SLAB Magazine — The Heuristic Journal for Gonzo Blurbanism

Preamble: Looking at Art.

It’s kind of a weird thing to do, relative to the other activities that fill our days. A bit like meditating, an unavoidable question seems to be: “what the hell am I doing here?”. This problem becomes especially acute due to (a) the deterrent pretension that crackles through the air at so many gallery openings and (b) the esoteric, self-referential bubble that the actual work seems to be trapped within. Add to that gooney art scenesters checklisting your scruffy appearance and practicing an eastern religion starts to look a lot more self-explanatory.

Looking at architecture is something that’s comparatively simple, if only because it’s a lot easier to make a statement about it without sounding stupid. It seems a given that we’re all entitled to an opinion about the buildings we live in and around -a basic tenet of this very publication’s existence. Architects and their works are somehow easier targets than artists and theirs, primarily because we think we know what the hell it is they’re doing, often times better than they do. There’s a legitimacy, even a moral obligation, in making a very base, or even obscene, criticism about an edifice with a corresponding appearance. And the work of architects seems to have some kind of effect on every moment of our lives, while art must first seduce us or offend us to be noticed in the first place.

“Take A Slow, Deep Breath! Elastic Impressions”

The title of Hella Gerlach’s show up at Studio commands and seduces us in equal measure, and in doing so initiates a necessary rupture from the profanity of everyday life and all the messiness of its architecture, physical and otherwise. This chunk of language is weird and at the same time totally(?) accessible, a kind of textual gateway that might give cause to investigate something that sounds kind of fun. On the other side of an exhalation and a sheet of plate glass is an offering that coaxes a closer look and, following the directive of the title, an emphatically meditative attitude. All of the elements and objects inside are both autonomous and at the same time the constituent parts of a bizarre phenomenal aggregate. The red cabinet, perfectly level, is actually balancing on its spindly legs as precariously as it appears to be…so be careful breathing out!

An untitled ceramic ball that was mistaken for a tomato, sits on the floor just to the right of the entrance.

Element I and Element II (Studiolo) are hung from the gridded substructure of the gallery’s semi-dismantled acoustic tile ceiling.

The semi-transparent ramie and viscose fiber walls of the three Element pieces have pockets in which objects were placed.

At the invitation of the gallerist, I dug the work Stab out from a pocket on one of the fabric walls. Also made of ceramic, it was uncannily heavy; it felt like a bone until I took it from its sleeve. “Stab” translates to “rod” in English, which is what I first thought the title was supposed to mean. Yet the shape of this thing could definitely be used to put someone into a world of pain.

Teil für Zwei (Piece for Two)

Further into the gallery are three more of those ceramic balls, one of which has been smashed. It was actually here that I first realized the ball in the front wasn’t a tomato. It all has something to do with a Greek housewarming ritual, I was told. The attempt was made to smash the balls all around the gallery just before the show opened, but they were fired to such a high strength that three of them survived.

Handstück (Hand Piece)

and

Schulterstück (Shoulder Piece)

were both cast from the artist’s body. But the visitor is free to try them on as well. These, I take it, are the “elastic impressions” mentioned in the title of the show.

This inconclusive set of objects, spaces and associations is like an architecture of the subconscious. That makes it difficult to talk about in any rational way, but I see the work as operating on the fuzzy line between art and architecture. Like a building, the show doesn’t presume anything of the viewer/occupant; it seems to be actually unable to. A pre-knowledge of what the work is about would if anything preclude understanding it for what it is, I think. As such, the work operates at a very base level, in spite of its elegance. Something down there, back there, at the beginning of architecture, seems to be making its presence known.

Take A Slow, Deep Breath! Elastic Impressions is on view at Studio, Adalbertstr.96, 10999 Berlin, until November 26th.

The former Evangelische Elias Kirche on Senefelder Str. struggles to inspire faith in God, the Lord Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost, as evinced by the fact that it was long ago abandoned as a place of worship. Although the parish was able to sustain the church during the cold war period in spite of the iron-fisted rule of East Germany’s totalitarian regime, by 1990 the shrinking number of worshipers caused the church to close. For a few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall the building’s fate remained unclear, until it was finally converted into a children’s museum -a fitting transformation considering that it lies the district of Prenzlauer Berg, which has one of the highest birthrates to be found in Germany.

Aesthetically, the former church seems a likely candidate to have been abandoned by its congregation. To be honest, it’s really just a clumsy hodgepodge of disparate elements slapped together with little sensitivity or grace, the highlight of which is the little towerette on the right hand side, crammed cozily against the wall of the neighboring apartment house.

Many thanks again to Victor Brigola for this, the penultimate photograph to be featured in this series. All of the pictures are on view in the show “Feeling the Void” at the Vero Linzmeier Galerie until November 17th.

This is the Rotating Earth Hydrosphere, which you can pick up for a mere 870 British Pounds, should you wish, though the price doesn’t include pump or resevoir so you’re going to have to stick it in the bath tub and wizz it round with your hands if you’re on a tight budget. Watch it go round and round. I’ve filmed a good 19 seconds or so of hydrospherical action, and if you want any more you’re just going to have to imagine it, or go out and buy one of the damned things. There’s a garden centre in Farnham Royal, England, which will be delighted to get rid of one.

On a recent trip to the UK, my Mum happened to mention that garden centres had mutated into fully-fledged recreational destinations, and were no longer the damp horticultural points-of-sale I remembered from my childhood. They had become places where, having stocked up on Catherine and Royal William rose bushes, you could eat a traditional Sunday roast in the restaurant, have your car washed by hand, and read the papers whilst the kids molest coi carp. Tapping into these suburban rituals, it sounded as though garden centres had subsumed the entire idea of a typical Sunday afternoon into a commercial venture.

A rock solid investment.

Hoping to back up Mother’s claims with some hard data, I briefly dredged through the internet where I came across a 2008 catering report entitled “More Than Tea & Cake” [PDF, 410KB], published by Britain’s Horticultural Trade Association. In it, the garden center coffee shop is specifically identified as “a place to meet and socialise” where customers “don’t have to eat, but … can be persuaded to do so”. This sounded promising, and hinted at subliminal architectural features design to coerce and stimulate.

So once at Farnham Royal, I was primed for an orgy of 24-hour cream teas and an acre of retail space, but the catering revolution had yet to penetrate this particular enclave, as had customers, judging by the empty car park.

Stones were on sale, some sorted geographically (Rutland Limestone, Cornish Slate), others sorted by generic aesthetic merits (Clear Green Drilled Glass Stone), hinting strongly at two opposing petrographic fractions amongst local gardeners: the authenticists and the artifists. Woe betide them that mix their stones.

But things really started getting interesting in the ornament section. Just what the hell those pieces of bent aluminium conduit were is anyone’e guess. Close inspection revealed few clues: they could just as well be some kind of fountain (I’m guessing the manufacturer might call this a “flanged cascader”, or something), or possibly a lighting feature. It is not to my taste, but the sign said it had won some award or other. That’s one trophy I do want to see.

The “Dubai Self Contained Water Feature, £317.17” looked more familar. As a seven year old I had watched it torture Princess Leia in Star Wars. Now is was a garden accessory, and probably had some kind of undocumented death-ray function for the neighbor’s cat. Seriously though, aren’t you happy that the price of LEDs has dropped so much that humanity can now pull off shit like this? And why “Dubai”? How many sci-fi desert–themed gardens can be found within Buckinghamshire?

Farnham Royal was pretty much the damp horticultural point-of-sale I remembered from my childhood. Long may it stay that way.

The example presented here, after a two month hiatus in publishing this series, had to be squeezed in in another way. So difficult was it to find a good vantage point from which to photograph it in its entirety that the facade just barely fit into the frame. But the photographer Victor Brigola was up to the challenge, and pulled it off again.

This Catholic job on Dänenstrasse appears incredibly secure in its standing, having little need for the kind of overwrought historical pastiche of its protestant brethren featured elsewhere in this collection. Its appearance has something more to do with an ideal than the contingencies of history, I would argue, and references to previous styles have been sublimated by a vision so reduced that it seems to be simultaneously both primitive and futuristic. A little dab of razzle dazzle hasn’t been forgotten, though: the guilded cross provides a not-so-subtle reminder of who’s got the money and isn’t afraid to show it.

As you may have seen by clicking onto the photographer’s link above, Mr. Brigola will be showing works from this series from Thursday, Oct. 27 in the show entitled “Feeling the Void” at the Vero Linzmeier Galerie. The opening party will be from 6:00-9:00pm on Thursday, I hope to see you there!

Until we dealt with Hamburg’s FRIEDASchanze, our main concern with property marketing had been a linguistic one: the series was a lingering divulgation of real estate boosters’ degenerate penmanship. But the previous installment in this series exposed a mechanism (shared by all of the projects featured in this study) which I’m just going to boldy call ‘vampire colonialism’, regardless of the mayhem which may ensue.

Render-bender

The mechanism is characterised by two key features: first, the romanticisation and fragmentation of the surrounding neighborhood through a celebration of its inherent authenticity; and second, the weaving together of these fragments into a patchwork to conceal the inherent phoneyness of the property itself.

The mechanism is colonial because it judges and appropriates the surroundings in self-defined terms, offering a self-serving, narrow reading of its host. And I’m calling it vampiristic, because the act of subsumation results in the eventual collapse of the host. The real estate project essentially has nothing unique to offer, other than location, and it is from this which it feeds to keep it alive.

Real deal

FRIEDASchanze was sold with the picture of a harmonious intercultural neighborhood in which carefree Italian pizza bakers with the songs of the Adria on their lips could be found, and where quaint obliging Arabs fried falafel in the nooks between home-grown fashion boutiques. So a few weeks back I was in Hamburg and dropped by Schanzenstraße to see how the picture shaped up against reality, and to see if the condos were as boldly crimson as the architect’s rendering suggested.

Manic organic

Sadly they weren’t. Instead, the façade had been toned down to a hue somewhere between egg plant and burgundy. It reminded me of a quip made by German graphic designer Erik Spiekerman where he refers to the colour beige as being a kind of “yellow for civil servants”. Something similar seems to have happened here: one imagines a neighborhood committee doggedly pressuring the building contractor to rethink the shocking red in a last ditch attempt at excersizing a semblance of grass-roots influence on the doings of property developers. If so, they’ve flogged a turd for no good reason. If you’re going to live with a turd, better have one with a colourful little flag stuck in it. But red by committee it is.

Speaking of egg plants and burgundy, the whole ground floor is already home to an organic supermarket – natch boogie. Once upon a time organic grocery stores were the pokey little vanguards of the green movement, but here they’ve arrived, no longer brandishing whole-earth manifestos, but corporate design manuals. It’s a thoroughly agreeble place to shop in: well lit, roomy, imaginatively stocked, and, advantageously, largely void of customers at this hour. Wherever they might be on a Friday morning, they’ve left a trail of evidence behind them: cork notice boards behind the checkouts are festooned with flyers for ayurvedic cookery courses and hand-written classified ads trading vintage sports cars for Bugaboos, or flogging aged IKEA sofas.

Flush puppy

Hum-drum

For the sake of dramatic convenience I’m going to assume a new tennant of FREIDASchanze themselves was responsible for the sofa ad, and was asserting their upward mobility with a confident couch upgrade. If so, you’d have to wonder why the same tennant had moved into an apartment which looks like a ‘Faktum’ IKEA kitchen. In a reversal of the theory put forward by D.S. on a low-resolution architecture made for photography, FRIEDASchanze looks shit¹ from a distance, but from up close reveals a complex surface grid of collateral fluting which would conceivably arrise if one were to violently combine seven Billy shelving units. Not an unintersting proposition. At the time of my visit, a guy in a mobile platform was fine tuning the cavity widths with a watchmaker’s vernier caliper. Anyroadup, this conglomeration of precision detailing combines to form a façade which, for all its whimsical surface depth modulation, is about as charismatic as a filing cabinate.

Gnarlyness

Some meters further down the road, the full contrast between the flush-fitted aluminium window profiles of FRIEDASchanze, and the grungy aggregate of century-old building materials which have coagulated to form the rest of the neighborhood becomes more immediately apparent. Is this the habitat the marketing-speak was referring to? By building something flush and clean, you automatically define everything else as lumpen and grungy. On my stroll down the Schanze I pass a cellar bar called Chance, where bottles of tequila and Malibu are displayed in the window at ankle-height beneath home-made chipboard cladding. The smeared windows of a Chinese bric-a-brac emporium are full of beckoning Maneko Nekos, rice cookers and fading polyurethane lotus blossoms. The Playtech Casino is a riot of self-adhesive foils, and the entrance nook between Falafel Factory and Schanzen Döner is slathered in a baroque filo-pastry crust of posters, flyers, daubings, stickers, Selotape² fragments and indelible tags.

Encrusted

The language of the street here is of adaptation, extension and improvisation. Everything is retro-fitted for a broken but still functioning future. This is the land into which spaceship FRIEDASchanze has decended. Its passengers are about to desembark: grunge tourists on an authenticity trip, nosey and charmed by the locale at first, but soon rubbing up against their own squeamishness and reservations. But for now at least, the mission is clear: revel in the grime, write postcards home, but lay subtle plans for a more orderly future.

Dirt

P.S.: Leaving the neighborhood I even catch sight of a poster encouraging us to Entdeck the Dreck – “Discover the Dirt”. Turns out that it’s a regular party in a club called Grüner Jäger. “Total trash and high-life in bags!” the club’s website proclaims; a “charming, Poptrash-Bad-Taste-Party”. It’s as if the underground was already gearing itself up for its own fragmentation and eventual metamorphosis into another, newer, altogether stranger bourgeoisie than can be found in the penthouse suites of FRIEDASchanze. For now it is content to frollic – for as long as it can’t afford its own mortgage – in a picturesque nightscape of pseudo-glamour, self-defined trash, and premeditated “good” bad-taste: a juvenil vampire already sucking life from its own environment …

—
¹ I can qualify “shit” if you so wish: read “banal”, “tedious” or “mundane”.
² US English: Scotch Tape; German: Tesafilm

(The Pretense of Craft in Contemporary Construction, Part 1)

Decosterd and Rahm have a great reference to Nietzsche and his concept of a phsyiological art as part of the introduction to their book Physiological Architecture. Unfortunately, I don’t remember exactly what it is except that it was really hard to read (white print on white paper) and awesome, but trying to be more a blogger than an online magazine writer, I’m too lazy to look it up. Maybe you can look it up. Something about how an aesthetic experience can have a physiological effect on people. So perhaps for the only time in history, Decosterd and Rahm and Marc Kocher (Palais Kolorectalbelle, and the building below, etc.)  in one text. Carpe dieminis, or whatever.

I don’t want to end up a bitter man all alone, walking around with the eccentric shuffle of an orthodox Jew, whose bent frame and flapping arms serve the sole purpose of taxiing his brain from A to B, lamenting the decline of a once exciting city full of architectural potential. So I check my initial reaction, try an open mind. Yeah, maybe this is not so bad, he’s trying to loosen the strict Prussian window bands of Gründerzeit urban blocks. I want to have positive reactions to Berlin’s new buildings one is often too quick to bash.  But I can no longer ignore the feeling of nausea spreading to my limbs from my gut, and I know this wobbly building is doing it to me. I mean, if this is origami (the architect’s project inspiration according to his website), then this pile of orange polyester construction netting might as well be Macramé. If I were mean, I might speculate that the origami spiel conveniently masks the fact that the developer one day value engineered any Italianate and expensive to build curves away with the highest arc segmentation setting in FunCad when the financial crisis hit. I want to sneeze, or cry, or puke, just flush it out, this physiological effect of an architecture that my entire aesthetic apparatus wants to reject and eject and purge.

I have to check myself. I must be getting carried away, here. But it’s there, undeniably, a visceral reaction, a feeling of having ingested something bad with my eyes, a dead oyster, some shady street food, too much cake, the fumes of a burning tire.

By God, what are these drops on the underside of the window’s top molding? (excuse the phoney pics, but if you look closely) Are they a 21^st century aberration of Guttae?  Towards the window’s bottom, the unfinished application of acrylic render reveals blocks of extruded polystyrene. You’ve got to be kidding. If I remember correctly, guttae are stylistic vestiges of a time when Greek temples were still built of wood thousands of years ago. Guttae originally were wooden nails that fixed the timber roof to the wooden architrave. It’s amazing that this little, millennia-old tectonic detail that pertains to craft, to things made by skilled hands as an expression of an architecture of assembly, has found its way onto a building made of goo, poured, spackled and sprayed together of concrete and polymers, and entirely not assembled, let alone by craft.

How did it all get so muddled? The Greeks started it, I guess, emulating wooden nails in stone, but that’s ok, they did it for tradition, and I assume they knew that they once were wood. Not sure what happened in between then and now. But here we have it, a renaissance of the wooden nail, on thermoplastic buildings, a haphazard stylistic reference to something whose meaning is entirely lost, the architectural equivalent of an Arschfax (see below), Chinese characters haphazardly applied on someone’s lower back for looks. Guttae (Greek drops) articulated as droops seems a lot more appropriate for an architecture of pouring. Make them gooey drops next time, please, make me chuckle, a more pleaseant physiological reaction to architecture.

Arschfax (German ass facsimile,  often meaningless motifs applied as tattoo to someone’s lower back)

image courtesy: http://www.photofunblog.com/fashion/free-lower-back-tattoo-designs-for-women-2011-12/attachment/kanji-and-flower-free-lower-back-tattoo-collection/

This was how Portsmouth’s Conservative Party were runnning for office in the local elections of 1994, when I was a student living in the city. What struck me then as a sinister and deeply absurd bit of campainging, hasn’t lost any of its crassness now, and if anything has become more potent in the wake of David Cameron’s pronouncements following the UK riots this summer.

But three years after these flyers circulated, Blair’s New Labour were in power nationally and CCTV cameras became a ubiquitous feature of the urban environment all the same. Close to half a billion Pounds have been spent on CCTV equipment in London alone, but internal Metropolitain Police reports warn of their neligable role in crime prevention, with only 1 in 1000 crimes solved using CCTV images in 2008. Caught-on-camera riot galleries and Flickr dragnets are probably part of a wider strategy to improve these figures.

Down a couple of pints of export strength lager in some Southsea boozer, and the flyer might start to resemble something Vorticism threw up. But the cheap single-colour printing, berk typography (Futura with Eurostil?) and the martiality of the target motif make for an ugly bit of populist urban propaganda. The implication that car parks and shopping centers constitute “our heritage” now reads less like dark humor and more like grim self-fulfilling prophecy.

There’s been something of a stylistic revival of hard-edge ’60s architecture lately, something that’s plain to see on the streets of Berlin. Local examples of the new-look brutalism/smoothism would include Scarchitekten’s Passivhaus Engeldamm and Dresdener Str. 31/32 by the developers Archigon (architects unknown). Both are basically stripey post-Stimmann era condo/lifestyle boxes for today’s fashion-conscious city dweller. Such works stand in some kind of opposition to the even more derivative condo option that is so recognizable these days, the neo-historicist, pseudo-old-world/other-world lifestyle block such as Palais KolleBelle and co…stuff that’s already been addressed on these pages in the sternest, most sardonic terms.

In any event, you know that a design era is in a state of revival as soon as the source material that is its lifeblood starts to be destroyed. At the same time as it’s fashionable to crank out austere, eco-freindly machines for living, it’s all the rage to raze perfectly good glass and steel megastructures that are merely in need of a reliable asbestos abatement contractor. The classic example was the old Palast der Republik, the destruction of which was, of course, a travesty to the city planning/tourism boosting process. We all know about that, I assume, and what’s done is done, save the construction of the new Stadtpalast, which I swear will cause me to bail on Berlin if and when it ever gets built.

But now another example of the crystalline ’60s is about to be summarily executed, also for the sake of preposterous neo-historical drivel. Standing blindfolded and smoking its last cigarette is the 1968 Konsistorium located at Bachstr. 1-2, by Georg Heinrichs and Hans-Christian Müller.

Once it’s dead and buried the plan is to put up a courtyard house by one of Hans Stimmann’s minions from his glory days in the ’90s, Tobias Nöfer. There are seemingly no images of the new design available online, but of course it has to be called something predictably historicist and low-brow in equal measure: “Hansahof”. The name itself indicates what is at the heart of the backlash against both the old building’s destruction and the new building’s construction, which is that to build a traditional courtyard-style block in the Hansaviertel is in fact a desecration of the “urban fabric” -actually more a like an ex-urban constellation of functionalist objects floating in a sea of grass and trees- that has defined the area since the heady days of Interbau 1957. So the proponents of Modernist design are playing the same card as the New Urbanists did back in ’80s and ’90s, which is to advocate something that came before because (1) they like it and (2) it came before. And fair play to them for doing so.

But, in truth, there are practical alternatives to just using architecture up and throwing it away. The question on all the radical architects’ lips at the moment is why it’s not possible to do something productive with a structure such as this. An obvious example would be to adapt the building’s interior, as well as its sheathing, to suit the intended brief of the new project, which is for low-income housing, and then put in some perma-culture urban farming plots all around it, and on the roof, where the residents could grow food to supplement what they can buy with their meager Hartz-4 takings. It could, like, change everything! Just brain storming here, but whatever…it’s not the kind of thing that anyone involved in the new project’s construction has probably ever done, much less considered weighing up such alternatives against what they’re planning to do and then performing a cost benefit analysis. But no one ever said that stopping the juggernaut of mindless German conservatism was going to be easy.

That’s all there is to say about, really. Though the old Konsistorium looks beautiful as a post-apocalyptic ruin, it seems, in truth, to exist in a pre-apocalyptic state as regarding big “A” Architecture. There is a quixotic absurdity in trying to salvage a ’60s office building that’s stood empty beside a trafficy intersection for the last ten years, but why not? Maybe we can all get together and change the situation the same way as we did with the petition to save Hejduk’s tower in Kreutzberg.

Just sign here!

And please check out these German-language links for more on the story, if you’re so inclined:

http://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/angst-um-die-moderne/4407152.html

http://www.baunetz.de/meldungen/Meldungen-Buerohaus_in_Berlin_wird_abgerissen_1675795.html

Last, a shot of the building’s interior that was passed on to me by the kind folks at Büro für Konstruktivismus. Just imagine the potential…I mean, I totally want to live in there!!!