Damn! Architectural criticism just got a whole load easier: You catch wind of a new hotel complex down at Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof, Google the architects, and instantly get some kind of critical response thrown right back at you. There isn’t even time to think up pithy, irreverant slurs these days … a silicon valley algorithm’s already beaten you to it.
An entirely rewritten version of my piece Trash Compactor is Blingin’ can be found in the current issue of Article Magazine, a print and web-based publication hailing from Sheffield in England.
Describing itself as a “guide to the space you’re in”, the current issue of Article deals with the pressing issue of waste. Flick through the online version above, or visit the site here. A raised frothing tankard to Alasdair Hiscock for his interest, and for getting us involved.
In this, the largest edition of Sunday Sculptures, we present:
“And On The Seventh Day, He Cleaned The Apartment”, a four-part epic by Haig Walta and Wolfgang Philippi.
Also included is a humorous quotation, the songtext of a famous pop combo, and an incredibly tedious analysis of the editor’s tie collection.
In my last entry I boldly tried to force a 2010 Dürüm Döner into the hands of 1969 Walter Ulbricht by ways of the Deleuzean concept of the refrain as a strategy of place making. Sometimes you write these things and are left feeling slightly unsure if there’s actually something behind your grossly speculative concoction, in this case, the tale of the spinning folly as a post-whatever strategy of place making as an alternative to western enlightenment traditions.
I initially felt some reassurance by the recent BLDGBLG entry on a record breaking artificial tornado created in the Mercedes Benz museum in Stuttgart. Only to then find out that the motivation behind this vortex was not semiotic or representative at all, but the result of a pretty amazing fire strategy that allowed for an open floor design completely free of fire doors.
“The twister takes around seven minutes to materialize and is generated by 144 jets and 28 tons of air. The low pressure area at the center of the tornado works to create a jet stream that draws smoke out of the building’s corridors and funnels it upwards and out an exhaust vent on the roof.”
The tornado fire strategy seems intrinsically linked to the morphological concept of the museum: an ascending double helix (The Mercedes DNA) spins and ramps the museum program continuously around the central atrium space, which is now revealed to us as the focus not only of of the building’s representative program and circulation, but also of it’s more utilitarian fire strategy. As so often the case, this unintentional utilitarian detail, afterthought or interpretation provides an aspect of a building (the helix as a system of ordering) that is at least as interesting as the original and intentional design.
Hans-Kollhoff’s office tower on Potsdamer Platz was barely seven years old when it disappeared behind a curtain of scaffolding. In September of 2006, our colleagues over at the Tagesspiegel reported that builders were busy “knocking off the façade”, amid unconfirmed rumors that parts of it had fallen off and were posing a threat to pedestrians.
Ute von Vellberg, spokeswoman for Daimler-Chrysler – the building’s owner at the time – called the measures “precautionary and voluntary” and hadn’t followed any particular incident. However, the preceeding winter was blamed for unspecified damage to the large brick-look tiles which coat most of the building’s twenty-five floors. Looking back, the Tagesspiegel seems to deliberately tempt fate by quoting von Vellberg as saying that work would be completed by Christmas 2006.
Four Christmas’ later, and the scaffolding is still there. In fact, it’s getting hard to remember a time when it wasn’t there, and harder to think of a reason why it shouldn’t just stay as it is, in a permanent state of rennovation. At the base of the tower, a whole street has turned into a wooden village for builders and façade specialists. The scaffolding is some five meters deep around the base of the building, turning pavements into darkened tunnels. One can imagine that the businesses in the ground floor might soon want to extend their storefronts out into this new exterior space with tents, pieces of corrugated iron or plastic sheeting. A kind of high-class boutique slum.
By December 2006 though, it had become clear that extensive rennovation was needed, and that a messy and protracted legal battle was going to be the only way to find someone to blame. In October of 2007 Hans Kollhoff went on the record as saying “We’ve built so many buildings and proven that it can’t have anything to do with us”, which carefully avoided slandering some contractor, or making any sense whatsoever. A couple of months later Daimler-Crysler sold the building to the Swedish bank SEB for 1.3 billion Euros, and with it, one assumes, the 10 million Euro rennovation costs.
But what this is really about is the twofold irony which has afflicting the building during the whole escapade.
The first is to be found in the choice of advertising attached to the scaffolding, which has always striven to acknowledge the extreme verticality of the space available. Adverts for hairspray are particulrly succesful. The proportions lend themselves particularly well to 50 meter pack-shots, whilst the product itself boasts of properties sadly lacking in Kollhoff’s tower: in the above detail we read that L’Oreal’s Elnett (hairspray to the stars) has “Ultra starker halt”, meaning it has super hold. Shame Kollhoff’s brick-look tiles don’t.
The second irony is that, in its wraped-up state, the northern flank of Kollhoff’s po-mo tower bears an eerie resemblance to Renzo Piano and Christoph Kohlbecker’s streamlined wedge next door, and with it, an altogether different approach to building high in a city proud of being squat.
7 October 1969. High above the representational void at the heart of the bombed city, the Telecafe at the top of the TV tower is set in rotational motion. This celebratory carousel of solo entertainer with organ and some selected guests draws out first circles around the representational center of a fledgling republic in honor of its 20th anniversary.
It is the architectural equivalent of the refrain as a strategy of place making: “A refrain…is like a song that creates the beginning of order in chaos – as in a child singing in the dark…the beginning of the refrain is fragile. Next, a refrain creates a territory, an organization of a limited space with a circle drawn around it.” 1
Centripetal forces of the first refrain soon draw others – circular follies as markers of places and commerce: the C&A sign, the Weltzeituhr, the Berliner Verlag, a spinning display of rare Döner meat, the rings of Saturn, the spiraling logo of Media Markt.
If the surveying tool of Cartesian town planning is the groma, the strategy of place making by refrain is best represented by the dreidel:
More dreidel with Ira from Jesse Morros on Vimeo.
