the roof thing

[beige_alert]

My German friends were bemused with my fascination with all the tile (and even slate!) roofs is Germany. Want to know why? I have a photo taken from higher ground in the public park across the road from a fancy new expensive condominium development in a fancy expensive part of town by the river. Note that not only are these rooftops visible from the park across the road, but are visible from some of the units in the buildings themselves. This is not hidden away, but part of the view out the windows of the very building itself. An expensive view, no less. This is how we do it in America when we are spending plenty of money on a fancy place:

Comments

[beige-alert.livejournal.com]

Here, we sometimes literally build garden sheds out of plastic. They start warping the moment sun hits them the first time.

One could probably make the case that all the masonry is excessive in some cases. One could easily make the case that US construction is absurdly poor in many cases.

Germany tends to look really beautiful to someone used to American buildings, though!

[jaelle-n-gilla.livejournal.com]

I'm sure they took you to the nice places, though :-) There are pretty ugly houses in some areas, built in the 50s, 60s, and sometimes 70s where Germany was growing and needed room quickly, especially after the war.

Things like this: http://www.daburna.de/Bilder/HGW/plattenbau_greifswald_004.jpg

Or this:
http://www.welt.de/multimedia/archive/00292/plattenbau_DW_Wirts_292928g.jpg

I agree though. In general, Germany is pretty nice :-)

[beige-alert.livejournal.com]

60s-ish was a pretty remarkable period here to for ugly buildings. That horrific building right next to Milwaukee's 1890s German-inspired city hall comes to mind, or the police headquarters made of concrete and resembling something you clamp onto a computer CPU for cooling.

And yes, we did tend to seek out the pretty. That second photo is pretty bad. The first doesn't really look to me like a particularly striking example of ugly. No worse than medium ugly. I mean, it even looks like it has those spiffy German windows that open and everything.