A rest-stop on Berlin’s 127th Street. Little in common with Harlem.

In approaching a publication like Disko a more intense quality of research is needed than might otherwise go into a typical article on this site. Recognising this, and the need to explore semiotically challenging terrain, the SLAB editorial team decided to conduct a two-day field trip along the length of the old Berlin Wall using a quad bike and a beach buggy. Seeing as the old Death Strip is now a cycle path and a richly varied biotope, any difficulties arrising from our choice of transportation would become dramatic devices, exploitable at a later date. It was also of upmost importance to make a hell of a lot of noise with a couple of two-stroke engines.

The ultimate cul-de-sac

We explored the ultimate cul-de-sac, the so-called “duck’s beak” which is a dead-end street that was surrounded by the Wall on three sides, resulting in a narrow East German enclave which jutted 530 meters into West Berlin. Here we discovered Helmut-Kohl-era BRD concrete villas with orange awnings, and the post-reunification ‘shateux’ of a retired footballer.

Camping on the former death strip

We camped out on a football pitch on the former death strip, and reflected upon the 3% of landmines still unaccounted for twenty years after demilitarisation. People walk their dogs here at 5am.

This is what you do field trips for

We struck architectural gold in our discovery of this el Cheapo Site style rip-off. This was in a light industrial estate specialising in discount denim products and roof tiles.

We set off with no coherent thesis, and returned with no consistent conclusion, but certainly with enough material to compile an engaging documentation. This article, then, should be seen as a kind of trailer for our issue of Disko, which will appear towards the end of the year, and will, doubtless, be touted by us doggedly up to and beyond publication date.

You can link to the gallery site at this address, but please be aware that a flash animation is embedded that may cause seizures to be suffered by people diagnosed with epilepsy:

http://www.kaihoelzner.de/

For those of you that don’t want to brave that test of speed reading in German, here is a tickling frame that was furnished to me in the press release for the show:

As our more steadfast readers already know, the Berlin townhouse is a subject that is both seductive and perplexing to us, going all the way back to Ian Warner’s piece from November 2006, ‘Upper-Middle-Class Homes for the “Classless” Society’, as well as Karen Elliot’s seminal follow-up from one year ago, ‘A Whiff of Density’.

So now let’s see where this conversation is going, should be an awesome thing to check out this weekend. From 7:00pm on Saturday, July 17th at Galerie Kai Hoelzner, Adalbertstr. 96, 10999 Berlin.

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.

On green-bin-day, thousands of identical green bins are wheeled onto the streets of this Dublin neighbourhood for emptying by the city council trucks. There are also black-bin days for general refuse, and brown-bin days for organic waste. In the past, everyone would buy their own bin container from the hardware shop, put all of their rubbish in it, and put the bin out on the street for collection. In that system, you knew which bin was yours because it was newer, older, bigger, smaller or different in some other respect to your neighbours’ bins. Perhaps yours had a metal body and a plastic lid, or vice versa. Ours had a highly distinctive crumpled edge, a result of being accidentally thrown in under the refuse crusher in the back of the lorry.

However, market-friendly policies pursued by the government, and in line with European Union legislation, has led to private companies moving in on the waste disposal market. These companies are paid from the city’s funds, and they run a leaner, union-free service. Less lucrative contracts for certain parts of Dublin are not taken by private companies, so the city council still has to cover them. Effectively, the city council is subsidising the private bin collectors.

This process is part of the ‘greening’ of refuse policy, which encourages people to recycle. A bin collection charge has been levied by the city council, but has met considerable local opposition and boycotts. Now in some parts of the capital, the city council has receded from public consciousness as the body that runs the city’s rubbish, while in others it is a bogeyman that brings poor people to court over non-payment.

One side effect of these policies is people stuffing domestic waste into public litter baskets, which are often full and overflowing as a result. Another is ‘fly-tipping’, i.e. driving your rubbish around until you find a secluded spot and dumping it there. The Dublin and Wicklow mountains to the south of the city are particularly scarred by this.

There are many other side effects, not to mention complicated controversies concerning an incinerator (another case of the city contracting out its work to private business). But the rather prosaic side effect illustrated here is that now each household is issued with a standard bin, each identical to the next. They have barcode identity tags, which are scanned when the bins are emptied and the owners charged accordingly. Rubbish presented in any other container is ignored. Because the bins are now all the same, people write their house number, and sometimes their street name, on the side of the bin. That way, when the collection has been made, you can be sure you are wheeling your own bin back in, and not someone else’s. What has developed is a weird array of fonts and handwritings, most of them achieved with an arresting slovenliness. Though, as we can see above, some people try to beautify the things.

Normally this kind of thing would be called a doubly redundant system, would it not? Only here, the entire ensemble is redundant. What remains is art, clearly. No one thinking seriously about ram-raiding the Aedes Pfefferberg tonight is going to be particularly worried by the two surrogate bollards standing in for their absent yellow counterparts, which seem to have gone AWOL.

Colleague Andreas (who took the photo), Florian and myself watched on amused as a security guy scurried out of his hut, removed the two central posts, and ushered a large white Transit van into the goods yard. Colleague Andreas then transposed the already ridiculous situation into high parody, by insisting that the posts were repositioned for the above picture.

Anon!

Never mind the architecture: check out the prose!

Having already scoured the grim depths of property marketing phraseology, in which coherence is routinely substituted for an inventory of vagaries, I expected to be sufficiently desensitized so as to cope with anything that the FRIEDASchanze boosters might throw my way. But I was quite wrong. The following quotes are my own translations, and therefore subject to grotesque bias, but I have tried to be as authentic as possible:

“After breathing in the neighborhood air, and a walk through the heads of the people that call this part of the city their home, the modern, striking design for the Frieda’Schanze project was born.”

Striking is that the building cunningly resembles five metro trains parked on top of each other. The model interiors, however, belong firmly to that completely interchangeable genre of effete lifestyle porn which seems to give property developers the hots.

Just wait till they start frying liver and onions in the kitchen

With the apartment’s inspirational moment of conception swiftly dealt with on one page, the Schanze neighborhood is described in some detail on another, setting the scene for prospective buyers.

“Little stores, Arabic falafel stands, Italian pizza bakers with songs of the Adria on their lips, bric-a-brac stores and record shops, rustic pubs like Omas Apotheke for the cultivated evening beer, beach clubs, cool bars for cool types like the Bar Rossi, the hippest clothes shops in the city and many small clubs with DJs in which the newest trends are created … all of this is the Schanze.“

There are striking parallels between this gushing, romanticised prose, and that of the nineteenth-century tourist/travel writer. Historian Mark Mazower illuminates the Victorian concept of the picturesque in his excellent book Salonica – City of Ghosts:

“Tourists, it is clear, were seeing very much what they had come to see. Their own culturally determined appetites demanded to be satisfied – how could they not be? – inspired by a romanticism which valued new landscapes for the states of mind they induced … The concrete realities and economic possibilities of the place no longer interested them … Instead the East was now an aesthetic construct.

In all the examples of real-estate marketing which have been scrutinised by this series, the same is true. A picture of a neighborhood is painted, and the potential buyer of a flat is then invited to identify themselves not with the neighborhood itself, but with the picture of the neighborhood being painted for them. With FRIEDASchanze it’s the aesthetic construct of a vibrant heterogeneous neighborhood, with Berlin’s Palais KolleBelle it’s the geographically displaced joie de vivre of bohemian Paris.

Adjectives anyone? “… trendy 2 to 5 room apartments, hip maisonettes, cool penthouses …”

So what is to distinguish the myth-making of property developers from any other kind of advertising, which also relies on inducing “states of mind”? Well for one, property marketing is prone to the observer’s paradox: the vibrant heterogeneous neighborhood which is FRIEDASchanze’s lifeblood will change as a result of its presence. High-priced apartments (average price € 350.000) have a habit of driving up the rent in the surrounding area: the classic symptom of gentrification. Homogenisation is invariably the result. Let’s hope those charming Arabs and Italians in their falafal stands and pizza parlours can still afford their rent in 2011.

The FRIEDASchanze website: www.friedaschanze.de [German langauge]
Best enjoyed mangled by Google’s hysterical translation machine here.

The Property Marketing Balls Collection

I’m using all my powers of Holmesian abductive reasoning, but I just can’t figure out what this little hut is for. All I can say about it for sure is that it’s dorky. Let’s just run through the facts:

– It has a tapered roof
– It is connected to a wood conduit
– It is braced to the ground
– It is made of cheap, maybe found building materials
– It has no openings

So whatever is inside needs to be protected from the weather. Whatever is inside probably needs electricity to work, and might even be sending signals back out through a cable in the conduit. Being braced to the ground, it’s contents are important enough to warrant a modicum of security. Cheap materials hint at a quick solution to an impromptu problem. And the lack of openings rules out the need for regular access.

I am inclined to propose that the hut contains an electric dog which monitors traffic. Whatever the case, I’m damned if it isn’t just a dorky little hut.

Having snobbishly berated Berlin for its lack of density in the post before last, it suddenly occured to me that I’d stopped in the street a day earlier to photograph exactly that. Admittedly, I used the zoom on my camera to flatten the depth of field, but only a little bit.

And what, perchance, should be responsible for this slight whiff of metropolitain glamour? The Berlin Townhouses, also berated by us, way back in the day. We truely know nothing.

These large open spaces strip back the flesh of the city to reveal the medieval structures below. One consequence of this is that many of the the roads which used to lead out of town, still feel like the roads which lead out of town, even though they no longer do.

Cahoona Drive-In Coffee: Berlin’s greatest architectural achievement.

A case in point is Leipziger Straße, a thoroughfare running on an east-west axis and ending up at Potsdamer Platz which, in days of yore, used to be one of the city’s major gates. Infrastructurally speaking, little has been done to ‘correct’ the feeling that you are about to leave the city. In fact, some architectural features actually accentuate this feeling, as in the Cahoona Hawaiian Drive-In Coffee Shack pictured above.

Now, I guess if I was cruising out of town with my lady in one of these, then I might be inclined to pull over and order two quarter-gallon jugs of espresso before hitting the road in search of sun, surf and sand-dunes.

Sometimes I think Berlin’s fed up of being a city, and that it’d actually much rather go back to being a swampy little provincial garrison town, so uninspiring that they built a wall around it not to defend it from attack from outside, but to stop the soldiers stationed inside from deserting. But it’s exactly this schism that allows oddities like the Cahoona Hawaiian Drive-In Coffee Hut to exist in the first place.