SLAB Magazine

The riverside in Kingston-upon-Thames, on the edge of London, has undergone a familiar process of gentrification that waterside sites experience when they are transformed into leisure amenities. The regeneration projects that we have become accustomed to in the last few decades (Manhattan, San Francisco, Oslo, Dublin, Manchester, etc.) are necessary because the activities that went on there in the first place have now waned. No more warehouses or factories, but restaurants, theatres, apartment living, pleasure boating and cultural resources. Of course, the role of property speculation is a, perhaps the, key factor in all of this. In Kingston, the  pedestrianized waterfront south of the bridge contains mostly restaurants and bars. This being the case, the control of drinking and of drunks is a major concern, hence the many signs with messages pointing out ‘drinks not to be taken beyond this point’ and ‘the consumption of alcohol is restricted to the premises of the licensed restaurants’.

On the evidence of the sign pictured here, the control of chewing gum seems to be a pressing concern, too. Discarded chewing gum on the ground may be undesirable, but it seems that the drive to avoid it in Kingston has lost sight of the fact that used chewing gum is possibly even more disgusting when displayed at eye level. The sober tones of alcohol control are replaced here with jaunty, children’s-TV humour. This is social control achieved with the carrot, not the stick. It is friendly, light-hearted, playful, just like the celebrity culture it exploits. The waterfront is saved from disfigurement, but not these women’s faces. It is fine to disfigure them. Nothing like a little symbolic sexual violence to keep the place looking neat. Nothing like smearing famously assertive women with ejaculation residue in order to keep Britain tidy.

It was a chilly July morning as I came across the Erotik Markt Diskont Store at Alpen Straße 51, and by the time my eye was in the end caught by it I’d already passed any number of likely candidates for a SLAB cross-examination. I have to admit that the back-lit transparency of a lady biting her own finger is what I first took notice of. Lipstick, nail lacquer and hard white teeth. Their garish intensity burned through the drizzle and into my subconscious, it was as if I were being confronted by the vestige of a bizarre morning dream that I wished I could wake up from. My eye flinched and then wandered, slowly getting a read on what a weird edifice stood before me. There is a desperation to the suburban landscape that is only very rarely responded to with such a generous serving of architectural coherence as this structure offers.

The climax of strip architecture?

Located at the fringe of Salzburg, Austria, the Erotk Markt appears at first sight to be nothing more than a local iteration of the sort of strip architecture that we’re all familiar with. And it is. But the Austrians, as I learned on my recent travels to Salzburg and Carinthia, have an edge when it come to rendering the banal with an extra level of reflection, expense and stubborn hashing-out-of-the-details that can transmogrify the inane into the exotic. Down there I saw tons of overwrought expressions of consumerist fantasy that I now wish I’d stopped to photograph. I think I was just too taken aback by all the sleek detailing and computer modeled form to start breaking it down into something I could make sense of; I was in a daze, I guess, from having just driven by the local headquarters of Bausparkasse Wustenrot.

But at the Erotik Markt I found something both comprehensible and uncanny, something that for all its convention and economy had a much greater impact on me. What it was, really, that I felt had to be recorded, was the building’s corner detail.

Structure and Symbol

This mega strut, from which the roof is hung via steel rods, is jacked at an angle well above 45º. That’s something provocative in and of itself given the context. Topping it is an element filled with innuendo, wavering between conditions of structural necessity and frivolous suggestiveness: the triangular steel plate connecting flange / useless finial.

Learning the rules of hide and reveal from the pros

Driving the double entendre home without any doubt whatsoever, the window dressers have helpfully put a mannequin in what looks like a not-to-comfortable pose against the strut’s base inside the plate glass-enclosed shop interior. The shag carpet sleeve provides a frictive buffer between her and cold steel structure. Cue pink flourescent tube.

In November 2009, SLAB Magazine was invited by architect Arno Brandlhuber to give a talk for his masters students studying at the Akademie der Bildende Künste in Nürnberg. Following our scattershot 113-slide presentation, Brandlhuber invited us to write an upcoming issue of Disko, a publication documenting the “results and marginal phenomena of the a42.org / master of architecture course of studies”. He was particularly interested in an appendix of our presentation, entitled “The New Death Strip: Architectural Mediocrity and Worse Along the Site of the Former Berlin Wall”.

A rest-stop on Berlin’s 127th Street. Little in common with Harlem.

In approaching a publication like Disko a more intense quality of research is needed than might otherwise go into a typical article on this site. Recognising this, and the need to explore semiotically challenging terrain, the SLAB editorial team decided to conduct a two-day field trip along the length of the old Berlin Wall using a quad bike and a beach buggy. Seeing as the old Death Strip is now a cycle path and a richly varied biotope, any difficulties arrising from our choice of transportation would become dramatic devices, exploitable at a later date. It was also of upmost importance to make a hell of a lot of noise with a couple of two-stroke engines.

The ultimate cul-de-sac

We explored the ultimate cul-de-sac, the so-called “duck’s beak” which is a dead-end street that was surrounded by the Wall on three sides, resulting in a narrow East German enclave which jutted 530 meters into West Berlin. Here we discovered Helmut-Kohl-era BRD concrete villas with orange awnings, and the post-reunification ‘shateux’ of a retired footballer.

Camping on the former death strip

We camped out on a football pitch on the former death strip, and reflected upon the 3% of landmines still unaccounted for twenty years after demilitarisation. People walk their dogs here at 5am.

This is what you do field trips for

We struck architectural gold in our discovery of this el Cheapo Site style rip-off. This was in a light industrial estate specialising in discount denim products and roof tiles.

We set off with no coherent thesis, and returned with no consistent conclusion, but certainly with enough material to compile an engaging documentation. This article, then, should be seen as a kind of trailer for our issue of Disko, which will appear towards the end of the year, and will, doubtless, be touted by us doggedly up to and beyond publication date.

The title of this entry is also the title of a tasty looking show opening on Saturday night at Galerie Kai Hoelzner here in Berlin. Literally translated into English its title would be ‘With the Townhouse to Live’, grammatically correct that would be ‘Living with the Townhouse’. It is described by the gallery to be an information exhibit, something far more likely to be of interest to geeks like us than say, art would be.

You can link to the gallery site at this address, but please be aware that a flash animation is embedded that may cause seizures to be suffered by people diagnosed with epilepsy:

http://www.kaihoelzner.de/

For those of you that don’t want to brave that test of speed reading in German, here is a tickling frame that was furnished to me in the press release for the show:

As our more steadfast readers already know, the Berlin townhouse is a subject that is both seductive and perplexing to us, going all the way back to Ian Warner’s piece from November 2006, ‘Upper-Middle-Class Homes for the “Classless” Society’, as well as Karen Elliot’s seminal follow-up from one year ago, ‘A Whiff of Density’.

So now let’s see where this conversation is going, should be an awesome thing to check out this weekend. From 7:00pm on Saturday, July 17th at Galerie Kai Hoelzner, Adalbertstr. 96, 10999 Berlin.

Dispatch No. 1 from a Land that Never Embraced Post-Modern Design in the 1980’s

A typical solution, employing a common tarpaulin and pressure sensitive adhesive tape.

A more elaborate proposal, requiring special ordinances for the temporary use of pavement customarily used for the parking of automobiles.

A festive variation, found at a popular purveyor of Indian cuisine.

A more aggressive approach, fashioned with the assistance of a professional scaffolding contractor.

Disguising utilitarian micro-architecture seems to be well on the way to becoming a genuine folk-art tradition in these parts. Last July I reported on a DSL box in Potsdam which had been carefully painted to resemble the wall behind it, including a row of terra-cotta tiles running across the top. Since then I’ve seen more and more examples, not only in Berlin, but further afield too.

The diguises fall into two categories: cloaks and costumes, and with ‘cloak’ I mean the science fiction variety; an invisibility shield.

The doric order shithouse

The BVG, Berlin’s public transport network operator, have been busy building toilets for its bus and tram drivers across the city. Whilst taking the picture above, I got chatting to a tram driver seeking relief at a terminal stop at Nordbahnhof. He told me that all the BVG loos have been decorated differently. Which means we won’t need to put up with badly painted Roman temples, but a wide variety of shakey costume architectural parodies. Whilst I dig the idea, the execution leaves a lot to be desired. However, I must admit to being fascinated by the positioning of the two tell-tale, off-the-shelf vent coverings, which look as though they were added after the paint job.

Convenient canvas

Out in Fürstenberg, a small town 75km north of Berlin, some wag has produced a stunning portrait of SpongeBob Squarepants using a ubiquitous curb-side Grey Box as a conveniently shaped canvas.

The Lennon box

Another costume, produced, one assumes, by an anonymous pupil of the John Lenon Secondary School in Berlin’s Mitte district. For me, this marks an artistic zenith in the quiet conflict which has been waging for months between sprayers and Deutsche Telekom buffers. I’m hoping this piece of urban decoration will be lasting, but some other can-weilding cretin has already blemished the piece since the photo was taken.

The stealth cottage is visible enough not to be seen

I’m going to leave this meander with another example from the countryside: this time from Neuglobsow, a lakeside hamlet close to SpongeBob’s home town, and a great example of a ‘cloaked’ hut. It turned out to be an electrical substation, and obviously one of such aesthetic embarrasment to this history-conscious community that it was worth disguising as a timber frame cottage. Apart from the exaggerated perspective, and the peculiarly uninterrupted view of a distant lake, the effect is pretty convincing even from a distance of just two meters. So absorbing is this example, that the undisguied Grey Box to the right goes by unnoticed. Paradoxes abound.

For me this is all about a healthy erosion of the boundry between individuals and the civic infrastructure. Regardless of whether the decorattion of these non-descript structures is legal or illegal, it’s a way of reclaiming the streets and turning them into an extension of private domestic space. Customisation and reappropriation of that which is nominally out of bounds is a reaffirmation that the place you call home extends beyond the four walls of your dwelling.

London’s Cartwright Gardens is a piece of classic Georgian streetscape, consisting of an elegant semi-circle of dark-brick townhouses. It lies in between the core of London city centre and the two railway stations of King’s Cross and Euston, which did not yet exist at the time of construction.

The semi-circular terrace is the perfect shape for these buildings because it allows vistas only of the fronts of the buildings. The geometry of the semi-circle means that looking out the back of any of these buildings makes it impossible to see the rear facades of the neighbouring buildings. This is entirely in keeping with the clean and proportioned aesthetic of the fronts, which are possible only at the expense of the jumbled and irregular rears. Thus, the townhouses of Cartwright Gardens were designed so that the only thing that could be seen from the rear would be the gardens of the houses themselves, providing a buffer between the terrace and whatever the next building would have been around 1807.

This is the view from the rear of the Harlingford Hotel, on the south side of Cartwright Gardens. Whatever green space there was visible from here has been eaten up in the intervening years, and now the townhouses have no space out the back other than the closed-in courtyards which act as light- and air-wells. The pressure of space and the temptation of high land prices have taken their toll, and now the genteel terrace contemplates an array of warehouse roofs. The overall effect is that distinctively London look of eras upon eras, spaces upon spaces, blocks upon blocks, where the commercial imperative above all has created a jumble that ranges from captivating to distressing, depending on your mood and your pay level. There has been little to invite hotel guests to glance out the window of the return stairs between the third and fourth floors, from where this picture was taken. Until 2009/10, that is, when the colourful rear facade opposite suddenly appeared. What the children’s colourbook colour-scheme of the new building attempts to distract us from is the fact that the new structure has filled the only unoccupied gap on the entire block.

The new building appears in this satellite image as a grey rhomboid, backing on to the beige-roofed buildings on the north side of Tavistock Place. The warehouse roofs of the first picture shine white in the sunshine in the satellite image. The view from the window at the back of the Harlingford used to include the rear of Tavistock Place, but this is a fact I can assert not from memory but only from deduction. I have stayed in that hotel many times, and looked out that window many times, but I can no longer remember what the view used to be. Now that this new building has appeared, a gap in my memory has opened. Nobody knows the value of an empty site more than a building developer, except perhaps the people who spend the rest of their days gazing out at the object that has taken its place.