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.

It is difficult at first to put your finger on what is odd about this cottage, especially when you are standing there beside it. Fortunately, the local walking guide tells you what you’re looking at:

” … Some of the old houses have been renovated or knocked, and new houses built. Meelmaan has the unique distinction of a number of cottages with roof ridges which parallel the steep downward slope of the road, so that the gable at the top end is some five feet higher than that at the bottom. It has been suggested that if children had their bedrooms in the attics, they would move from the lower end to the higher end as they grew. It seems that the same unsung artisan was the author of most of the village houses, and ruins showing his original feature also remain. One hopes that those refurbishing the latter for holiday homes will retain this priceless feature of design.”

The remark at the end of this quote about renovations in Meelmaan is perhaps more pointed than it might first appear, when we look at what has in fact been built in recent years.

The new holiday homes, with their inauthentic, non-artisan aesthetic, are indeed less interesting and even more soulless, but on what grounds can we make an objection to them? Surely the needs, materials, skills and circumstances of the present day are just as contingent and worthy of authenticity as the conditions that prevailed in the old days? These concerns come to mind in the aftermath of Slab’s recent intervention in the renovation of the Hejduk Tower, a renovation which paid little heed to the spirit of the original design. When I contacted an architect friend about ‘the petition to save the Hejduk Tower from defacement’, as this site put it, she replied that she would happily sign not because she is a fan of Hejduk, which she is not, but because (in her words) she knows ‘how it feels when people mess up your design with crappy add-ons – though most of us just have to live with it and hope that the building design is robust enough to take it’.

My point here is a general one about the idea of saving a certain kind of built environment: if change must come, given that buildings age and must be renovated, then does there come a point when the thing that you are trying to save has stopped existing anyway, just as the circumstances in which it was built have also stopped existing? What exactly are we trying to save when we try to save valued buildings?

And here’s Juergen Mayer’s accompanying press release text:

JOH 3 – New Apartmenthouse Johannisstraße 3, Berlin

Property development group Euroboden is building a unique apartment house at Johannisstraße in Mitte, Berlin’s downtown district. J. MAYER H. architects’ design for the building, which will soon neighbor both Museum Island and Friedrichstrasse, reinterprets the classic Berliner Wohnhaus with its multi-unit structure and green interior courtyard. A suspended lamella facade not only provides privacy but also draws historical reference to the elaborately decorated facades from the Wilhelminian period. Plans for the ground floor facing the street also include a number of commercial spaces. The generously sized apartments will face south-west, opening themselves to a view of the calm, carefully designed courtyard garden. Spacious, breezy transitions to the outside create an open residential experience in the middle of the city that, thanks to the variable heights of the different building levels, also offers an interesting succession of rooms. The units’ varying floorplans and layouts indicate a number of housing options; condominiums are organized into townhouses with private gardens, classic apartments or penthouses with a spectacular view of the old Friedrichstadt. The integrated design concept, which incorporates everything from façade to stairwells, elevators to apartment interiors, promises a unique spatial and living experience with an eye to high design.

This seems more the language of a property developer than the artist-cum-architect, and I wonder who really penned these words. As far as the new building’s “historical reference to the elaborately decorated facades from the Wilhelminian period”: really? I have to be honest and state that this is not far off from the tricky-ricky lingo we’ve become accustomed to whist browsing promotional material for such projects as The Fellini Residences.

And the last sentence is pure fluff. The architect – who has been touted by several publications as one of the hottest young German designers of the last few years – appears misguided in the approach he’s taken to representing his own work. Why not save such low-brow stuff for the people who actually have to sell the real estate? Because consumers and producers of culture, to whom an architect would presumably be directing such a press release, generally want to use their minds while reading such blurbs.

It has come to our attention that John Hejduk’s remarkable Kreuzberg Tower and Wings building (covered here by Karen Eliot in 2007) is currently undergoing a ham-fisted “renovation” job.

This afternoon Jim Hudson of Architecture in Berlin, who has covered the building in some depth as part of his ongoing IBA odyssey, forwarded me a mail sent to him by none other than Renata Hejduk, daughter of the late John Hejduk. A friend of hers in Berlin had sent her the photos shown here, noting sadly “they cut the eyebrows away”. The façade is being painted white. The original balconies and awnings are already scrap and will be replaced by new orange purple constructions.

Renovation: cretin style [Photo: Aida]

Renata Hejduk herself writes that the group of buildings are being “defaced and destroyed by a development company that bought them in foreclosure”. She added: “I tried everything I could to get them to stop and to at least consult with the Estate and other architects who were interested in helping to preserve them. They were completely uninterested and felt their facade changes would be much better than the original. Devastating.”

The development company in question is the Berlinhaus Verwaltung GmbH, of whom this journal currently knows nothing. We strongly suggest all appreciators of architecture question them on this matter, and request open dialog. Today I contacted our esteemed colleague Kolja Reichert of the Tagesspiegel about the story, as well our our friends at Baunetz. We await reply.

Can it really be that this city, which prides itself as being a culture capital, is not only happy to fill itself with the vacuous turds of property developers, but is also content to let the few genuinely interesting examples of (post/late)modern architecture that it has be disfigured in this manner by the same handful of philistines?

To paraphrase Jim, who has so elegantly put it: if you also feel that architecture has more value than just real estate, then pass on the news and get people talking.

Updates pending.

Kollhoff’s tower (center) on Potsdamer Platz, seen from Leipziger Platz [Click to enlarge]

Ute von Vellberg, spokeswoman for Daimler-Chrysler – the building’s owner at the time – called the measures “precautionary and voluntary” and hadn’t followed any particular incident. However, the preceeding winter was blamed for unspecified damage to the large brick-look tiles which coat most of the building’s twenty-five floors. Looking back, the Tagesspiegel seems to deliberately tempt fate by quoting von Vellberg as saying that work would be completed by Christmas 2006.

Ms Cruz, the face of modern hairspray

Four Christmas’ later, and the scaffolding is still there. In fact, it’s getting hard to remember a time when it wasn’t there, and harder to think of a reason why it shouldn’t just stay as it is, in a permanent state of rennovation. At the base of the tower, a whole street has turned into a wooden village for builders and façade specialists. The scaffolding is some five meters deep around the base of the building, turning pavements into darkened tunnels. One can imagine that the businesses in the ground floor might soon want to extend their storefronts out into this new exterior space with tents, pieces of corrugated iron or plastic sheeting. A kind of high-class boutique slum.

By December 2006 though, it had become clear that extensive rennovation was needed, and that a messy and protracted legal battle was going to be the only way to find someone to blame. In October of 2007 Hans Kollhoff went on the record as saying “We’ve built so many buildings and proven that it can’t have anything to do with us”, which carefully avoided slandering some contractor, or making any sense whatsoever. A couple of months later Daimler-Crysler sold the building to the Swedish bank SEB for 1.3 billion Euros, and with it, one assumes, the 10 million Euro rennovation costs.

Hidden messages

But what this is really about is the twofold irony which has afflicting the building during the whole escapade.

The first is to be found in the choice of advertising attached to the scaffolding, which has always striven to acknowledge the extreme verticality of the space available. Adverts for hairspray are particulrly succesful. The proportions lend themselves particularly well to 50 meter pack-shots, whilst the product itself boasts of properties sadly lacking in Kollhoff’s tower: in the above detail we read that L’Oreal’s Elnett (hairspray to the stars) has “Ultra starker halt”, meaning it has super hold. Shame Kollhoff’s brick-look tiles don’t.

The second irony is that, in its wraped-up state, the northern flank of Kollhoff’s po-mo tower bears an eerie resemblance to Renzo Piano and Christoph Kohlbecker’s streamlined wedge next door, and with it, an altogether different approach to building high in a city proud of being squat.

But then the initial work for the permanent railings went in a few of weeks ago. In fact they looked pretty good, but I was too stressed or lazy to get on with uploading photos in due course. The following was shot on Oct 20, 2009:

I was struck at the time by a kind of tipsy geometry to the steel framework. It seems Brandldude has no inclination to stick to a rigorously orthogonal order, but he doesn’t go for a fully displaced web of skewed elements, either, nor a warpy conglomeration of non-uniform rational B-spline-derived blobulars. His look is rather like something that started out neat and tidy but then got wind-blown. Kind of like his hair. That said, I had to fear what would come next: either some horrendous perforated steel panels or someone accidentally slipping and falling to his or her death.

Back there again last weekend and getting a bit tipsy myself at Kim, where as one of the business’s proprietors the drinks are altogether too reasonably priced. As is my tendency, I gave the premises next door a cursory surveyal while I was unlocking my bike in the courtyard behind the bar. I saw that some on-site prototyping had been going on for the completion of the railing, yielding still more promising results. It had taken a while, far longer than one is used to seeing in Germany, but the open clearances of the banisters were finally being filled so that no one would fall through them in the event of unfortunate slip.

The nu-rave purple reflection is from the camera’s flash hitting the polycarbonate sheeting on the building’s exterior.

I really like the solution as this is an easy detail to get horribly wrong. Sand-blasted glass panes, metal screens, horzontal bands of cable or steel rods, gridded grill work and all that jazz, fuck no. But it’s none of that, it references I think a typical 50’s modernist solution of light triangulated stays. Here the execution’s radically economical, its just one cable threaded through holes drilled in the unfinished steel piping and the eyelets that have been anchored in the concrete.

A couple of days later I was back to set up my drum kit in Kim’s basement and saw a metal fabricator up on the terrace, apparently at work drilling for the cable routing. He seemed like yet another pretty chill dude: Nike sweatshirt and jamming out to his mp3 player with a cigarette dangling from his mouth while he banged a jig around and drilled away.

So I went up and asked him if I could take a few pictures of what he was doing. He took his earbuds out, I repeated my question, and said that I’d only need a few seconds. “Mir ist’s Scheiß egal” he answered, and then put his buds back in. This is what I got, and its not that complicated, really.

For the event we’ll talk a bit about what we’re doing and why, as well as define such terms as “blurbanism”, “remerrhoids”, “advertecture” and “brutiful”. We’ll get back into themes such as “The Bland Box” and introduce new ones like the timely “The New Death Strip: Architectural Mediocrity and Worse Along the Site of the Former Berlin Wall”. And we’ll also talk a bit about the object in question, and explain what the above detail says to us.

All this will be presented in a stunning, panoramic dual-projector format…so please feel free to come on down to the KOW gallery at Brunnenstraße 9, tomorrow at 18:00 EST.

Could it be that Nivea’s new Volume Sensation Styling Spray was itself developed in reaction to the obvious marketing opportunity that the eastern face of the scaffolding presented? Or maybe that the idea for the product, as well as its name, were indeed derived from the cladding technique that Kollhof had employed a decade before in the construction of this titan in the pantheon of fakeytecture?

The upside is that it looks better covered in scaffolding than it did before the brick-look panels began to peel away.

So it seems that after having a SLAB business card thrust into his palm, he’d read my piece a couple of weeks ago, and for whatever reason he’d wanted to meet us at the building. We showed up at the place right on time, and Mr. Brandlhuber casually rolled up on an old ten speed a few minutes later. After meeting and greeting we found a nice place on the second storey terrace at the back to sit and rap for 45 minutes or so. We expected a bit of lively debate, and that’s what we got, but he was elusive when it came to the building itself. And the reason why is because he actually wanted us to particapate in a workshop/symposium/lecture series thing (!) for Seminarblock 2 of the Master of Architecture program he heads at the AdBK Nürnberg, called a42.org. The event will be centered around the construction at Brunnenstrasse 9, and is to be held right there in the building itself. Needless to say we were flattered by the invitation, and kindly took it up. But in order to keep the debate at the event as lively and spontaneous as possible he’s putting a lid on it till then, which does make some sense. That said, I hope a SLAB reader or two will be there for the proceedings. We’re scheduled to be a part of what’s going on there on the evening of Sunday, November 8th.

Before

From there the conversation wandered here and there, I remember there was a bit of Rem-bashing. It really seems like we were on the same wavelength! In all he was an extremely down-to-earth guy, appearing more relaxed and at the same time on top of the situation than either of us, in spite of the stresses he’s got to be under as a hot architect. I wish I was wired like that.

I realize now how great it would have been to have gotten a picture of us there so as to have made this rambling text more interesting. All I’ve got instead is a bit of before and after visual journaling of the door details inside the passageway. I took the ‘before’ pictures because I have this fetish for how things look before they’re finished. I wondered: why not just leave these doors the like this; clear coat it with something, call it done?

But I really like the solution they’ve found. Who could have guessed that slapping on that super coarse East-German-style rough-coat would look so right. The building needed something to offset the smoothness of the front facade, and this is definitely doing it. Beautiful, or maybe should I say “brutiful”?

After