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Holiday pop-up installation: bakery |
Pop-up installations are all the rage. What is more pop-up than an open air market? It is in the nature of such markets to be not there one day and there another, bringing additional people into public spaces. The open air market is an altogether excellent place-making device. Like Russian dolls that nest inside each other, markets can create streets within a street, plazas on a plaza and a village inside a city. The booths and stalls are the buildings and stores, the spaces in between the streets and the intersections become small squares. Seasonal farmers markets have spread like wildfire all across America and no surprise that this popularity coincides with the general renaissance of cities during the past decade or so.
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A city within a city: The Weihnachtsmarkt Stuttgart on the Marktplatz |
It comes as a surprise, then, that the European tradition of Christmas markets has not caught on in the US in the same way, even if there is a recent wave of German "Christkindlemarkets" listed on christmasmarkets.com which appear to be a concerted commercial effort of creating those markets "in vitro".
By contrast, especially German Christmas markets have a very long tradition (Dresden's Striezelmarkt claims to go back to 1434) and have developed in a variety of ways across Europe. The Nuremburg market has...Read full article
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Nikolaus Philipsen FAIA
Archplan Inc. Philipsen Architects
Baltimore MD
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