SLAB Magazine

Renee Mlynaryk got in touch with SLAB recently to tell us about the New-York-wide art intervention TRASH: anycoloryoulike runnning throughout summer 2008.
Initiated by artist Adrian Kondratowicz, the project is as simple as it is poetic: in selected city blocks, normal black plastic rubbish bags are swapped for colourful polkadot versions, effectively turning whole neighborhoods into [...]

Canada: super-cooled in summer
Canada makes me feel very European. Obviously I haven’t, for example, understand air-conditioning. I haven’t understood its need to run 24 hours a day regardless of the weather outside. Nor have I understood why the benefits of a reliable 18.5°C room temperature so outweigh the annoyance of the rattle and hum of [...]

Breite Straße isn’t just being narrowed; it’s also getting new furniture. SLAB was intrigued by the thin net-stockings the new lamp posts seem to have been brought to the building site in. The material is probably the minimum required to separate the posts whilst stacked in transit.

Kollwitzstraße 17 — Architect: unknown
Most of Berlin’s Bland Boxes went up in the 1990s. This one was completed less than a year ago. The smeggy rag-rolling paint job, the fake balconies and the Borg window box thing are all doing their best to diguise the fact that this is a Bland Box. But it’s not [...]

These two chimneys seen behind the 78 acre Mount Zion Cemetery in Queens, New York, made for some bewildered bus-window viewing yesterday. After a little bit of Google research it seems the stacks belong to the city’s Department of Sanitation, not making the association any better. One has to wonder how such macabre urban juxtapositions [...]

This Jacob’s coffee vending machine sources its water very locally.

Seen at Berlin’s Tegel airport

Spittelmarkt 11, 12, 13 — Architect: Claus Neumann; Berlin
This building does not have a roof. It has a lid. And unlike most lids it’s not keeping the freshness inside, it’s keeping the blandness from escaping outside.