An Easy Target (Rant)
I snapped this thing a month or so ago, a smirk twisting upon my face in irony-laden amusement. To be honest, any time I get anywhere close to Berlin’s very own little ‘ground zero’ I get my grimace on, so it was a mild relief to rest my eyes upon an image so ridiculous and flimsy.
So I guess this is the cultural resonance of OMA’s Seattle Public Library. For anyone wishing something that avant would ever get built at a similar scale in the heart of poor, uncultivated Berlin, I mean by poor rich, uncultivated Federal Rupublic of Germany, well, I’m sorry to break it to you, not any time soon. Although the Humboldt Forum is a project being driven at the federal level and to no small extent by the donations of private interests with dubious motives, we in Berlin are, politically speaking, willing victims.
But I don’t even know how to begin with really looking at this situation I took a picture of, there’s so much going on. Its a cartoon of some futuristic rhomboid printed on an info box/viewing platform which is itself nothing more than glorified scaffolding wrapped in vinyl tarpaulins. The pavilion being represented on the pavilion is in direct contradiction to the project that will in fact be built on this site, though its depiction has been done in such a silly way that it seems to indicate a certain patronizing attitude of those powers that be. And that, I think is it, I get it. This whole thing is just so cheap, not only in how a massive cultural center has been conceived, but also in how another has been destroyed, as well as in how a temporary pavilion has been constructed, not to mention in how that very entity of the information box itself has been not only degraded but also mocked. Way back when the design of such a pavilion was seen as an opportunity to give some hot young architecture office to chance to get out there and mix it up – like in the case of Schneider and Schumacher on Potsdamer Platz. Here such an opportunity has not only been denied but also cynically derided, and yeah, its kinda funny, ha ha.
Then my eye wanders to the other picture, printed around the corner, and I start to feel the heebee jeebees all over again.
Very decent of you to cover this story: it certainly relieves my own backlog of pending rants.
I found great humor in the fact that the Infobox you snapped is an information center for the Humbolt Box, which is an infobox for the Humbolt Forum. Can’t Berlin just keep on building more and more infoboxes for ficticious building projects, until the entire square is filled with an architectural Ouroboros of self-referential flotsam?
Also of note is that the developer of both the Infobox and the Humbolt Box is the outdoor advertising specialists Megaposter, who are know for their building-sized mega posters, as the name suggests. This is ‘advertecture’ at its most potent: the ad is the building, and the building is the ad.
okay, so they’re actually going to build that knock off of the Seattle Public Library as an info box, and this is the info box for that?!? Sorry dude, I can’t keep up.
An endless proliferation of such boxes referring to one another is conceptually watertight, and about as representative of our culture as the Humboldt Forum project. Or maybe representative of a parallel version of it.
Things are looking up…the start date for the Prussian turd has been pushed back, increasing the possibility that it will never happen:
http://tinyurl.com/35dmqtm
Thank the lord, that means my exit date from Berlin has been pushed back as well. I vowed to bail if and when this piece of shit finally gets built.