SLAB Magazine — The Heuristic Journal for Gonzo Blurbanism

We would like to extend our belated thanks to Sandra Bartoli of Büro für Konstruktivismus and the Chair for Urban Design and Architecture at Berlin’s Technical University, for inviting myself and Oliver Miller to hold a lecture on The New Death Strip as part of a BA course investigating the line of the former Berlin Wall.

Kunstfabrik am Flutgraben

Our lecture, held in the Kunstfabrik on October 17th, was a great opportunity for us to revisit many of the themes which we brought to paper in our contribution to the ‘Disko’ series of publications back in 2010. It made sense to reshuffle a lot of that content into loose topics, and pinpoint these to various geographic locations. By doing this we could break down the story-structure of the publication, and not fall into the trap of recounting a travelogue in a linear fashion.

Graphic: Sandra Bartoli

We also had a great time on November 15th when we were invited back as guest critics at the end of the course along with Christian Fuchs, Katharina Hagg, Daniela Mehlich and Matthias Heyden. Over the course of an exhausting afternoon where the students present their impressive project work, their was ample chance to delve into some heated exchange about the ramifications of speculative urban design concepts for this unique space.

“Brutiful” at 8:45
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The Slab-funded trip to Amsterdam took place in July 2013. It was similar to the Zurich expedition, in that your Slab correspondent found very little to write home about. Central Amsterdam contains canals, bridges and bikes, and they are arranged exactly as you would expect to find them.

The Dutch heritage industry is just like what you find in Germany, England, Ireland, Scotland, the United States and other places where the inhabitants are fundamentally alienated from the reality of the place that they live in. So the Dutch encounter Dutchness as it is fabricated for tourists, Dutch heritage becomes a theme-park, and traditional Dutch architecture is a repository of icons that can be exploited as a cultural resource. This self-promoting, vision-building, not-quite-nationalistic and ultimately evacuating process takes place on postage stamps, matchboxes, public transport signage and insignia, letterheads, coins, complimentary pens and pencils and … in the Netherlands, on sugar sachets.

… and then finally something decent to put in the dossier. This is a municipal building of some description (hey, if you want research and facts, post us a cheque and we’ll look into it). The flag is the Amsterdam city flag.

Surely your Slab correspondent cannot be the first to observe the similarity between this and the fascist emblems in Charlie Chaplin’s Hitler-spoof The Great Dictator?

A man, a plan, a canal, Tomania?

So Amsterdam is worth visiting after all. Who knew?

This is the inside of one of those chocolate-coated snacks which is light and fluffy on the inside so that you can eat it between meals, right? A malt honeycomb center coated in a coagulated skimmed-milk paste stabilized with soya lecithin and sorbitan tristearate, all held in place with a masonry substrate of demineralised whey powders.

Somehow inevitably this series must also direct its gaze to the Fellini Residences – currently nearing completion – and perhaps unfairly Slab’s own Messers Warner and Miller have gotten pretty intimate with it, going right up close, training their macro lenses almost pornographically upon its nether regions, its intimate crevices and orifices; probing away where no self-respecting critic of architecture has previously dared to insert his or her fingers and faces with the simple aim of revealing the truth, and nothing less.

But unfair for whom, or what? Why, for this fine series of articles, of course, which is supposed to deal with the surface of things and go no further. Here we cannot point to damage as such, but rather to a kind of pre-damage: the micro-horror of construction itself and the unseemly manner in which five separate surfaces might conjoin. Not much of this gloppy, viscid, battery goo-gam will still be visible once ribbons are cut and corks have flown. But we will know. We will know.

▸ Modern Façades Today, Now

On the Slab-funded architectural trip to Zurich in July, your reporter found little of interest. The only really striking thing about Zurich is the presence of construction cranes all over the city, particularly to a foreigner whose eyes have finally become attuned to uninterrupted grey skies in the aftershock of a building boom.

Zurich Airport

District 4

Near the Rathaus

Zurich intersection

Zürichsee

Zürichberg

Crouching Allegorical Figure, Hidden Construction Crane

Your Slab reporter adds: The stained glass windows by Sigmar Polke in Zurich’s Grossmünster Church are something special, but difficult to photograph. A silent video of them can be viewed here.

Signs may not mean what they say, or rather they mention the thing they do not want, and so constitute their very thereness by reference to the absent thing. The spectrum we are surveying here ranges from the example of the 45-year-old who wears a vintage-looking ‘The Ramones’ t-shirt, but who when he/she was 17 had never heard of them, or if they had, were afraid of them, to the owner of the garden below who above all wants no dog crap, to the point where he/she can think of nothing else to say, indeed can think of nothing else.

Where on the spectrum can we put the next sign, which is a plaque to commemorate the birthplace of a fictional character? The claim-making urge is strong here, so strong indeed that the possibility that this is in fact the wrong house is no obstacle. Joyce said that Bloom was born in 52 Clanbrassil Street, but did not specify which end of the street, Upper or Lower. The Upper got the upper hand in this Joycean struggle, and the Lower, far less picturesque after a much-opposed 1980s city-centre road-widening scheme, is perhaps better perused here on Google Maps.

But it is the personal, handmade, quasi-graffiti sign, bordering on vigilantism, that makes the strongest claim for a space and, most unusually for public signage, effectively expresses emotion.

But nothing lays claim to a place like plain old graffiti. The lower the quality (of spelling, of execution, of housing, of education), the rawer the emotion, and indeed it is difficult on reading this to think of anything else.

In 2001 Berlin’s Senate Department for Town Planning and the Berlin State Museums created the foundation Verein Internationale Bauakademie with the aim of rebuilding Schinkel’s famous academy and installing a center of excellence for architecture.

Between 1999 and 2002 part of the façade – the north-east corner – was faithfully reconstructed by apprentices of the Structural Engineering Association. In 2004 it was integrated into a printed-canvas scaffold simulation of the entire building.

Within the scaffold an exhibition and event space was created, a nested simulation of the “Red Hall”, originally located on the 1st upper floor of the Bauakademie. Parts of the outer façade were sold as advertising space for Hugo Boss, Mercedes and other international brands.

In 2008 the private real-estate company Liegenschaftsfonds Berlin, charged with selling off state property (the State of Berlin is its sole shareholder), started a bidding process to seek finances for the rebuilding. One condition was that the majority of the building would be handed over free of charge to an as yet founded Academy for Architecture and Urban Planning.

The conditions proved too hard to meet, the bidding process stalled and was eventually cancelled in 2010.

Whilst the Senate still expresses an interest in the rebuilding project and the founding of a new Academy, the canvas façades have faded, and undergrowth has been allowed to flourish within the scaffold.

Last week the textile exterior was stripped away, revealing deep structural absurdities and a burgeoning forest within.

Click on any image to open an annotated slideshow.

Walking along Neue Grünstraße, my knuckles beat a hollow tune on a parade of new EIFS facades (Exterior insulation facade systems, foam finished with imitation acrylic stucco or render). Since my last article on the historicist use of acrylic render, I had somehow shelved the subject, quietly deluding myself into thinking I had put a halt to the awful malpractice through an act of writing, much like Thomas Bernhard annihilated the village of Wolfsegg through never ending, punctuation free sentences in his excellent book Extinction. I was a bit perplexed to discover the stuff sprouting up again, pretty much right behind my studio on Gendarmenmarkt. I was reminded of what ruthless developer billionaire Alonzo Hawk must have felt when Herbie, a VW Beetle, avenges Hawk’s attempt to take his owner’s historic home for profit, with a foam attack, in the 1968 film The Love Bug:

“Hey, ’nuff with the foam, please!”

Befittingly, Herbie’s owner is a Mrs Steinmetz (stone mason).

Yes, Berlin is becoming something of a hotbed for foam architecture wizardry these days. It seems like people en masse are popping into their local Boesner (franchise art shop), grabbing a starter kit of plastic spackles and sculpture knives and getting to work on blocks of acrylic putty over night, creating entire Quartiers in a frenzy of creativity and giving them French sounding titles in the morning (Belles Etages, Voltaire, etc.) much like those sculpture parks carved out of ice in winter at the World Ice Art Championships. This novel art of acrylic render puttying has its epicenter here, in a ca. 600m long trapezoidal city block along Seydelstraße, between Spittelmarkt and Alte Jakobstraße in Berlin Mitte, where a large city block of this stuff has sprung up seemingly in the last few seconds. Only yesterday, this was a bucolic meadow of untouched virgin death strip land fostering such beautifully idle things as an outdoor sculpture park, an inhabited billboard as artist residence, or even „Honey Neustadt“, a miniature city of Plattenbaus inhabited by bees.

EIFS are, of course, a national, even global, phenomenon and quite common and banal as such. Masked behind a fancy acronym, the construction technique is quite amateur, consisting more or less of hacking extruded polystyrene sheets down to size with machetes or carpet knives, tacking them onto cheap-ass low density concrete masonry units and then smearing them with an acrylic imitation of mineral render to give it all a smoothed-over appearance. I myself prefer the acro CACT – cheap ass construction technique. Common techniques of EIFS are glueing, tacking, chopping, spraying and smearing, whereas the classical orders that are thus imitated convey notions of very different techniques; of carving, hewing, cutting and assembling, of distinct parts, of columns, capitals, arches, architraves. There couldn’t be a more oxymoronic combination of construction technique and symbolic content conveyed; in real life that is, it is entirely common in set design. For a surprisingly extensive list of examples, visit the sites of The Groth Development GmbH and Van Caem Projects, and those of famed foam maestros Marc Kocher and Tobias Nöfer.

This bizarre pairing, of amateur construction technique with historicist vocabularies, somehow appears to me quintessentially Roweweit-era Berlin (Schlossplatz and BER - wait, or was it Woreweit? these widespread historicist misquotations of historical reference got me all messed up) in its almost mindlessness, haphazard, negligence. The vacuous materiality of foam facades and aircrete, together with the prominence of hugely conspicuous absences in the center of the city, seem to define this recent architectural epoch of lightness under Mr Rovevoid. For a while now, I have asked myself, how is this possible? How can someone grant a planning permit for something this awful? Director of City Planning Regula Lüscher provides a glimpse at the reasons for the rise of vacuous, cavernous mediocrity: the lack of legislation that would provide the authorities with powers to demand architectural quality from developers. As it stands, developers must only comply with massing requirements. They don’t have to live up to any aesthetic standards, save some vague and un-enforceable stipulation that developments don’t disfigure their environment. As long as a building satisfies non-aesthetic criteria, in terms of volume, height, you can build whatever you want ( I don’t know how Stimman’s implemenation of a law for mineral facades “steinernes Berlin” happened). It seems that if what is lacking is legislation, it would be up to the legislature to create some, which in turn would require an architectural vision for the Berlin.

I don’t believe in attaching morals to materials, so I started wondering how an appropriate expression of foam architecture, scummytecture, could look like? There already exists an appropriate expression for the construction in scum (scum, from middle german schum schaum foam) by product designer and artist Jerszy Seymour which could lend itself beautifully to acrylic render facades.