SLAB Magazine — The Heuristic Journal for Gonzo Blurbanism

In a three part series commemorating the five year anniversary of Kyrill blowing I-beams out Berlin’s central station, I take three pot shots at this grotesque (meaning it’s like a Grotto, but also pretty hideous) building, trying to undo it with writing. In Part 1, the faufu (faux functionalist) aesthetic is exposed as a charade to conceal a shopping mall as a train station. Part 2 explores the planners’ devices to artificially prolong our stay in the station and thereby our exposure to its commercial offerings (it’s really true). Part 3 gives a historical perspective for why this building is so putrid and perfidious and why it is tragic that it was errected here, where the excesses of the Gründerzeit spawned functionalism as a medicina mentis (Prozac) with good intentions.

“They float on the landscapes like pyramids to the boom years all those Plazas, and Malls, and Esplanades” Jane Gidion, On the Mall

Circulation heals, soothes sore muscles, sanitizes the bedroom, flushes us with nutrients and minerals. Shops cluster around terminals like micro-organisms and crustaceans around an underwater volcano. A constant pulse of arrival and departures flushes the mall with fresh consumers and drains away the old. Graphs of sales figures rise and fall with scheduled arrivals and departures. Glass and steel Panorama escelators and elevators pierce the station’s numerous shopping levels like surgical equipment, flushing endless concourses of outlets and chain cafes with a steady supply of shoppers. Intake, compression, shop, exhaust.

At midnight on January 19, 2007, the isobar map for northern Germany looked like this, moments after Cyclone Kyrill’s furious winds has swept through Berlin.

Missing from the facade of Berlin’s central station was a two tonne steel I-beam and another one was hanging by its thread. In a single blow, Kyrill had knocked four tonnes of steel off value-engineered supports, and the lid off of most of our conceptions about this building, it’s modernist appearance, and the professions involved in its construction. Architect’s GMP were complicit in the pastiche modernist design, but DB had taken control of the building’s construction and someone had said “these little steel rails that keep the two tonne beams in place and cost us 67 Euros? We don’t need those.”

Fears for the building’s structural integrity were quickly dispelled. Kyrill’s distructive winds had only inflicted superficial damage. The two tonne I-Beam had had little to prop up besides itself and the image of a modernist facade. It had served as one of the massive, but purely decorative, horizontal transoms of the station’s externally expressed structure. St. Thomas, patron saint of architects, had unleashed his fury at this endless square footage of vacuous mediocrity – the latest missed opportunity to translate the promise and potential of early re-unified Berlin into built form – only days after its completion. It had sent Kyrill to expose the applique fig leaf modernism of Berlin’s central station. This publication smelled a rat ever since Kyrill plunged this dubious building into disrepute. They had promised us a “Stadtkrone”, instead we got this mall.

Years later, I found myself literally kicking the brushed steel facias of the nation’s and this station’s most prized glass elevators, down there in the pit of track 7, with girlfriend, child, stroller, and a mound of stuff that parenthood seems to always collect around you. I started to wonder if there was method to this buidling’s wretchedness. I beams that created the illusion of functionalism, crystalline elevators that didn’t live up to their aesthetic promise in terms of effectiveness, convoluted circulation whose sole purpose was to suck you deeper and deeper into the buildings auraless, cold, techno vacuity? I don’t recall ever feeling this much anger at an inanimate thing or building, in my life, not since I was eight. I wanted to kick it in the nuts, kick the life into it, and the shit out of its stoic, disaffected detachedness, fucking with me and succeeding.

I was trapped. After leftist terror attacks in October 2011, my train south had been canceled, and chasing one replacement connection after another, we had been sent on a tour de farce around the train station, experiencing the full brunt of what I was suspecting was a deliberate attempt to trap us in this Moloch of mammon for as long as, and by any means, possible. Eventually you will fold, and buy a croissant, a mini pizza, or some underwear. You might miss your train and have to buy a new ticket. On our fourth and final elevator trip, we felt we were drowning in this building – running, sweating, hope, defeat, not knowing up from down, etc.

“Your next connection is in 10 minutes from Track 12″, said the DB rep. Ok, that sounded good. “So that means you won’t make it”, he concluded. What? It takes 10 minutes to get from the main North South tracks to the main East-West tracks? How can that be, I thought, as this is what this building was sold to us on, that it linked up these two routes beautifully and functionally, as an expression of Germany’s new found unity.

could you move that sign? I can’t see my train

All this physical exertion had only brought us closer to our first family stint on the Tagesschau, but I had to pull my girlfriend away from the limelight, just as she was making her closing remarks, in a last ditch effort to miss our next connection on track six. “I swear they said track six” I said. Of course, there had only been a single PA anouncement , and a four minute notice, to make it to that train. The lone DB rep on the track shrugged her shoulders and shook her head, flapping a blond pony tail around, tied back under her red faux velvet DB cap. Her smart device was not smart anymore. It, too, had conceded to the terrorist’s arson, as had the LCDs, and all other displays, all the other fancy schmancy gadgetry. All they were doing was checking the internet for train schedules, anyway. She could not help me, was like me, just with a hat and uniform, just didn’t have to catch a train. This brief feeling of sympathy couldn’t stop the inevitable from happening. I unleashed a verbal attack that made me look pathetic and helpless. It didn’t seem to phase her one bit, but offered temporary relief from the swelling in my neck and throat I had eperienced, where the feeling of injustice resides. On a deeper level, I had already resigned long ago,when I saw Wolfgang Tiefensee (Germany’s former traffic minister and ironically also in charge when the station openend in 2007) walk up to a rep with smart phone and be turned away like anyone else. We had all become this Moloch’s children.

descent into Moloch in shiny elevators – a bit slow, but nice to look at

The building’s exterior looks engineered and functionalist, but is, in fact, a carefully crafted image that serves as a decoy. This might be called a train station but is only 20% train station and 80% percent shopping mall. There is really no reason for this to look any different than Alexa or any other Pomo shopping mall. The functionalist appearance here serves the purpose of fooling us into thinking we are confronted with a train station, the aesthetic of “the overall railway-station character of our existence”, to quote Ernst Bloch. Maybe it fooled some officials into thinking they were getting a train station. I suspect a study indicating that people are 30% more likely to shop in a mall if unaware of being in one.

From the perspective of a train station and a user, the functionalist appearance served to mask an architecture of deliberate dysfunctionality. From the perspective of a vertical mall and shopper, it may be a building that is very functional, but the common architecture of functioning malls is not that of the “railway-station character of our existence”.

the station's real self – X ray image through modernist fig leaf

Does anyone remember Rachel Whiteread’s House, which won the Turner Prize in 1993? It is striking how of its time the piece is now. That reads like a polite way of saying it has dated, which has a grain of truth, so I’ll leave it in. This short video will jog readers’ memories.

Looking back, House fits precisely with the early 1990s postmodern (’pomo’) Zeitgeist, where insides and outsides and the permeable, shifting liminal zones between them were in a flux of radical undecidability, even of alterity. Clearly, the period’s critical theory buzzwords still flow fluently. In 1993, I was a student of English literature, particularly taken with critical theory, and it shows. It also explains why House made its mark on me, or should I say, it accounts for the continuing inscription of the Zeitgeist’s discourse onto the palimpsest of my (en)cultur(at)ed Weltanschauung. Still, it’s easy to sneer.

From Zeitgeist to Geistzeit. It was Halloween when I first noticed the moulding on this exterior wall of a basement in Dublin. Perhaps it was something to do with the way the drapes hang like a white-sheet ghost that drew my attention. The moribund plant container and the odd negative jail-cell bars on the frosted glass certainly played a role too. But I think it goes deeper than just association of ideas. Things that are inside-out can be disturbingly uncanny because they give solid form to what is not normally solid. That is not to say that inside-out buildings are always uncanny – the exposed entrails of the Centre Georges Pompidou or of the Lloyds Building are merely interesting. But when a building or its surfaces bear the trace of something now missing, as in House, or when concrete bears the mark of the piece of wood that contained it (example here), we are faced with some kind of ghostly remnant (if this sounds like Derrida, it is because it occurs to me that his Specters of Marx also dates from 1993).

On a cold winter’s day in Paris, when you notice the marks where, months before, the kickstands of parked motorbikes have sunk into the softened tar, the ghostly heat of that summer’s day brushes your cheek.

In Derry, are these micro-sculptures meant to be emerging from beneath the pavement, or have they fallen from above? Either way, they are imprints of the missing oak wood – Derry comes from ‘Doire’, which means oak wood – that once occupied this spot. The name of the city is contested – officially it is Londonderry, the colonial name, but the great majority of its residents call it simply Derry. The micro-sculptures are evidence that the ghost of the original wood has not forgotten, and will not forget, that this is an undead doire. It’s a good example of how the nationalist population of that city have won the cultural war, spending UK-exchequer money on deconstruction-influenced sculpture that proclaims the passing nature of the centuries-long British occupation.

The grisly curtains in Dublin make me wonder, with a quickening of my pulse, if the original curtains are still in there, undead and entombed inside the plaster? Whiteread’s scultpure always did have something of the sarcophagus about it, as if some ghastly entombment had happened there. Years after House was demolished, I lived in London and for a long while passed the spot regularly without knowing what had stood there. What I always thought of as I passed that spot was how 200 people were made homeless and 6 were killed there in 1944 by the first successful German V-1 ‘flying bomb’. There’s no trace of that.

What better way to begin a new year than with a fresh reminder from Slab Magazine that the “Berliner Republik” is crumbling! Yes! It is falling apart at the seams!

Cast your mind back to April 2011 (or open another tab, if you wish), and you might recall a similar case in this series, where the anchoring pins of a sandstone panel had become painfully visible. I claimed that the phenomena was not uncommon, so feel duty-bound to reveal another example of façade-failure, this time affecting the generically named “Bürohaus Neue Grünstraße 22”.

Whilst listed in the Senate Department’s database of post-1990 architecture (here), the office building seems to have been disowned by its architects: “no data available”. Even the client is anonymous, and the Senate has no record of when building work begun or was completed. It is a textbook example of the “Planwerk Innenstadt” building typology: six stone-clad floors of misery punctured by a monotonous cooky-cutter grid of windows.

Ah yes. Stone cladding. It’s not as though Berlin isn’t short of a good example: Emil Fahrenkamp’s Shell-Haus of 1932, is masterful proof that the technique isn’t evil per se. But Hans Stimmann’s berkish insistence that the future of Berlin should be a freeze-dried Imperial Era travesty sealed stone cladding’s fate as a sort of cheap, heavy, foundation cream. It was slathered on by mediocre architects, and probably greeted by investors keen on quick ROI with little Senate-side friction.

A quick fix, then, for battered Berlin. And repair will be the reigning paradigm for decades to come when dealing with Stimmann’s crumbling inheritance, as these pictures show. One assumes that those yellowed globules are the coagulated residuum from the flubbed patch-job to the crack on the right. Maybe the gaps between panels (don’t tell me these gaping crevices are expansion joints) are just being used to store putty for the next round of repairs.

→ Modern Façades Today, Now

Precariously low down on my mental to-do list for the past decade or so, was the digitization of a reel of film I shot in 1994 as part of a student project. The reel consisted of four rolls of Super-8, which had been spliced together and submitted to my tutors along with a TDK D90 cassette, onto which I’d recorded the accompanying soundtrack, and a sketchbook full of notes and photos. The fact that I’d never bothered to synchronise the two media, or even presented the results of half a semester’s thinking on a projection screen underlines my woeful level of ambition at the time. Somehow, two and a half years later, I graduated with 1st class honors. The second-semester “Cities” project can surely have contributed precious little to this, though hereonafter, cities and the built environment were to accompany me right up to my degree show.

Regent’s Park, London. Late 20th Century.

Dansey Place, in all probability, behind a Chinese restaurant

I remember being interested in quietness, and of wanting to avoid clichés of the ‘pulsating, chaotic city’ kind. I’d come across the photography of Paul Barkshire, whose black and white photos of London were unpeopled, meditative and strangely timeless. He made the early 1980’s look like the early 1880’s, and seemed to have a knack of coaxing the inner village out of the metropolis. I wanted something similar. Super-8 cartridges contained 15 meters of film, and at 18 frames per second were good for three minutes of film. This was to be my defining restriction. The film I wanted to make wouldn’t be cut, it would just be grafted togther. This could just as easily be attributed to a prediliction for Andy Warhol as it could to sheer laziness.

The author (left), and his sister drink 60p cups of tea

My sister and I went to London together to make the film. I had four sites in mind, conjoined by the idea of descent, or diminishing space: Regent’s Park, an alleyway in Chinatown, the inside of a cafe, and the Tube. I held the camera, my sister the tapedeck.

Having converted the film I was touched to discover younger versions of us both in the now defunct and sorely-missed New Picadilly Café on Denman Street, occasionally looking somewhat self-conscious in front of the camera. If I’d known that the film was to become a historical document I’d have pointed the camera into the cafe at the staff and the other patrons.

Going underground

The soundtrack seems to have been recorded asynchronously. I don’t recall why. It’s most noticeable in the cafe, and apparant too in the final underground scene where at least the closing-door-alarm seems to match roughly with the entrance and exit of some passengers.

Of course, Super-8 film was already an anachronism when I shot the film. VHS was still de rigueur, but Apple’s Quicktime software was already in its second version, signalling things to come. Digitized, streamed and embedded, the film seems not just doubly aged, but almost decrepit; of another epoch. The grainysmear patina of real film with all its fluff, underexposure and colour-bleed is now just a cosmetic option in some app, lending the digital the aura of the authentic, of the crafted. Ironically, the beauty of Super-8 was that you didn’t really need to know what you were doing either. But just look at those black tones! No idea how that happend.

Anyway, take a look at the film. Absolutely nothing happens. I urge you to watch all of it anyway, and if it helps make things more interesting I can reveal that there is an odd moment of audio-creep about three-quarters of the way in, where a French voice can be heard intruding upon the soundtrack. Probably some casette deck balls-up. As you may recall, they didn’t have an ‘undo’ function.

Last week I took a cheap flight down to Barcelona and visited an old friend there. I arrived in an overtired and generally run down state; I’d only slept three hours the night before and had woken up from an inflight nap with the beginnings of the cold that’s been going around. My body was additionally confused by the drastic shift in climate, by the mild air and the glare coming off the sun-drenched C-31 highway leading into town. It felt to me like a trip to California, but with a splash of airport cologne having been substituted for disinfectant air freshener.

I was only really there to spend time with Ankur and his family, and beyond that didn’t really have a plan. On the second day, the two of us followed the lead of his four year old son, who for obvious reasons wanted to take a tour of the city on an open-top bus. Finding the stop proved difficult. As we shlepped it a half a mile or so to the next one, I was taken by the sight of this mirrored glass office building:

The image speaks for itself, especially to covert fans of glassy corporate architecture like me. I suppose it was the craggy tessellated underside of the one chunk sandwiched between two others, and its reflection, that really turned me on.

That evening I learned more about the building using the Google search website. I found out that it was the Gas Natural tower, the last built work of Enric Miralles, actually completed by his partner and wife Benedetta Tagliabue some five years after his premature death from a brain tumor in 2000. Although I’ve forgotten about a lot of the work that I used to look at while studying architecture in the ’90s, reading that name immediately coaxed distant memories of a certain issue of El Croquis that had really turned me on. From that moment I knew what my plan would be for the next sinus-congested days.

Ankur, Claudia and their son Vivek seemed totally fine with my idea to hunt down ’90s architecture, and the next day we drove their Seat minivan out to the work that was way way at the top of my list. But what I found in the Vall d’Hebron was a total buzz kill. Miralles and Pinós’s Archery Range for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics was there, but not in the state I’d thought I would find it in. I suppose I could have managed my expectations much better if I’d first stumbled upon this blog entry from 2006.

These neatly arranged concrete elements are all that I saw of the former archery range, though I later discovered that the roof structure dug into the hill is still there a couple hundred yards away (see the link above). I think I was too fazed, too disbelieving, to have gone any further with this particular chapter of our treasure hunt. A billboard from the construction company carrying out the park renovations, still in progress, read: “Construïm Valor”, meaning “Constructing Value” in the Catalan. Pfff… the motto made me wince, especially when I thought about all the vacant real estate that companies like this had speculatively built down by the water in the last decade or so.

At least I knew I had a good scoop for Slab, but the consolation was a weak one. Despondent, I felt that there had to be something more to be done. To put it in the clearest terms, I felt like I simply had to see this work with my own eyes, some how.

The next day I went and checked out Mies van der Rohe’s famous pavilion for the 1930 Barcelona Expo, and it was there that an idea came to me. Perhaps it was the peace and clarity of that architecture, so different from Miralles and Pinós’s exhuberant techno-organicism. The atmosphere helped, but it was really the quite literal facts on the ground that said something to me; the fact that this pavilion wasn’t the one that Mies has built – that edifice had been dismantled along with the rest of the expo in 1930. The Mies pavilion the we all know and love, so totally useless, is in truth a reproduction, completed in 1986 by a group of high profile architects and archi-fanatics.

So that’s my idea now, to do the same thing with the old archery range. Be a part of it. Sign

here !

Pulling this off will make last year’s successful coup with Hejduk’s tower look like a walk in the park. But it’s our only chance. Like Miralles’s architecture, this dream is erratic, maybe even absurd, but still makes sense.

Yeah, OK, it’s a bit unfair to walk in on a building that hasn’t finished putting its make-up on before the big Cancan, walk up really close to it, and judge it for what you see: wrinkles that haven’t been filled with putty or flattened by Botox, unnatural curvature changes, incision marks, or wobbly suture lines unsoftened by foundation. But I’ll do it anyway.

According to the developer’s website we have a real good vintage of a building here, with all the potential of an instant classic. Though I’m not sure that the EIFS polystyrene will be around when that happens one day. Some maggots or a woodpecker thinking of a maggot lunch might take a bite out of it. Careful and unbiased research, using a popular search engine, into failures of EIFS led to this insight. On occasion, I repeat this research when I feel I’ve leaned out the window too far proclaiming that fact with too much emphasis and glee. The evidence I spotted on the building itself left me first incredulous and then somewhat elated and hopeful. May I draw your attention to the dark blotch at the top left corner of this image of a townhouse entrance:

Close-up, the cluster of reddish-black globules on the entrance’s ceiling revealed itself as Prenzlauer Bogen’s first residents: an infestation of ladybugs that had already started to crap all over the acrylic render, perhaps drawn to its relatively mild surface temperature or hooked on its evaporations, a veritable ladybug crack house.

Now, a key to preventing vermin infestations in exterior insulation is to ensure that the facade is properly sealed. Here, I found plenty of access points for insects to a warm, moist, hydrocarbon foam feast.

But how did I get here, poking my 10x zoom at a lost hole in the acrylic render facade of this uninhabited building’s darkest recesses on a cold and dreary afternoon? I was immediately drawn to it when I first saw it. I was overcome by a reminiscence of the buildings of East Berlin, maybe ten, 20 years ago – paired down belle epoch buildings finished in uniform crude grey stucco that bore their fate with honesty and candor, stripped of all their ornament, either because the Commies thought of it as bourgeois or because they were too skint to repair what hadn’t been shot off in the war, or both. This building looks like that to me, like the former buildings of East Berlin, before they were subjected to the vandalism of sponge effects and pastel hues. It, too, seemed to have lost its ornament through a tragic event in history – only prior to its construction – a financial crisis, or the advent of some sustainability standard.

I was intrigued and studied architect Tobias Nöfer’s concept on the project website, but didn’t like what I read. Normally, developments of this kind aspire to places seemingly higher up the pecking order of cosmopolitan desirability, such as Rome, New York, or Paris. This example of “highest building art” (developer’s usual modest marketing blah) is taking things down a notch. The reference is of pulsating, cosmopolitan, Bath, England. Apparently, what we have here is a fine example of “Old English Crescent” (!?) an architecture style I had never come across prior to studying the project’s website, and of which there had hitherto existed but a single proponent, John Wood’s Royal Crescent in Bath, and now also, the Prenzlauer Bogen. If you find yourself trapped in the city of Berlin, but yearn for the quaint, slow-paced town life of a place like Bath and are a fan of “Old English Crescent”, this is for you.

The historicist facade stripped of ornament invokes former buildings of East Berlin. Could this be an unintentional proponent of the critical regionalism in the Kenneth Frampton style? But why Bath? Why England? Don’t we have our very own Berlin crescent housing? Nah, that’s a horseshoe. This is a crescent, I mean a sickle, no, an arc (see the development’s concept). Yet, the stripped down historicist style lends this radial structure a penal appearance. By god, it’s a panopticon! At least if must feel that way playing in that sandbox and I wouldn’t worry about having your bike stolen.

The facade of Pfingstkirche on Petersburger Str has the most chaotic, hack job-est design of any of the churches featured in this series, clearly the work of an architect deaf to Vitruvius’s mantra of “Firmness, Commodity and Delight”. The guilty culprits were Jürgen Kröger und Gustav Werner, who purportedly designed it in a flamboyant late-gothic revival style. The Wikipedia entry for the church, going on and on in a manner might be termed preposterous neo-pedantic monotonism, gives an impossibly detailed description of something that can be simply understood to be ugly, banal and charmless.

Looking at the facade so unwillingly, my eye is drawn to the strange house-like monument that stands before it. Its primitive form, coated with the dregs of neon-colored billpostings, exudes a raw, spontaneous energy that’s in stark contrast to the church’s insipid architectural contrivances.

With this image we hereby draw to a close the publication of Victor Brigola’s wonderful series of photographs of rowhouse churches. It is, I think, a fitting way to end. Ever since the project began, this image has been the can being kicked down the road, an ugly truth that I wanted to ignore. But in the end it has served as an inspiration, a testament to the fact that a beautiful picture can be taken of something that isn’t.

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.