous the relationships can be that humans entertain with geographic places. Some places attract us, others reject us. Some entice us, others bore us to death. Some places poison us, others intoxicate us only to eat us alive. In the same way as places are haunted by people and their afterlife specters, places can haunt us in return. They lure us to always […]

Vignettes des Vestiges
Part I: Joseph Roth (a)

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Marseille / Place
Hôtel Beauvau

When I visited Marseille for the first time, I already knew that some of my favorite authors had been here before me. The writer and journalist Joseph Roth, for instance. I had a vague notion of him sitting in the lobby of some grand hotel by the Old Port writing his articles for the Frankfurter Zeitung. Or did he actually come to Marseille seeking shelter from the Nazis, to be right at the port and […]

Vignettes des Vestiges
Introduction

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Marseille / Place
Jardin des vestiges

Marseille has a record as an ancient city without monuments. The oldest city in France baffles visitors with a glaring lack of remnants from its twenty-six-hundred-year-old history, adding to its bad reputation as uncultured, poverty-stricken, and dangerous. For the longest time, centralist France seemed to have all but abandoned its greatest harbor, once a lifeline supplying the entire Hexagon with colonial riches. And until recently, the age-old trading hub has been unable to sell itself […]

“A Human Ribbon”

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Place
Crossroad

Berlin's Friedrichstrasse was once praised and disdained as a symbol of modern metropolitan life. Today, it might partly regain its former status, as the street is part of an ongoing experiment about revitalizing urban space.