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!!!

…for traffic swamped Winskiez. By the looks of it, a new stretch of Hadrian’s wall is under construction. Ah, no, just the next installment of public space improvements on Winsstraße these days, presumably to link up with the exclusive condominiums of current development Wohnquartier on the corner of Jablonskistraße, a kind of Kollebelle light in aircrete and pvc by the same architect. By the looks of it, someone imported Kollebelle’s curved facade into Vectorworks with the wrong arc segmentation settings, though the architect says it’s a reference to the Japanese art of origami. Aha.

kollebelle origami facade by the man himself, Marc Koch

This city really takes care of you. Phew, glad I am just inside this perimeter of respectibility and decorum, qualities directly proportional to the redundancy of bollards and pedestrian traffic lights in the ‘hood. Earlier that day the Ordnungsamt had saved me from unknowingly purchasing grilled salsiccie that a rogue organic butcher had tried to cook from a raw state at Kollwitzplatz market. He only had a license to grill cooked sausages. What people try to get away with! And I know how busy they have been in the trenches of the newly installed neigborhood parking in this area. So hats off to them. In fact, let’s dedicate these bollards as tiny monuments to the noble travails of our friends from the Ordnungsamt, scouring our sidewalks daily for first signs of decay and traffic indiscipline. Protect and serve. Things are looking up.

gentrification bridgehead into unchartered territory

Layering programs, the old fashioned way

This spontaneous intervention lends some much-needed radness to what can otherwise be seen as classically Remorrhoidian architecture; its scrappiness defies the still-reigned in aestheticizing that OMA -and its legacy of wunderkinder- have as yet appeared reluctant to loosen their stranglehold upon.

A more elaborate proposal, requiring special ordinances for the temporary use of pavement customarily used for the parking of automobiles.

A festive variation, found at a popular purveyor of Indian cuisine.

A more aggressive approach, fashioned with the assistance of a professional scaffolding contractor.

The diguises fall into two categories: cloaks and costumes, and with ‘cloak’ I mean the science fiction variety; an invisibility shield.

The doric order shithouse

The BVG, Berlin’s public transport network operator, have been busy building toilets for its bus and tram drivers across the city. Whilst taking the picture above, I got chatting to a tram driver seeking relief at a terminal stop at Nordbahnhof. He told me that all the BVG loos have been decorated differently. Which means we won’t need to put up with badly painted Roman temples, but a wide variety of shakey costume architectural parodies. Whilst I dig the idea, the execution leaves a lot to be desired. However, I must admit to being fascinated by the positioning of the two tell-tale, off-the-shelf vent coverings, which look as though they were added after the paint job.

Convenient canvas

Out in Fürstenberg, a small town 75km north of Berlin, some wag has produced a stunning portrait of SpongeBob Squarepants using a ubiquitous curb-side Grey Box as a conveniently shaped canvas.

The Lennon box

Another costume, produced, one assumes, by an anonymous pupil of the John Lenon Secondary School in Berlin’s Mitte district. For me, this marks an artistic zenith in the quiet conflict which has been waging for months between sprayers and Deutsche Telekom buffers. I’m hoping this piece of urban decoration will be lasting, but some other can-weilding cretin has already blemished the piece since the photo was taken.

The stealth cottage is visible enough not to be seen

I’m going to leave this meander with another example from the countryside: this time from Neuglobsow, a lakeside hamlet close to SpongeBob’s home town, and a great example of a ‘cloaked’ hut. It turned out to be an electrical substation, and obviously one of such aesthetic embarrasment to this history-conscious community that it was worth disguising as a timber frame cottage. Apart from the exaggerated perspective, and the peculiarly uninterrupted view of a distant lake, the effect is pretty convincing even from a distance of just two meters. So absorbing is this example, that the undisguied Grey Box to the right goes by unnoticed. Paradoxes abound.

For me this is all about a healthy erosion of the boundry between individuals and the civic infrastructure. Regardless of whether the decorattion of these non-descript structures is legal or illegal, it’s a way of reclaiming the streets and turning them into an extension of private domestic space. Customisation and reappropriation of that which is nominally out of bounds is a reaffirmation that the place you call home extends beyond the four walls of your dwelling.

Was reading a fascinating interview with the artist Cyprien Gaillard last night, in issue 7 of Pin-Up Magazine. I really dig what this guy is doing with architecture: recycling brutalist housing into stone gravel-ways (La grande allée du Château de Oiron), transplanting monuments from site to site (Le canard de Beaugrenelle), reflecting on spring break tourists puking on Mayan ruins. See his portfolio here.

Google, a large technology company, has quietly added some new features to its popular “Maps” site. Selected areas of the globe are now viewable as a collage of areal photos - presumably shot from low-flying light aircraft. The effect is to render towns and cities in a SimCity near-isometric view. Currently the feature is restricted to a few parts of California, which is great because it allows us to spin one of those flippant, hyperbolic correlations which you all come here for. The imagery has been heavily processed to reduce noise, so rooftops, pools, streets, and just about any expanse of uniform tonality have that pastey, pancaked-look which badly Photoshopped fashion models often suffer from. The effect is enhanced further by some pretty brutal JPEG compression, giving the Californian ’burbscape the lifted, botoxed-look of an ageing celebrity.

That’ll be Europe [Click to enlarge]

Also of note is the map rotation feature which allows you to turn everything on its head. This is a great step, and brings the idea of context-changing alternative mapping to the masses. What I’d like to see next are Buckminster Fuller’s dymaxion map projections, or Jack van Wijk’s award winning Myriahedral projections:

Then a few days back I caught sight of this thing:

Isn’t that a thing of awesome beauty? When did waste management get so darn æsthetic? All those orderly perpendicular lines converging into a rotating orange checker board pattern just have me dazzled. And just think about how far removed the pattern is from the fetid mass of refuse blending away in the pitch black interior. And the detailing: are those really day-glo pink bristles on the tank-mounted brooms?

Well it’s obvious that I need to know more. A quick search for the company name Faun turns up a super-nerdy, German language, vehicle-spotting site, dedicated to amassing thousands of amateur photos of every conceivable form of transport. There’s even a whole page dedicated to waste disposal vehicles, God bless them, on which we read that this is most probably a Mercedes Benz ECONIC 2629 with Faun trash compactor. Sorry, guys, but that’s not nearly specific enough. If you’ve got a nerdy-need-to-know vibe going, then you’ve got to drill deeper. I’m after serial numbers and payload specifications. I’ve sent out an email to the BSR’s press department requesting more information, so, watch this space.

*** Update 27.11.09 ***

So, just had a chat with Dr. Thomas Klöckner of the BSR’s executive affairs office for public relations, and it seems that the vehicle above is something of a rarity. Asked whether the BSR just took delivery of some new equipment, he quipped that the BSR are continuously right up to date with the latest hot-shit kit in waste disposal technology. But the machine in question, the Trommelpresse (drum press) shown above, is currently undergoing field testing and is not yet in citywide operation.

Dr. Klöckner explained that these machines are basically trash compactors on wheels, and that 60% of the fuel used by a traditional rubbish truck goes into the press, and not into the engine. The cylindrical drum press, though, has a big screw on the inside, which continually pushes the rubbish to the back. To empty itself, it simply turns in the opposite direction. The æsthetic economy of the drum is also matched by a real economy of material: less machine means more trash per truck, which means lower overheads.

So that’s basically the low-down on the Faun Trommelpressausatz. Thanks to Dr. Thomas Klöckner.

*** Update 28.11.09 ***

Dr. Klöckner got back in touch to say that the truck I filmed actually belongs to the BSR daughter company Berlin Recycling, and is being fed with paper.