I was only really there to spend time with Ankur and his family, and beyond that didn’t really have a plan. On the second day, the two of us followed the lead of his four year old son, who for obvious reasons wanted to take a tour of the city on an open-top bus. Finding the stop proved difficult. As we shlepped it a half a mile or so to the next one, I was taken by the sight of this mirrored glass office building:

The image speaks for itself, especially to covert fans of glassy corporate architecture like me. I suppose it was the craggy tessellated underside of the one chunk sandwiched between two others, and its reflection, that really turned me on.

That evening I learned more about the building using the Google search website. I found out that it was the Gas Natural tower, the last built work of Enric Miralles, actually completed by his partner and wife Benedetta Tagliabue some five years after his premature death from a brain tumor in 2000. Although I’ve forgotten about a lot of the work that I used to look at while studying architecture in the ’90s, reading that name immediately coaxed distant memories of a certain issue of El Croquis that had really turned me on. From that moment I knew what my plan would be for the next sinus-congested days.

Ankur, Claudia and their son Vivek seemed totally fine with my idea to hunt down ’90s architecture, and the next day we drove their Seat minivan out to the work that was way way at the top of my list. But what I found in the Vall d’Hebron was a total buzz kill. Miralles and Pinós’s Archery Range for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics was there, but not in the state I’d thought I would find it in. I suppose I could have managed my expectations much better if I’d first stumbled upon this blog entry from 2006.

These neatly arranged concrete elements are all that I saw of the former archery range, though I later discovered that the roof structure dug into the hill is still there a couple hundred yards away (see the link above). I think I was too fazed, too disbelieving, to have gone any further with this particular chapter of our treasure hunt. A billboard from the construction company carrying out the park renovations, still in progress, read: “Construïm Valor”, meaning “Constructing Value” in the Catalan. Pfff… the motto made me wince, especially when I thought about all the vacant real estate that companies like this had speculatively built down by the water in the last decade or so.

At least I knew I had a good scoop for Slab, but the consolation was a weak one. Despondent, I felt that there had to be something more to be done. To put it in the clearest terms, I felt like I simply had to see this work with my own eyes, some how.

The next day I went and checked out Mies van der Rohe’s famous pavilion for the 1930 Barcelona Expo, and it was there that an idea came to me. Perhaps it was the peace and clarity of that architecture, so different from Miralles and Pinós’s exhuberant techno-organicism. The atmosphere helped, but it was really the quite literal facts on the ground that said something to me; the fact that this pavilion wasn’t the one that Mies has built – that edifice had been dismantled along with the rest of the expo in 1930. The Mies pavilion the we all know and love, so totally useless, is in truth a reproduction, completed in 1986 by a group of high profile architects and archi-fanatics.

So that’s my idea now, to do the same thing with the old archery range. Be a part of it. Sign

here !

Pulling this off will make last year’s successful coup with Hejduk’s tower look like a walk in the park. But it’s our only chance. Like Miralles’s architecture, this dream is erratic, maybe even absurd, but still makes sense.

Looking at the facade so unwillingly, my eye is drawn to the strange house-like monument that stands before it. Its primitive form, coated with the dregs of neon-colored billpostings, exudes a raw, spontaneous energy that’s in stark contrast to the church’s insipid architectural contrivances.

With this image we hereby draw to a close the publication of Victor Brigola’s wonderful series of photographs of rowhouse churches. It is, I think, a fitting way to end. Ever since the project began, this image has been the can being kicked down the road, an ugly truth that I wanted to ignore. But in the end it has served as an inspiration, a testament to the fact that a beautiful picture can be taken of something that isn’t.

It’s kind of a weird thing to do, relative to the other activities that fill our days. A bit like meditating, an unavoidable question seems to be: “what the hell am I doing here?”. This problem becomes especially acute due to (a) the deterrent pretension that crackles through the air at so many gallery openings and (b) the esoteric, self-referential bubble that the actual work seems to be trapped within. Add to that gooney art scenesters checklisting your scruffy appearance and practicing an eastern religion starts to look a lot more self-explanatory.

Looking at architecture is something that’s comparatively simple, if only because it’s a lot easier to make a statement about it without sounding stupid. It seems a given that we’re all entitled to an opinion about the buildings we live in and around -a basic tenet of this very publication’s existence. Architects and their works are somehow easier targets than artists and theirs, primarily because we think we know what the hell it is they’re doing, often times better than they do. There’s a legitimacy, even a moral obligation, in making a very base, or even obscene, criticism about an edifice with a corresponding appearance. And the work of architects seems to have some kind of effect on every moment of our lives, while art must first seduce us or offend us to be noticed in the first place.

“Take A Slow, Deep Breath! Elastic Impressions”

The title of Hella Gerlach’s show up at Studio commands and seduces us in equal measure, and in doing so initiates a necessary rupture from the profanity of everyday life and all the messiness of its architecture, physical and otherwise. This chunk of language is weird and at the same time totally(?) accessible, a kind of textual gateway that might give cause to investigate something that sounds kind of fun. On the other side of an exhalation and a sheet of plate glass is an offering that coaxes a closer look and, following the directive of the title, an emphatically meditative attitude. All of the elements and objects inside are both autonomous and at the same time the constituent parts of a bizarre phenomenal aggregate. The red cabinet, perfectly level, is actually balancing on its spindly legs as precariously as it appears to be…so be careful breathing out!

An untitled ceramic ball that was mistaken for a tomato, sits on the floor just to the right of the entrance.

Element I and Element II (Studiolo) are hung from the gridded substructure of the gallery’s semi-dismantled acoustic tile ceiling.

The semi-transparent ramie and viscose fiber walls of the three Element pieces have pockets in which objects were placed.

At the invitation of the gallerist, I dug the work Stab out from a pocket on one of the fabric walls. Also made of ceramic, it was uncannily heavy; it felt like a bone until I took it from its sleeve. “Stab” translates to “rod” in English, which is what I first thought the title was supposed to mean. Yet the shape of this thing could definitely be used to put someone into a world of pain.

Teil für Zwei (Piece for Two)

Further into the gallery are three more of those ceramic balls, one of which has been smashed. It was actually here that I first realized the ball in the front wasn’t a tomato. It all has something to do with a Greek housewarming ritual, I was told. The attempt was made to smash the balls all around the gallery just before the show opened, but they were fired to such a high strength that three of them survived.

Handstück (Hand Piece)

and

Schulterstück (Shoulder Piece)

were both cast from the artist’s body. But the visitor is free to try them on as well. These, I take it, are the “elastic impressions” mentioned in the title of the show.

This inconclusive set of objects, spaces and associations is like an architecture of the subconscious. That makes it difficult to talk about in any rational way, but I see the work as operating on the fuzzy line between art and architecture. Like a building, the show doesn’t presume anything of the viewer/occupant; it seems to be actually unable to. A pre-knowledge of what the work is about would if anything preclude understanding it for what it is, I think. As such, the work operates at a very base level, in spite of its elegance. Something down there, back there, at the beginning of architecture, seems to be making its presence known.

Take A Slow, Deep Breath! Elastic Impressions is on view at Studio, Adalbertstr.96, 10999 Berlin, until November 26th.

Aesthetically, the former church seems a likely candidate to have been abandoned by its congregation. To be honest, it’s really just a clumsy hodgepodge of disparate elements slapped together with little sensitivity or grace, the highlight of which is the little towerette on the right hand side, crammed cozily against the wall of the neighboring apartment house.

Many thanks again to Victor Brigola for this, the penultimate photograph to be featured in this series. All of the pictures are on view in the show “Feeling the Void” at the Vero Linzmeier Galerie until November 17th.

This Catholic job on Dänenstrasse appears incredibly secure in its standing, having little need for the kind of overwrought historical pastiche of its protestant brethren featured elsewhere in this collection. Its appearance has something more to do with an ideal than the contingencies of history, I would argue, and references to previous styles have been sublimated by a vision so reduced that it seems to be simultaneously both primitive and futuristic. A little dab of razzle dazzle hasn’t been forgotten, though: the guilded cross provides a not-so-subtle reminder of who’s got the money and isn’t afraid to show it.

As you may have seen by clicking onto the photographer’s link above, Mr. Brigola will be showing works from this series from Thursday, Oct. 27 in the show entitled “Feeling the Void” at the Vero Linzmeier Galerie. The opening party will be from 6:00-9:00pm on Thursday, I hope to see you there!

In any event, you know that a design era is in a state of revival as soon as the source material that is its lifeblood starts to be destroyed. At the same time as it’s fashionable to crank out austere, eco-freindly machines for living, it’s all the rage to raze perfectly good glass and steel megastructures that are merely in need of a reliable asbestos abatement contractor. The classic example was the old Palast der Republik, the destruction of which was, of course, a travesty to the city planning/tourism boosting process. We all know about that, I assume, and what’s done is done, save the construction of the new Stadtpalast, which I swear will cause me to bail on Berlin if and when it ever gets built.

But now another example of the crystalline ’60s is about to be summarily executed, also for the sake of preposterous neo-historical drivel. Standing blindfolded and smoking its last cigarette is the 1968 Konsistorium located at Bachstr. 1-2, by Georg Heinrichs and Hans-Christian Müller.

Once it’s dead and buried the plan is to put up a courtyard house by one of Hans Stimmann’s minions from his glory days in the ’90s, Tobias Nöfer. There are seemingly no images of the new design available online, but of course it has to be called something predictably historicist and low-brow in equal measure: “Hansahof”. The name itself indicates what is at the heart of the backlash against both the old building’s destruction and the new building’s construction, which is that to build a traditional courtyard-style block in the Hansaviertel is in fact a desecration of the “urban fabric” -actually more a like an ex-urban constellation of functionalist objects floating in a sea of grass and trees- that has defined the area since the heady days of Interbau 1957. So the proponents of Modernist design are playing the same card as the New Urbanists did back in ’80s and ’90s, which is to advocate something that came before because (1) they like it and (2) it came before. And fair play to them for doing so.

But, in truth, there are practical alternatives to just using architecture up and throwing it away. The question on all the radical architects’ lips at the moment is why it’s not possible to do something productive with a structure such as this. An obvious example would be to adapt the building’s interior, as well as its sheathing, to suit the intended brief of the new project, which is for low-income housing, and then put in some perma-culture urban farming plots all around it, and on the roof, where the residents could grow food to supplement what they can buy with their meager Hartz-4 takings. It could, like, change everything! Just brain storming here, but whatever…it’s not the kind of thing that anyone involved in the new project’s construction has probably ever done, much less considered weighing up such alternatives against what they’re planning to do and then performing a cost benefit analysis. But no one ever said that stopping the juggernaut of mindless German conservatism was going to be easy.

That’s all there is to say about, really. Though the old Konsistorium looks beautiful as a post-apocalyptic ruin, it seems, in truth, to exist in a pre-apocalyptic state as regarding big “A” Architecture. There is a quixotic absurdity in trying to salvage a ’60s office building that’s stood empty beside a trafficy intersection for the last ten years, but why not? Maybe we can all get together and change the situation the same way as we did with the petition to save Hejduk’s tower in Kreutzberg.

Just sign here!

And please check out these German-language links for more on the story, if you’re so inclined:

http://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/angst-um-die-moderne/4407152.html

http://www.baunetz.de/meldungen/Meldungen-Buerohaus_in_Berlin_wird_abgerissen_1675795.html

Last, a shot of the building’s interior that was passed on to me by the kind folks at Büro für Konstruktivismus. Just imagine the potential…I mean, I totally want to live in there!!!

In a sense, the presence of such a covering simply heightens the rather abstract structural qualities that these churches all seem to have. None of them are as elaborate in their detailing or as dense in their rendering as the models from which they were derived, in spite of the fact that their façades are generally coated in a rife-running admixture of decorative treatments. And in this case, as the church + cloister stood before the photographer on a chilly morning last spring, the most juicy parts of all have been both muffled and abstracted. Beneath the white sheathing can be found the rich combination of a loggia, crenellated turrets, a circular white clock face and a broad, gothic-arched drive that leads to an inner courtyard which is has been touted as a verdant Shangri-La, far removed from the city’s bustling streets -in essence, a real hodge podge of turn-of-the-19th-century eclecticism. The architect, whoever he was, truly red-lined his understanding of historical styles, having shifted his encyclopaedic knowledge of them into a proverbial overdrive, if you will, which was his reward, perhaps, for having finished top of the class at some stiflingly oppressive Wilhelminian Bauakademie.

Campanile, campanilo, campanilotto -as the Wikipedia entry on Italian diminutives states, “there are no limits to suffixation, which could continue”.

Thanks again to Victor Brigola for his photographic offerings to this humble channel of architectural conjecture.

There’s been talk for years within the Slab camp about launching a full-scale investigation of this particular detail, so well loved by frustrated German architects. With this article I hope to formally initiate such an action, prompting my colleagues to dig up their own pictures of this particular architectural absurdity. Inspired by sun-drenched holidays in southern Europe, louvers of this kind have been implemented in a most reckless fashion. Berlin and large parts of Germany are generally overcast, as it indeed is at the time of this writing.

The example presented here is adorns a community sports and recreation center on Winstraße, and the state of its as-built condition should have anyway taught its designers a lesson. The east-facing louvers serve no other function than to provide delinquent youths with a firm scaffolding upon which to stand whilst spraying their degenerate tags. If the quality of the graffiti in Berlin were better, one could perhaps show more understanding for such an architectural vagary. As it is, such louvers are worse than useless. They are an aesthetic and environmental abhorrence that has been desperately applied in order to distract us from the sober truth that is represented by these boxes of architectural boredom.

One more for the collection of photographer Victor Brigola’s edition of images produced for Slab.

Perhaps the ‘jects surrounding this baby are more reminiscent of Beograd, or its suburbs, than the church itself -at least on the outside. It’s apparently a classic retrofit, indicating demographic shifts in the working class district of Berlin-Wedding. Or could the church have been purpose built? Indeed there is some arcane romance in both the design of the crenelations, as well as of the steppy triangle things over the tripartite entrance way. There’s no real info on the edifice itself on the parish homepage, though a nice synopsis of the order is presented. Lots of strife, of course. All the agonizing multiculturalism seems to have started with the physical location of the Serbian homeland being stuck between its two major Christian influences, Constantinople and Rome.

Still, I remain convinced that the surroundings look more yugo than the church itself.