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

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.

This is the Rotating Earth Hydrosphere, which you can pick up for a mere 870 British Pounds, should you wish, though the price doesn’t include pump or resevoir so you’re going to have to stick it in the bath tub and wizz it round with your hands if you’re on a tight budget. Watch it go round and round. I’ve filmed a good 19 seconds or so of hydrospherical action, and if you want any more you’re just going to have to imagine it, or go out and buy one of the damned things. There’s a garden centre in Farnham Royal, England, which will be delighted to get rid of one.

On a recent trip to the UK, my Mum happened to mention that garden centres had mutated into fully-fledged recreational destinations, and were no longer the damp horticultural points-of-sale I remembered from my childhood. They had become places where, having stocked up on Catherine and Royal William rose bushes, you could eat a traditional Sunday roast in the restaurant, have your car washed by hand, and read the papers whilst the kids molest coi carp. Tapping into these suburban rituals, it sounded as though garden centres had subsumed the entire idea of a typical Sunday afternoon into a commercial venture.

A rock solid investment.

Hoping to back up Mother’s claims with some hard data, I briefly dredged through the internet where I came across a 2008 catering report entitled “More Than Tea & Cake” [PDF, 410KB], published by Britain’s Horticultural Trade Association. In it, the garden center coffee shop is specifically identified as “a place to meet and socialise” where customers “don’t have to eat, but … can be persuaded to do so”. This sounded promising, and hinted at subliminal architectural features design to coerce and stimulate.

So once at Farnham Royal, I was primed for an orgy of 24-hour cream teas and an acre of retail space, but the catering revolution had yet to penetrate this particular enclave, as had customers, judging by the empty car park.

Stones were on sale, some sorted geographically (Rutland Limestone, Cornish Slate), others sorted by generic aesthetic merits (Clear Green Drilled Glass Stone), hinting strongly at two opposing petrographic fractions amongst local gardeners: the authenticists and the artifists. Woe betide them that mix their stones.

But things really started getting interesting in the ornament section. Just what the hell those pieces of bent aluminium conduit were is anyone’e guess. Close inspection revealed few clues: they could just as well be some kind of fountain (I’m guessing the manufacturer might call this a “flanged cascader”, or something), or possibly a lighting feature. It is not to my taste, but the sign said it had won some award or other. That’s one trophy I do want to see.

The “Dubai Self Contained Water Feature, £317.17” looked more familar. As a seven year old I had watched it torture Princess Leia in Star Wars. Now is was a garden accessory, and probably had some kind of undocumented death-ray function for the neighbor’s cat. Seriously though, aren’t you happy that the price of LEDs has dropped so much that humanity can now pull off shit like this? And why “Dubai”? How many sci-fi desert–themed gardens can be found within Buckinghamshire?

Farnham Royal was pretty much the damp horticultural point-of-sale I remembered from my childhood. Long may it stay that way.

Render-bender

The mechanism is characterised by two key features: first, the romanticisation and fragmentation of the surrounding neighborhood through a celebration of its inherent authenticity; and second, the weaving together of these fragments into a patchwork to conceal the inherent phoneyness of the property itself.

The mechanism is colonial because it judges and appropriates the surroundings in self-defined terms, offering a self-serving, narrow reading of its host. And I’m calling it vampiristic, because the act of subsumation results in the eventual collapse of the host. The real estate project essentially has nothing unique to offer, other than location, and it is from this which it feeds to keep it alive.

Real deal

FRIEDASchanze was sold with the picture of a harmonious intercultural neighborhood in which carefree Italian pizza bakers with the songs of the Adria on their lips could be found, and where quaint obliging Arabs fried falafel in the nooks between home-grown fashion boutiques. So a few weeks back I was in Hamburg and dropped by Schanzenstraße to see how the picture shaped up against reality, and to see if the condos were as boldly crimson as the architect’s rendering suggested.

Manic organic

Sadly they weren’t. Instead, the façade had been toned down to a hue somewhere between egg plant and burgundy. It reminded me of a quip made by German graphic designer Erik Spiekerman where he refers to the colour beige as being a kind of “yellow for civil servants”. Something similar seems to have happened here: one imagines a neighborhood committee doggedly pressuring the building contractor to rethink the shocking red in a last ditch attempt at excersizing a semblance of grass-roots influence on the doings of property developers. If so, they’ve flogged a turd for no good reason. If you’re going to live with a turd, better have one with a colourful little flag stuck in it. But red by committee it is.

Speaking of egg plants and burgundy, the whole ground floor is already home to an organic supermarket – natch boogie. Once upon a time organic grocery stores were the pokey little vanguards of the green movement, but here they’ve arrived, no longer brandishing whole-earth manifestos, but corporate design manuals. It’s a thoroughly agreeble place to shop in: well lit, roomy, imaginatively stocked, and, advantageously, largely void of customers at this hour. Wherever they might be on a Friday morning, they’ve left a trail of evidence behind them: cork notice boards behind the checkouts are festooned with flyers for ayurvedic cookery courses and hand-written classified ads trading vintage sports cars for Bugaboos, or flogging aged IKEA sofas.

Flush puppy

Hum-drum

For the sake of dramatic convenience I’m going to assume a new tennant of FREIDASchanze themselves was responsible for the sofa ad, and was asserting their upward mobility with a confident couch upgrade. If so, you’d have to wonder why the same tennant had moved into an apartment which looks like a ‘Faktum’ IKEA kitchen. In a reversal of the theory put forward by D.S. on a low-resolution architecture made for photography, FRIEDASchanze looks shit¹ from a distance, but from up close reveals a complex surface grid of collateral fluting which would conceivably arrise if one were to violently combine seven Billy shelving units. Not an unintersting proposition. At the time of my visit, a guy in a mobile platform was fine tuning the cavity widths with a watchmaker’s vernier caliper. Anyroadup, this conglomeration of precision detailing combines to form a façade which, for all its whimsical surface depth modulation, is about as charismatic as a filing cabinate.

Gnarlyness

Some meters further down the road, the full contrast between the flush-fitted aluminium window profiles of FRIEDASchanze, and the grungy aggregate of century-old building materials which have coagulated to form the rest of the neighborhood becomes more immediately apparent. Is this the habitat the marketing-speak was referring to? By building something flush and clean, you automatically define everything else as lumpen and grungy. On my stroll down the Schanze I pass a cellar bar called Chance, where bottles of tequila and Malibu are displayed in the window at ankle-height beneath home-made chipboard cladding. The smeared windows of a Chinese bric-a-brac emporium are full of beckoning Maneko Nekos, rice cookers and fading polyurethane lotus blossoms. The Playtech Casino is a riot of self-adhesive foils, and the entrance nook between Falafel Factory and Schanzen Döner is slathered in a baroque filo-pastry crust of posters, flyers, daubings, stickers, Selotape² fragments and indelible tags.

Encrusted

The language of the street here is of adaptation, extension and improvisation. Everything is retro-fitted for a broken but still functioning future. This is the land into which spaceship FRIEDASchanze has decended. Its passengers are about to desembark: grunge tourists on an authenticity trip, nosey and charmed by the locale at first, but soon rubbing up against their own squeamishness and reservations. But for now at least, the mission is clear: revel in the grime, write postcards home, but lay subtle plans for a more orderly future.

Dirt

P.S.: Leaving the neighborhood I even catch sight of a poster encouraging us to Entdeck the Dreck – “Discover the Dirt”. Turns out that it’s a regular party in a club called Grüner Jäger. “Total trash and high-life in bags!” the club’s website proclaims; a “charming, Poptrash-Bad-Taste-Party”. It’s as if the underground was already gearing itself up for its own fragmentation and eventual metamorphosis into another, newer, altogether stranger bourgeoisie than can be found in the penthouse suites of FRIEDASchanze. For now it is content to frollic – for as long as it can’t afford its own mortgage – in a picturesque nightscape of pseudo-glamour, self-defined trash, and premeditated “good” bad-taste: a juvenil vampire already sucking life from its own environment …

—
¹ I can qualify “shit” if you so wish: read “banal”, “tedious” or “mundane”.
² US English: Scotch Tape; German: Tesafilm

This was how Portsmouth’s Conservative Party were runnning for office in the local elections of 1994, when I was a student living in the city. What struck me then as a sinister and deeply absurd bit of campainging, hasn’t lost any of its crassness now, and if anything has become more potent in the wake of David Cameron’s pronouncements following the UK riots this summer.

But three years after these flyers circulated, Blair’s New Labour were in power nationally and CCTV cameras became a ubiquitous feature of the urban environment all the same. Close to half a billion Pounds have been spent on CCTV equipment in London alone, but internal Metropolitain Police reports warn of their neligable role in crime prevention, with only 1 in 1000 crimes solved using CCTV images in 2008. Caught-on-camera riot galleries and Flickr dragnets are probably part of a wider strategy to improve these figures.

Down a couple of pints of export strength lager in some Southsea boozer, and the flyer might start to resemble something Vorticism threw up. But the cheap single-colour printing, berk typography (Futura with Eurostil?) and the martiality of the target motif make for an ugly bit of populist urban propaganda. The implication that car parks and shopping centers constitute “our heritage” now reads less like dark humor and more like grim self-fulfilling prophecy.

A Liter of Light

On the northern edge of Potsdamer Platz, the line of cobble stones marking the course of the former Berlin Wall thrusts under the stoney skirt of Hans Kollhoff and Helga Timmermann’s office building ‘P5’. A crack has appeared. Are cheap materials to blame, or are cosmic forces at play?

Recent studies show that infrasonic tremors, resonating just beyond human perception at around 17 Hz, emanate naturally from the line and are focused by the convergence of vertical and horizontal planes. Accumulated psychogeographic vibrations, combined with winter frosts, have severed the façade element, and hair-width fissures penetrate deep into the steel reinforced superstructure.

Furthermore, staff and visitors of the ground-floor restuarant commonly report feelings of anxiety, queasiness and even sorrow after prolonged exposure to the location. Some are even afflicted by mild, temporary disturbances of their peripheral vision: blurrings, grey blobs and hatchings just beyond the field of view.

The guardian spirit of Potsdamer Platz, a latter-day Genius Loci with her cornucopia of casino, fast-food franchise and VIP shuttle service is running out of patience. Without regular sacrifices made at the temple alter, the rumblings are set to increase their amplitude. Profound structural failure followed by collapse are inevitable.

How do you like your absurdity?

O.M.’s article was based on the assumption that Berlin had intended to build some kind of Seattle public library rip-off (shown on the façade), but was too strapped for cash and ended up defaulting to a scaffold box with some decorative tarpaulin wrapped around it. His sardonic appeal to the reader was, however, about to bite him on the ass because the true absurdity of the situation was a magnitude or two greater than could be accomodated by his dualistic fluff/gravy continuum.

In my comment response to his article, I pointed out that the scaffold tarpaulin box was not a viewing platform for the building site of the future reconstruction of the Berlin City Palace (aka Humboldt Forum) – depicted on the side of the scaffold tarpaulin box – but a viewing platform for the building site of the future viewing platform for the future reconstruction of the City Palace depicted on the front of the scaffold tarpaulin box.

I’ll give you a second or two to digest that last bit before proceeding. In the mean time, here’s a picture of a cute lamb, soothingly bereft of absurdity.

A soothing lamb, somewhere in northern England

On the roof

About a week or so after O.M.’s article appeared, I visited the scaffold shortly before sundown. I was forced to pass through a turnstile which only opened once I’d grudgingly poked a 50 cent donation into its slot, thereby funding a gram or two of nostalgic Prussian misery. The ground-floor exhibition had closed shop for the day, so I was pretty much forced to ascend the scaffold to the roof, which inevitably is what a viewing platform is all about.

On the roof a map of Alexander von Humboldt’s Latin America expedition of 1799–1804 had been reproduced, using – incidently – source material taken straight from Wikipedia, and left uncredited in contradiction to the licence under which it was published. Not very scientific, and a saddening detail when one considers that the Berlin City Palace’s very purpose, as proposed by the Humboldt Forum project, is to unite the natural and social sciences under one roof. Citation needed indeed.

The view, of course, was spectacular. Ignoring the Berlin Cathedral or Alexanderplatz for a moment, and ignoring the picture-postcard sunset behind me, I was taken aback by the vast grassy plain below me. I’ve mentioned this inner-city mega-lawn before, but from up here it’s size was particularly striking. The only striking thing about the view of the Humboldt Box building site, was the staggaring number of supporting beams being used to prop up the slowly setting concrete superstructure.

On the roof, for your orientation: Humboldt’s voyage of 1799-1804

View of viewing tower construction site, from viewing tower’s viewing tower

Decending the scaffold

But, heck! What am I thinking? Here’s me relishing the absurd prospect of a viewing platform purpose built to assist in the viewing of the construction of a second viewing platform, completely forgetting that we live in post-interpretative times and that things are actually dead simple if you just relax and shut down most of your cerebral cortex. A quick check of the Humboldt Forum’s news ticker is relieving and revealing:

“[4.12.09] Humboldt-Box: Building work on the erection of the Humboldt-Box can be observed from an observation platform”.

Fantastic! No more explanation needed than those two clerical lines of reine Information, as beautifully unadorned as any 19th century telegraph message.

And all I needed to do was pay attention to the signs, of which there were plenty. All pointing to the exit – no less – to the outside, back to the street where a house-high rendering of the Palace, accompanied by a web address served to remind the onlooker that the edifice wasn’t commissioned by a romantic, philanthropic contractor, but by a company called Megaposter.

You bring the meat, we’ll make the vegetables

In February 2007 I coined the rather clumsy term “advertecture” to describe the increasingly common sight of buildings being engulfed by advertising to help fund their rennovation or repair. It was a crass but logical step up from regular billboards applied to regular buildings, and has helped the city save a big pile of money on several occasions. Megaposter arguably started the trend in 2000 by providing the wherewithal for Deutsche Telekom to swamp the Brandenburg Gate in trompe l’oeil DSL ads. Six years later they did the same for the lesser known Charlottenburger Gate, a neo-Baroque vanity project from 1909, which was falling into disrepair and in urgent need of a 3.500 sq meter Samsung advert.

The Humboldt Box though represents a full transformation from applied advertising to advertising as architecture. The information center, roof-top bar and faintly pompous sounding “agora”, as they’re calling the ground floor, are therefore only a fragment of the building’s real purpose: selling bikinis.

It’s the bikinis, stupid.

The imminent completion of the Humboldt Box couldn’t have come at a better time, or a worse one, depending on your point of view. This May, the Senate Department for Urban Development launched a set of guidelines which aim to improve lighting in the city, and also curb the spread of mega-verts. An outright ban a la São Paulo isn’t on the cards, and I wouldn’t exactly want it to be. Instead, the guidelines are based on an intricate study in which 20 different spatial and building types have been defined, and their sensitivity to 15 common forms of advertising have been gauged with a system of four colours ranging from red to green. A kind of traffic-light of advertising horrors, if you will. On a map published by the Senate, the area around the Humboldt Box has been labeled with an ominous orangy-yellow dot, meaning “sensitive”, on account of the historic ensemble of buildings surrounding it. That the advertising here is part of the same web of private and state interests surrounding the rebuilding of the Palace surely won’t have escaped the Senate. And making the situation rather more sticky for Megaposter will be last June’s decision to postpone the Palace’s construction for another three years.

Should the Palace never be built, then Humboldt’s gift to the city might just be some kind of protracted Champagne reception, hosted on the roof of a contemporary ruin, not yet paid for but too expensive to demolish, where the party is caught in an atmospheric limbo somewhere between birthday and funeral, and the drinks are constantly threatening to run out, but somehow never quite do.

This has to be the architectural equivalent of a split fingernail. And if that’s the case then the whole of Berlin could do with a damned good manicure because this kind of thing can be seen city-wide. Gah! It makes my nostrils curl up at the edges just looking at it.

The dinked column in question is part of a structure aping the peristyle of Roman architecture and belongs to a building with the sphincter-clenchingly horrid name of “SpreePalais”, meaning that it’s a palace on the river Spree. Geographically speaking, the name is not in dispute, but a palace? Getouttahere. Historically, the peristyle surrounded a lush courtyard with a fountain, but at SpreePalais, architects Nägele, Hofmann, Tiedemann & Partner have cleverly used it to enclose a draughty sandstone quarry where exiled office workers are required to smoke.