Friendly Blocky Tower, Easy to Draw
This building looms into view on days when I cycle to work down Lindenstraße. I took a closer look today and here are some photos.
From a distance I always assumed that the green awnings above the windows were made of a stiff weather-proof cloth, but they’re actually made of metal sheets also used to clad the teeny tiny 1 sq/m balconies. Now if I lived in a flat with a south-facing 1 sq/m balcony, I wouldn’t know what to do with it either, but I probably wouldn’t affix two satellite dishes to it and store my ladder there:
The nice thing about this building is that it looks like a sad geometric cat. Despite the gloomy tower it still manages to be friendly, maybe because of its ‘easy-to-draw’ appeal. Indeed, simple tools are available to the amateur architect, making the design of such a building within easy reach.
Did you know that amateur architect was a guy named John Hejduk, who died a few years back? Long-time dean of the architecture school at Cooper Union in New York, colleague of Colin Rowe and Peter Eisenman at Cornell University in the 1960’s, and mentor to Daniel Liebeskind (architect of the much-toutet but similarly dysfunctional Jewish Museum around the corner), whatever he did with this building it wasn’t by accident. Which I guess must make it even more suspect. But that’s the point, I guess. “Why, why, would he do this to the southern facade of a building?”, you might ask. The short answer is because he was far more interested in the biomorphic (sad geometric cat) appearance of the building than in merely trying to fulfill the needs the inhabitants. The long answer can be found in the book Hejduk’s Chronotope, a collection of essays by cutting-edge 1990’s architecture theorists edited by K. Micheal Hays. At least there’s a place for the satellite dishes, and a ladder. I know for fact that you can get great reception on the south side, too, so light is in this sense let in in a completely different way. And they enhance the reading of a nose, possibly suggesting nostrils, or nose plugs.
[...] has come to our attention that John Hejduk’s remarkable Kreuzberg Tower and Wings building (covered here by Karen Eliot in 2007) is currently undergoing a scandalously ham-fisted “rennovation” [...]