SLAB Magazine

Worked at home today. Went out around lunch time to buy some good pasta from the local deli, and walked into a film set. Lights were set up on the pavement, rental trucks full of rigs, booms and all-sorts were parked near-by, and there was an atmosphere of hushed busyness. For a second or two [...]

Mark Gröningen was first mentioned in the year 779. If you’re doing a timber-framed-architecture tour of Europe next summer, make this a place to visit.

The town hall

Buildings on the main square

The date in this inscription utilises Roman and Gothic numerals. DD (1000); the half-eight (4); the tipped seven (7); and 6: 1476. And above that, [...]

Mummified: undead sculpture in front of ‘Alexa’ by Mirko Siakkou-Flodin
As I may have mentioned elsewhere, the newly opened ‘Alexa’ Shopping and Leisure Behemoth™ bears more than a striking resemblance to an ancient Egyptian burial monument. I was dazzled, then, to discover that the entrance to Alexa has been decorated with a 9 meter high, stainless [...]

In a cute ironic twist, Breite Straße (Wide Street) in Berlin’s Mitte district, is currently being narrowed to make way for some Cityhometownhouses, ushering in a new era of urban density. The street is being nipped and tucked back to its original width having spent many years doubling-up as a military parade ground for tanks.

Nip, [...]

‘Alexa’, the new necrophile zombie shopping crypt on Alexanderplatz, opened to shocking scenes of chaos on the 12th September. Europe’s largest branch of MediaMarkt opened at midnight, and thousands of Berliners decended upon the store in a fest of consumer greed. The “stack ‘em high, sell them low” policy of the electronic goods giant [...]

I’ve just returned from a private trip to Lille in France, where a few things inspired my appetite for all things geo-urban.
For starters, the name of the city is the story of its past. Lille is a contraction of “le île”, which is French for “island”. Lille used to be a merchant canal city, and [...]

Cycling back home from work this evening I found myself singing the words to Goldie’s Inner City Life, as sung by Diane Charlemagne, a track which blew me away when I first heard it in 1996. I still have the 12″ and played it this evening and tried to remember a few images from the [...]