SLAB Magazine

Here’s a nice piece of old news which did the rounds in late May, concerning the façade of a luxury department store in Berlin, a famous brand of fashionable sports and leisurewear, and a graffiti artist.
In honor of Lacoste’s 75th birthday, KaDeWe (Berlin’s answer to Harrods) invited the fashion label to celebrate in its department [...]

At SLAB, we wouldn’t dream of claiming responsibility for excersizing even a modicum of real influence upon the outside world with mere words. But it hasn’t escaped out attention that the Choriner Höfe website we recently called «a bloated bag of unspeakable turds», has changed slightly since the publication of our critical piece on the [...]

On a recent trip back to my old hometown of Windsor, I was stood in the garden of my parents when a flock of seven loudly squawking, bright green parakeets flew overhead. My mother insisted that this was perfectly normal, and that the parakeets had been around in Windsor since at least the early 1970s. [...]

Thanks to Thomas who sent us this photo of a pretty novel looking power transformation substation in Tel Aviv. SLAB is heartily amused by the super-redundancy of the columns, the decorative security fence and the beautiful integration of faked ceramic insulators as doric capitals.

This pile of stones is so damned satisfying, that I would have to have one too, if only I had a garden.

There’s something very touching about amateur art. Maybe it has to do with the degree of effort which goes into it, and the fact that this effort is often so distressingly visible in the final result. In this example, found on a flea market, you can see how much love and time went into the [...]

Think about the spacial settings of computer games (labyrinths, factories, castles, dungeons) and you could maybe, tentatively, argue that they’ve always, at their core, been about our relationship to architecture. This reading suits SLAB just fine of course, but Valve Software’s title Portal, is undoubtably fantastic encounter with the architecture of the imagination.
What makes Portal [...]

Know where you’re at
My first real taste of business travel has taken me 5995 kilometers from home in Berlin to Montreal in Canada. Not that I can tell that I’m there, however, since my entire stay here has been confined to a Novotel hotel room, a small windowless conference room in the second floor of [...]