SLAB Magazine

The thing about the dead-tree press is that, in contrast to bottom-feeding blogs like this one, who favour rumor and speculation over well researched facts, you can always rely on them as a respected source of quality information.

In this past Sunday’s Tagesspiegel for example we read that this journal is in fact called “Slub Magazine”. We stand duly corrected, and have made the necessary adjustments to the masthead, which will remain in place until columnist Kolja Reichert decides to fire up his browser in a flurry of post-press research, and then apologise publically for this heinous slur.

Further more, we read that Slub Magazine “resides a couple of houses further up the street” from Arno Brandlhuber’s much talked about Teutonic Favela™ on Brunnenstraße 9. The assumption here is probably that SLAB is some venerable, centrally organised institution, shacked up in the bar ‘Kim’, with which the co-editor of this chronicle is associated, paying rent to Jean-Remy von Matt … two grubby archi-hacks bivouacking in the basement of a dive bar, living off Mitte’s gin and peanut vernissage circuit.

The article in question, which is otherwise interesting and informative can be found at the following link: Tagesspiegel

Click to enlarge

The headline is deliberately obscure, and meant to be educational. Those are the Inuktitut words for ‘seal’, with Inuktitut being the name of some of the Inuit languages spoken way north of the Canadian tree line.

The photo above was shot in Berlin though, last week. And I have to say, it does look as though a seal has been bludgeoned to death right here. My guess is that there’s a more rational explanation: spilt red paint from the DIY store just out of shot, or someone let off several kilos of Chinese firecrackers here at New Year, and the red paper wrappers are now dissolving away in the snow. Now maybe someone can tell me what the Inuktitut word for ‘blood-stained snow’ is.

On green-bin-day, thousands of identical green bins are wheeled onto the streets of this Dublin neighbourhood for emptying by the city council trucks. There are also black-bin days for general refuse, and brown-bin days for organic waste. In the past, everyone would buy their own bin container from the hardware shop, put all of their rubbish in it, and put the bin out on the street for collection. In that system, you knew which bin was yours because it was newer, older, bigger, smaller or different in some other respect to your neighbours’ bins. Perhaps yours had a metal body and a plastic lid, or vice versa. Ours had a highly distinctive crumpled edge, a result of being accidentally thrown in under the refuse crusher in the back of the lorry.

However, market-friendly policies pursued by the government, and in line with European Union legislation, has led to private companies moving in on the waste disposal market. These companies are paid from the city’s funds, and they run a leaner, union-free service. Less lucrative contracts for certain parts of Dublin are not taken by private companies, so the city council still has to cover them. Effectively, the city council is subsidising the private bin collectors.

This process is part of the ‘greening’ of refuse policy, which encourages people to recycle. A bin collection charge has been levied by the city council, but has met considerable local opposition and boycotts. Now in some parts of the capital, the city council has receded from public consciousness as the body that runs the city’s rubbish, while in others it is a bogeyman that brings poor people to court over non-payment.

One side effect of these policies is people stuffing domestic waste into public litter baskets, which are often full and overflowing as a result. Another is ‘fly-tipping’, i.e. driving your rubbish around until you find a secluded spot and dumping it there. The Dublin and Wicklow mountains to the south of the city are particularly scarred by this.

There are many other side effects, not to mention complicated controversies concerning an incinerator (another case of the city contracting out its work to private business). But the rather prosaic side effect illustrated here is that now each household is issued with a standard bin, each identical to the next. They have barcode identity tags, which are scanned when the bins are emptied and the owners charged accordingly. Rubbish presented in any other container is ignored. Because the bins are now all the same, people write their house number, and sometimes their street name, on the side of the bin. That way, when the collection has been made, you can be sure you are wheeling your own bin back in, and not someone else’s. What has developed is a weird array of fonts and handwritings, most of them achieved with an arresting slovenliness. Though, as we can see above, some people try to beautify the things.

At the impressionable age of sixteen, and with sufficient technical drawing skills, I went and did a work experience at an architectural office in London. It was part of a school program, lasting, I think, two weeks. A year later I returned during a summer break, and put in a couple more weeks at the firm’s new office on Shad Thames, just around the corner from the Design Museum.

I helped survey underground station entrance buildings. I drew worm’s-eye axonometric views of esculator shafts. I discovered Shin Takamatsu. I learnt that Finsbury Park, when spoken backwards, became ‘Krapy Rubsnif’. I played an after-work game of softball against Saatchi & Saatchi. I heard the word “fuckwhip” used as a term of collegial endearment for the first and only time in my life. I commuted to work in bermuda shorts. The office fax machine’s internal clock was set to the year 1902. And I was sure of two things: that I would never become an architect, and that I was definitely going to live and work in London in the future.

One lunchtime I was outside on the banks of the Thames with a couple of guys from the office, and we were looking at this building from across the river:

Minster Court, by GMW Architects, 1991. [Photo: Flickr user stevecadman]

It seems extraordinary that we were able to actually see it from where we were sat, but it was a sufficient view for one of the architects to dub Minster Court “Transylvania”. Looking back now, this small event seems to be ultra significant, since it was my first encounter with architectural satire, which is obviously part of SLAB’s unwritten program.

Quartier 206, by Pei, Cobb, Freed & Partners, 1992-96. [Click to enlarge]

So I’m wondering if a dash of nostalgia has anything to do with my new found admiration for the Quartier 206 building, shown above. Built in the early to mid nineties, this was one of a whole ensemble of projects which went up on Friedrichstraße, one of Berlin’s most important thoroughfares. There is a lot to hate about post-reunification architecture on Friedrichstraße. O.M.Ungers’ Quartier 205 is a starchy sandstone waffel, one of the late architect’s many odes to the mystical universality of the square, which houses a branch of H&M. Even the great Philip Johnsson left his mark here, though the bulbous turd he deposited close to Checkpoint Charlie must have been draughted whilst he was on vacation.

But Q206 has something going for it. By day it is an exhausting beige hulk, ridiculously ribbed and encrusted with jutting angular bay elements. But at night it turns into a glowing 8-bit computer game rendered in amethyst. Atari-gothic, or something. Recast Max Schreck’s Nosferatu as a Vice City pimp and this could be the Dark Lord’s Beverly Hills crib. And that’s kind of where we all want to go shopping isn’t it?

Over the last two weeks, a continuous cycle of thawing and refreezing has turned these glass ledges into a kind of slow-motion pasta machine for snow.

That was worth sharing with y’all now, right?

“For your own safety, no wading or swimming”.

That’s what the warning sign says. Proof that fiction can kill you. If trans fat doesn’t get to you first. Or your satanic neighbor. In hindsight, I wish I had taken many more pictures during my three week sojourn in the burbs of California. It’s hard to pick out whats significant if you are totally immersed in a seamless landscape of illusion stitched together by things like this.  By “Things like this” I mean higher degree simulations, copies of copies that have no traceable origin in something that is not an image. Only, but welcome, reminders of an alternate reality were a few black hawks and a flock of turkey vulchers that had convened on a housing association’s club house. For me, there is a fundamental difference between something like this and, for example, immigrated Welsh farmers of Bruce Chatwin’s Patagonia making themselves at home by the continued use of the Welsh vernacular, or their neighboring German immigrants doing the same by planting cherry trees.

Oh yeah, and those stairs really don’t lead anywhere …

I shudder to think my existence could end then and there in the foot deep rippling reflection of Hadrian’s petrified mirage of the Spanish Steps …

… Alpine cascades …

Any ideas for alternate inscriptions?

The Las Vegas colour table:

Normally this kind of thing would be called a doubly redundant system, would it not? Only here, the entire ensemble is redundant. What remains is art, clearly. No one thinking seriously about ram-raiding the Aedes Pfefferberg tonight is going to be particularly worried by the two surrogate bollards standing in for their absent yellow counterparts, which seem to have gone AWOL.

Colleague Andreas (who took the photo), Florian and myself watched on amused as a security guy scurried out of his hut, removed the two central posts, and ushered a large white Transit van into the goods yard. Colleague Andreas then transposed the already ridiculous situation into high parody, by insisting that the posts were repositioned for the above picture.

Anon!