My latest architectural dream has been published on 60pages today. It takes place on the 30th floor of a cantilevered apartment building, and features a swimming pool has neither a deep-end or a shallow-end, but a day-end and a night-end.
Jump to Day and Night Pool.
Slab’s coffers are empty after the extravagance of sending your roving correspondent to distant Lincoln, England.
The Roman walls survive in some places, here indelicately overstepped by the undercarriage of the brutiful 1970s City of Lincoln Council building. For the new building, the relic is an irrelevance that it is obliged not to obliterate. Preservation by condescension, insultingly undoing the difference between the outside and inside of the old walls. It does not matter which side we are on. Die Mauer ist weg.
It matters here, though. As you progress up the steep hill that is the heart of the old city, you move through a rather exclusive neighbourhood of niche houses, concealed from the winding streets, each with picturesque planting spilling over their walls, as if to make up for their high exclusivity. I have walked similar wealthy laneways above the coast around Nice.
The cathedral at the top of the hill is for everyone. For centuries, it welcomed pilgrims from far and wide who came to see the relic of the tomb (pictured) of Little Hugh, a child supposedly ritually murdered by Jews in 1255. Now there is a history of the event composed in 2009, in a spirit of ecumenical inclusivity, which acknowledges Lincoln’s leading role in the history of anti-semitism in England. Inclusivity cuts both ways of course – disowning the heritage of racism does not extend so far as to remove the remnants of the offending tomb. The wealth and stature of the cathedral itself derive to a significant degree from its anti-semitic attraction. The tomb cannot be disentangled from the cathedral.
The modern gargoyles on the renovated parts of the exterior tell us more about the modern cathedral’s values. Death and money. Yes, we get it. This is the Church of England à la Rowan Williams – unhappy with capitalism, but not quite uncomfortable. The vision of a demon transfixed by money goes back some way, indeed this is an undead Jew for all intents and purposes. The error is to outsource excessive interest in material wealth to a demonic entity, to some kind of repressed other, or to a hated minority. The real problem is far more disturbing and can find expression only in this weird gargoyle’s secret message, which is that God has not died, he has been transformed into money.
Connected to the cathedral is the prep school of Lincoln Minster School. A small, fairly posh place. It is interested in bringing out the best in everyone.
The best in everyone, you understand, but not for just anyone. You have to belong. These photographs were taken from the wrong side of the wall.
Down in the town, there sits ignored a far smaller, older church.
St Mary Le Wigford is unfortunate enough to be crammed between the railway track, the train station, the high street and the hideous dual carriageway that cuts through the heart of the waterside (built 1972, when else?). In its desperation, it plays both God cards at once: God is eternally there, and He has agents who work for Him in the here and now. You belong to Me. You don’t belong here.
In Germany, the laws governing the ban on smoking within public railway stations includes a subset of exceptions for certain areas demarcated by yellow lines. In mapping, lines defining the extremities of political territory often have physical counterparts: walls, checkpoints, fencing, river banks, coastline. But the graphical markings above form a legislative map, with no concrete manifestation on the ground other than the paint used to describe itself.
The smoking ban is otherwise known as the “Nichtraucherschutzgesetz”, or Law for the Protection of Non-Smokers, but smoke doesn’t care too much for yellow lines painted on the floor. Whilst the non-smoker may not enjoy a great deal of protection from a wayward puff of smoke, for a smoker, the line represents the difference between a contemplative drag on a fag within, and a 15€ fine without.
Caught between the vestigial popular image of the smoker as a carefree rebel, the law-abiding instincts of a right-minded German, and the inner alarm bells of slighted common sense, these smokers spotted in Angermünde participate in the silent theater of casual defiance. A back is turned to the line, a foot traverses it, and few wish to appear truly enclosed by it. The charitable protection of non-smokers is paid for with the shame of those obliged to participate in this absurd agreement.
As a design solution, the box misses an opportunity for some self-irony: the rectangle maybe most cost effective, but this author would prefer the outline of a big fluffy cloud.
The article “Fubar Corner“, from April of this year, was one of our regular skirmishes against what we perceive to be an affront to the architectural arts, just as much as it is a contribution. Today we must shed light on a further affront made by the same building, but this time to the typographic arts.
The object in question is Neue Grünstraße 40, otherwise known as ‘Berliner Neue Mitte’ by its developers, the Munich-based Baywobau. A quick peruse of the relevant project page of their website reveals that the horrid, wine-red, polyurethane window bay we criticised was actually planned by the architects as being constructed of wood.
Click through their slideshow (skipping over the inexplicable photo of a park bench on Unter den Linden, 2km distant) or peer closely at the rendering above, and one can see that the architects did a pretty good job on the typography over the doorways: Paul Renner’s 1927 typeface Futura has been used, and the letters are well-spaced. In reality though, the building will have to put up with Arial, which has been applied in the most ham-fisted way imaginable. The letters are mercilessly crushed up against each other, leaving a gaping hole between the words and tipping the whole center-justified affair completely off balance.
As a flourish, or a signing-off, the lettering probably marked the finishing touch to the entire building. How tragic, and how typical, that this final simple gesture should have been executed so poorly.
You are on a quay just outside Bantry, on the southwest coast of Ireland. In post-building boom Ireland, there is something familiar about the way this block has been abandoned, askew on the concrete, dumped either because it is damaged on the corner or because the construction firm went bust. The little slips of wood underneath, originally to help a lifting machine slide underneath, have softened and rotted to pulp. So far, so recession. You take a closer look.
Readers of Slab will be familiar with images of the secret polymer innards of apparently substantial architectural objets. But this block of science friction strikes you as particularly alien. You are contemplating the styrofoam hyperobject, an entity that will outlive you, that will out-exist you, on a timescale that has no place for the things that we usually call objects. Why are you thinking like this? On the way to Bantry, you saw this.
A farmer has used an old axle as a fencepost to enclose sheep on this particular windswept outcrop of turf and heather. The incongruity is apparent, because (let’s spell this out) it is a piece of modern engineering that has been repurposed in a natural, non-industrial environment. And perhaps you are pleased to sense the axle’s decay, its chemical disintegration in the face of weather, vegetation, soil and time. The quayside block may lose its blockiness with time, but the styrofoam will never change, and that’s uncanny. ‘Incongruous’ doesn’t even start to cover it.
The axle is almost quaint. In the grand historical sweep of things, ‘antique’ machinery has been integrated into a nostalgic vision with striking speed. The defunct maritime technology in a fishing port pub (brass compasses, oil lamps), the skeletal remains of mass-produced iron farm machinery in an Irish pub, and the chipped enamel signs for long-forgotten brands in a German bar – these are all barely a century old.
The rush to assign machinery to the trash heap of memory even results, for God’s sake, in perfectly functional bikes being pimped out to sell the cornucopia of fruit and vegetables of the common supermarket, a display that itself is strangely subject to immediate decay yet is in denial of all historical conceptions of time, place, culture, climate, transport and cuisine. In other words, modern agriculture is another hyperobject, festooned with the disjecta of an outmoded transport infrastructure, which invisiblizes the world-destroying hyperobject of mass-transportation-refrigeration-genetic-modification-industrialization-herbicide-pesticide-carbonization-suburbanization. Not to mention dummification.
Of course, it’s easy to ignore how modern old-fashioned modernity really was. The bike was a revolutionary technology that changed the shapes of cities, patterns of labour, gender relations, rural spheres of contact, and much more.
Back in West Cork, the farmer is penning in his sheep on the uplands, once inhabited and farmed by humans on the edge of starvation. It’s worth remembering how new the potato was, the key crop that sustained and then failed this population – it came to Europe a mere 200 years before. Then comes a truly modern, continent-wide event, the Napoleonic Wars, and the land is cleared of surviving humans to make way for sheep, because the price of wool has been driven up by the conflict. And all of this long before the invention of the bicycle. What other staples of the vision of traditional Irish rural life are in fact modern imports? Tea. Sugar. Corn. Tobacco. St Patrick’s Day.
A few miles up the road from Bantry, there is a fair in Kenmare, where you find more evidence of post-building-boom junk, this time in the form of tools of bankrupt and unemployed builders, dumped on the tarmac for the patient browser who knows what he or she is looking for. 20 or 30 years ago, you might have come across a jumbled box of screws, bolts and hinges, but the pace of obsolescence has increased even since then. Tools and the things they make are in an ever-faster race towards a vanishing point of obsolescence, each trying to become junk before the other.
The dislocation of it all dizzies the holidaymaker. Before obsolescence was its opposite – some kind of combination of immanence and transcendence achieved by feats of heroic prehistoric engineering. Two great 5000-year-old megaliths jut from the earth in a field just off the road, and their slow weathering, their gradual death, and their inarguable meaningfulness (though what it is that they say is obscure) make 3000 BCE seem like it was a very long time ago.
From Tuesday (May 6th 2014), I will begin publishing a series of written pieces over at the website www.60pages.com. 60pages is an exploration in long-form journalism, set up by author and columnist Georg Diez, together with other collaborators from various mainstream media outlets such as Spiegel Online and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. For 60pages, testing the limits of the journalistic format means opening it up to people with different backgrounds, and turning it into “a realtime thinking machine” in Diez’s words..
In the coming months I will revisit an idea I had thought about exploring on Slab a number of years ago, but for some reason hadn’t. Under the title “Looking for the Attic in the Cellar”, I will narrate a series of personal architectural encounters made whilst dreaming: an architecture of the subconscious.
The title of the series refers to Carl Gustav Jung’s comparison – made in Modern Man in Search of a Soul – in which the conscious being, hoping to act freely of their “autonomy of complexes”, behaves like a prudent man who, on hearing a suspicious noise coming from the cellar, runs to the attic instead to check for burglars. On finding none, he decides the noise was his imagination rather than dare investigate the cellar. Exploring the architecture of dream-sleep is a way of encountering the subconscious through the conscious act of writing; all without leaving the neat metaphor of Jung’s house.
I am not alone in this rather daunting endeavor. Each dream will be interpreted in an image created exclusively by the massively talented Michelle Phillips and Johannes Conrad of Studio YUKIKO. The one you’re seeing above is from the first installment: Cocktail Party in the Desert. Many thanks for taking part!
My thanks also go to Sandra Bartoli for hooking me up with 60pages. Her articles on the site can be found here.
This journal just seems to keep on gravitating back towards the same part of town, which by now probably warrants its own section alongside stalwarts “Eurotrash” and “NDS”. I am of course talking about the corner of Kommandantenstraße and Neue Grünstraße, which is where the Fellini Residences, with all its Romanesque trash-talk, has defiantly ensconced itself. It now has company, and what was once a convincing inner-city prairie is now a dense sub-ornamental bricolage of extruded-foam vanity-investment posing as architecture and urban fabric. An anti-neighborhood.
Take this earnest rogue for example. It looks as though it turned up to a casting for Bristol or Bath 85 years too late, and came wearing the wrong frock to the wrong town. And one has to cast aside all other concerns for a moment and ask: what in fuckery is up with that corner? All the smoothly plastered, wedding-cake swoopery and hoax-brick pretension of the upper floors withers spectacularly at the junction of the two streets. In other words: right where the architecture needs to express a tidy narrative of convergence and admission.
Instead, we are given a blunt, wine-red protrusion suffering from a kind of myopic squint. The berkish symmetry of the upper stories does at least exhibit some kind of perspectival generosity, but at the entrance such graces are asked to kindly fuck off and die. The whole plasticky ensemble invites only horror. It resembles a pustule, or a hernia. Or a metastatic growth. Something which should be removed swiftly.
However, the gesture does have a local predecessor. Well over a decade ago, a pale cousin exhibiting similar symptoms was constructed one block down on Neue Grün and Seidel, and still endures, meaning that the ailment is sadly non-terminal. In some aesthetic concession to accessibility, this one at least exhibits a recess at ground-level, but the same poverty of conception can be observed in its off-the-shelf approach to construction. The building looks this way because that’s how its components fit together easiest. This is what now seems to pass as local heritage.
Whilst one might justly contemplate running for the hills, a brief look at each of the corners defining this junction is appealing, if only for the formality of a 360° survey. The building on the western corner takes the idea of manufact-destiny a step further. Constructed in a era when Styrofoam wasn’t yet the go-to material for façade design, it looks like a case-modded PC, or the suburban warehouse in Shenzen where half of the case-modding parts were shipped from.
The northern corner briefly reprises the theme of ice-frosting, albeit in a form which almost engulfs the entrance between the cleft cheeks of a grey, fluted buttock. The building’s perimeter walls are sealed and aloof, most of its windows are mounted high above the pavement well beyond prying eyes. The southern corner – part of the mysteriously trite Zvi Hecker complex – offers an amalgamation of all forms: the wavy bulge, the grey blandness, the fussy ground-floor window assemblage. Its transparency is all bluff: the glass is obscured by decorative adhesive foils.
There won’t be much scope for this anti-neigborhood to develop any kind of urban life in the future. The abandonment of its intersections to formal arbitrariness and the delegation of its ground-floors to a protective barrier or a utilitarian membrane, mean that street-life has been subjugated to a series of efficient vectors which allow for discreet entrances and quick exits, but give little reason to linger, or to dwell.
