Looking back, House fits precisely with the early 1990s postmodern (’pomo’) Zeitgeist, where insides and outsides and the permeable, shifting liminal zones between them were in a flux of radical undecidability, even of alterity. Clearly, the period’s critical theory buzzwords still flow fluently. In 1993, I was a student of English literature, particularly taken with critical theory, and it shows. It also explains why House made its mark on me, or should I say, it accounts for the continuing inscription of the Zeitgeist’s discourse onto the palimpsest of my (en)cultur(at)ed Weltanschauung. Still, it’s easy to sneer.

From Zeitgeist to Geistzeit. It was Halloween when I first noticed the moulding on this exterior wall of a basement in Dublin. Perhaps it was something to do with the way the drapes hang like a white-sheet ghost that drew my attention. The moribund plant container and the odd negative jail-cell bars on the frosted glass certainly played a role too. But I think it goes deeper than just association of ideas. Things that are inside-out can be disturbingly uncanny because they give solid form to what is not normally solid. That is not to say that inside-out buildings are always uncanny – the exposed entrails of the Centre Georges Pompidou or of the Lloyds Building are merely interesting. But when a building or its surfaces bear the trace of something now missing, as in House, or when concrete bears the mark of the piece of wood that contained it (example here), we are faced with some kind of ghostly remnant (if this sounds like Derrida, it is because it occurs to me that his Specters of Marx also dates from 1993).

On a cold winter’s day in Paris, when you notice the marks where, months before, the kickstands of parked motorbikes have sunk into the softened tar, the ghostly heat of that summer’s day brushes your cheek.

In Derry, are these micro-sculptures meant to be emerging from beneath the pavement, or have they fallen from above? Either way, they are imprints of the missing oak wood – Derry comes from ‘Doire’, which means oak wood – that once occupied this spot. The name of the city is contested – officially it is Londonderry, the colonial name, but the great majority of its residents call it simply Derry. The micro-sculptures are evidence that the ghost of the original wood has not forgotten, and will not forget, that this is an undead doire. It’s a good example of how the nationalist population of that city have won the cultural war, spending UK-exchequer money on deconstruction-influenced sculpture that proclaims the passing nature of the centuries-long British occupation.

The grisly curtains in Dublin make me wonder, with a quickening of my pulse, if the original curtains are still in there, undead and entombed inside the plaster? Whiteread’s scultpure always did have something of the sarcophagus about it, as if some ghastly entombment had happened there. Years after House was demolished, I lived in London and for a long while passed the spot regularly without knowing what had stood there. What I always thought of as I passed that spot was how 200 people were made homeless and 6 were killed there in 1944 by the first successful German V-1 ‘flying bomb’. There’s no trace of that.

(The Pretense of Craft in Contemporary Construction, Part 1)

Decosterd and Rahm have a great reference to Nietzsche and his concept of a phsyiological art as part of the introduction to their book Physiological Architecture. Unfortunately, I don’t remember exactly what it is except that it was really hard to read (white print on white paper) and awesome, but trying to be more a blogger than an online magazine writer, I’m too lazy to look it up. Maybe you can look it up. Something about how an aesthetic experience can have a physiological effect on people. So perhaps for the only time in history, Decosterd and Rahm and Marc Kocher (Palais Kolorectalbelle, and the building below, etc.)  in one text. Carpe dieminis, or whatever.

I don’t want to end up a bitter man all alone, walking around with the eccentric shuffle of an orthodox Jew, whose bent frame and flapping arms serve the sole purpose of taxiing his brain from A to B, lamenting the decline of a once exciting city full of architectural potential. So I check my initial reaction, try an open mind. Yeah, maybe this is not so bad, he’s trying to loosen the strict Prussian window bands of Gründerzeit urban blocks. I want to have positive reactions to Berlin’s new buildings one is often too quick to bash.  But I can no longer ignore the feeling of nausea spreading to my limbs from my gut, and I know this wobbly building is doing it to me. I mean, if this is origami (the architect’s project inspiration according to his website), then this pile of orange polyester construction netting might as well be Macramé. If I were mean, I might speculate that the origami spiel conveniently masks the fact that the developer one day value engineered any Italianate and expensive to build curves away with the highest arc segmentation setting in FunCad when the financial crisis hit. I want to sneeze, or cry, or puke, just flush it out, this physiological effect of an architecture that my entire aesthetic apparatus wants to reject and eject and purge.

I have to check myself. I must be getting carried away, here. But it’s there, undeniably, a visceral reaction, a feeling of having ingested something bad with my eyes, a dead oyster, some shady street food, too much cake, the fumes of a burning tire.

By God, what are these drops on the underside of the window’s top molding? (excuse the phoney pics, but if you look closely) Are they a 21^st century aberration of Guttae?  Towards the window’s bottom, the unfinished application of acrylic render reveals blocks of extruded polystyrene. You’ve got to be kidding. If I remember correctly, guttae are stylistic vestiges of a time when Greek temples were still built of wood thousands of years ago. Guttae originally were wooden nails that fixed the timber roof to the wooden architrave. It’s amazing that this little, millennia-old tectonic detail that pertains to craft, to things made by skilled hands as an expression of an architecture of assembly, has found its way onto a building made of goo, poured, spackled and sprayed together of concrete and polymers, and entirely not assembled, let alone by craft.

How did it all get so muddled? The Greeks started it, I guess, emulating wooden nails in stone, but that’s ok, they did it for tradition, and I assume they knew that they once were wood. Not sure what happened in between then and now. But here we have it, a renaissance of the wooden nail, on thermoplastic buildings, a haphazard stylistic reference to something whose meaning is entirely lost, the architectural equivalent of an Arschfax (see below), Chinese characters haphazardly applied on someone’s lower back for looks. Guttae (Greek drops) articulated as droops seems a lot more appropriate for an architecture of pouring. Make them gooey drops next time, please, make me chuckle, a more pleaseant physiological reaction to architecture.

Arschfax (German ass facsimile,  often meaningless motifs applied as tattoo to someone’s lower back)

image courtesy: http://www.photofunblog.com/fashion/free-lower-back-tattoo-designs-for-women-2011-12/attachment/kanji-and-flower-free-lower-back-tattoo-collection/

A pet relationship is essentially about belonging. Pets are also faithful derivatives. The signage on the imbiss is a recognizable graphic iteration of the GSW’s famed meat-pixeled rose-pixeled windows hovering above it. It is a tiny copy, a pocket version of a great novel, “paperback” architecture.

Structurally it is a prop, a simple decorated shed. And, as such, a billboard of sorts, albeit one that does not advertise currywurst. No loud drawings depicting smiling sausages attempting to eat their own kind, no giant 3-D wurst toothpicked onto the roof. While the GSW sells you insurance, this imbiss sells you the GSW. In place of mystery pork, it flogs architecture. This shack has staked out an optimal perspective for viewing the building, and invites you to look up, admire, and while you’re there, enjoy a currywurst. Maybe a coffee.

Pets say a lot about their owners. One can evaluate the merits of the building by investigating its tiny copy. And, standing there, I have to ask myself what makes the GSW so special. Special enough that a currywurst seller invokes it to sell sausages.

It is in fact a structurally gymnastic building. The original rectilinear tower from the 1950s not only still stands, but acts as a sort of stiffening spine for the wing-shaped addition. The wing is essentially tied back to the tower, and each junction between platform and wing and tower is beautifully, cleanly detailed. Shadows obediently follow built lines, the framing is delicate but not fragile.

As with many SH buildings, a colourful facade smiles upon the city, and it is perhaps this gesture that Berliners, as well as the little imbiss, rarely see are drawn to. Within the complexities of built endeavors: contracts, codes, budgets, intricate air management systems, it is the procurement of a soft device: the fabric window shade that garners the GSW’s celebrity in Berlin. Amongst an infinite set of built parts, the window shades, in ca. 8-10 colors, become the building’s most obvious architectural gesture.

A passive heat gain strategy is responsible for the positioning of the massive glazed elevation, and this, as the building’s driving design principle, made it a winner with the clients, for sure.

But for the rest of us, it has more to do with its west-facing facade and the sun. Standing on Rudi-Dutschke-Strasse at Friedrichstrasse at various times of the day, you will encounter constant references to the cosmos. At noon, the facade is lit up in sunset oranges, reds and pinks, shades drawn against the sun, and later, in the evening light, shades open, the glazing reflects the real thing. Perhaps it is the quiet, intuitive performances of buildings that really communicate with us – on a frequency below glass domes, gurkens and pregnant oysters.

The first time I came across the imbiss was in March 2010, at which point it was blooming with GSW pride: red-orange pixel window ornament on 3 sides. It has since been “modernised”, namely in its reduction of colourful pixel-rectangles to one applied sticker on a newly painted cream metal box. Yet, in the end the little imbiss remains loyal to its owner, keeping the last panel, the last semblance of its pet relationship, on its west-facing facade.

How do you like your absurdity?

O.M.’s article was based on the assumption that Berlin had intended to build some kind of Seattle public library rip-off (shown on the façade), but was too strapped for cash and ended up defaulting to a scaffold box with some decorative tarpaulin wrapped around it. His sardonic appeal to the reader was, however, about to bite him on the ass because the true absurdity of the situation was a magnitude or two greater than could be accomodated by his dualistic fluff/gravy continuum.

In my comment response to his article, I pointed out that the scaffold tarpaulin box was not a viewing platform for the building site of the future reconstruction of the Berlin City Palace (aka Humboldt Forum) – depicted on the side of the scaffold tarpaulin box – but a viewing platform for the building site of the future viewing platform for the future reconstruction of the City Palace depicted on the front of the scaffold tarpaulin box.

I’ll give you a second or two to digest that last bit before proceeding. In the mean time, here’s a picture of a cute lamb, soothingly bereft of absurdity.

A soothing lamb, somewhere in northern England

On the roof

About a week or so after O.M.’s article appeared, I visited the scaffold shortly before sundown. I was forced to pass through a turnstile which only opened once I’d grudgingly poked a 50 cent donation into its slot, thereby funding a gram or two of nostalgic Prussian misery. The ground-floor exhibition had closed shop for the day, so I was pretty much forced to ascend the scaffold to the roof, which inevitably is what a viewing platform is all about.

On the roof a map of Alexander von Humboldt’s Latin America expedition of 1799–1804 had been reproduced, using – incidently – source material taken straight from Wikipedia, and left uncredited in contradiction to the licence under which it was published. Not very scientific, and a saddening detail when one considers that the Berlin City Palace’s very purpose, as proposed by the Humboldt Forum project, is to unite the natural and social sciences under one roof. Citation needed indeed.

The view, of course, was spectacular. Ignoring the Berlin Cathedral or Alexanderplatz for a moment, and ignoring the picture-postcard sunset behind me, I was taken aback by the vast grassy plain below me. I’ve mentioned this inner-city mega-lawn before, but from up here it’s size was particularly striking. The only striking thing about the view of the Humboldt Box building site, was the staggaring number of supporting beams being used to prop up the slowly setting concrete superstructure.

On the roof, for your orientation: Humboldt’s voyage of 1799-1804

View of viewing tower construction site, from viewing tower’s viewing tower

Decending the scaffold

But, heck! What am I thinking? Here’s me relishing the absurd prospect of a viewing platform purpose built to assist in the viewing of the construction of a second viewing platform, completely forgetting that we live in post-interpretative times and that things are actually dead simple if you just relax and shut down most of your cerebral cortex. A quick check of the Humboldt Forum’s news ticker is relieving and revealing:

“[4.12.09] Humboldt-Box: Building work on the erection of the Humboldt-Box can be observed from an observation platform”.

Fantastic! No more explanation needed than those two clerical lines of reine Information, as beautifully unadorned as any 19th century telegraph message.

And all I needed to do was pay attention to the signs, of which there were plenty. All pointing to the exit – no less – to the outside, back to the street where a house-high rendering of the Palace, accompanied by a web address served to remind the onlooker that the edifice wasn’t commissioned by a romantic, philanthropic contractor, but by a company called Megaposter.

You bring the meat, we’ll make the vegetables

In February 2007 I coined the rather clumsy term “advertecture” to describe the increasingly common sight of buildings being engulfed by advertising to help fund their rennovation or repair. It was a crass but logical step up from regular billboards applied to regular buildings, and has helped the city save a big pile of money on several occasions. Megaposter arguably started the trend in 2000 by providing the wherewithal for Deutsche Telekom to swamp the Brandenburg Gate in trompe l’oeil DSL ads. Six years later they did the same for the lesser known Charlottenburger Gate, a neo-Baroque vanity project from 1909, which was falling into disrepair and in urgent need of a 3.500 sq meter Samsung advert.

The Humboldt Box though represents a full transformation from applied advertising to advertising as architecture. The information center, roof-top bar and faintly pompous sounding “agora”, as they’re calling the ground floor, are therefore only a fragment of the building’s real purpose: selling bikinis.

It’s the bikinis, stupid.

The imminent completion of the Humboldt Box couldn’t have come at a better time, or a worse one, depending on your point of view. This May, the Senate Department for Urban Development launched a set of guidelines which aim to improve lighting in the city, and also curb the spread of mega-verts. An outright ban a la São Paulo isn’t on the cards, and I wouldn’t exactly want it to be. Instead, the guidelines are based on an intricate study in which 20 different spatial and building types have been defined, and their sensitivity to 15 common forms of advertising have been gauged with a system of four colours ranging from red to green. A kind of traffic-light of advertising horrors, if you will. On a map published by the Senate, the area around the Humboldt Box has been labeled with an ominous orangy-yellow dot, meaning “sensitive”, on account of the historic ensemble of buildings surrounding it. That the advertising here is part of the same web of private and state interests surrounding the rebuilding of the Palace surely won’t have escaped the Senate. And making the situation rather more sticky for Megaposter will be last June’s decision to postpone the Palace’s construction for another three years.

Should the Palace never be built, then Humboldt’s gift to the city might just be some kind of protracted Champagne reception, hosted on the roof of a contemporary ruin, not yet paid for but too expensive to demolish, where the party is caught in an atmospheric limbo somewhere between birthday and funeral, and the drinks are constantly threatening to run out, but somehow never quite do.

The rusty nail

We approached Broadcasting Place from the south, crossing over the trench of the A58 via a broad footbridge which boasted some epic puddles the like of which I haven’t seen for years: really huge expanses of water showing signs of developing their own weather systems. It was like crossing the moat of a castle, where, due to some epic bureaucratic balls-up, water had been allowed to flow through the point of entry, rather than in a defensive channel.

Our trajectory is important to note, since it afforded us with a head on view of the building’s iconographic twenty-three floor tower, which has been skewed into five jutting sections. As with the rest of the development, it is coated from top to bottom with pre-rusted Cor-Ten steel panels, which have turned a rich reddish ocre since their installation.

Accelerated decrepitude (foreground); decremental accoutrements (background)

Allow me to digress: a while back I was listening to a BBC radio program, the topic of which I’ve meanwhile completely forgotton, but a detail has stuck in my mind and is vaguely relevant here. It concerned the role that oxygen plays in the ageing process, in particular the involvment of reactive free-radicals in cell degeneration. The interviewee underlined the paradox that living organisms are reliant upon oxygen to live, but that ageing is nothing more than a symptom of long-term oxygen poisoning.

The architects, Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios, explain that the use of pre-rusted panels was inspired by the surrounding geography, and that the patterning of the windows were concevied as a cascading waterfall. But I’m beginning also to see some kind of sweeping economic analogy alluding to the corrosion of Northern England’s industrial base, and its replacement by the financial service sector. Leeds’ canal-side millhouses aren’t rusting anymore, they’ve been converted into luxury lofts for a town facing £15 million of budget cuts. Meanwhile rust has been turned into a medium for housing students across the road from the pastorially named concrete hulk that is Woodhouse Lane Car Park, which has been retro-fitted with nets to catch would-be suicide candidates.

Woodhouse Lane Car Park: where the rustic meets the rusty

There’s a deep sense here of something earthy and primitive. The whole site makes me want to strap on some headphones and listen to Sun O))). A big rusty nail poking out of the ground, adjacscent to a highway dug deep into the ground like a gash in the skin. Associated with tetanus, rusty nails are not the cause of the disease, but their jagged surfaces make a great home for the Clostridium tetani bacteria which do. And the taught rigidity of Broadcasting Place, caught mid-spasm, wrapping itself around Blenheim Baptist Church and the Old Broadcasting House, resembles the painful contortions of a tetanus sufferer.

Opisthotonus in a patient suffering from tetanus. Charles Bell, 1809 [Source]

But in the midst of all this very worthy, unabashed angularity, I’m kind of tickled to find traces of the humdrum in some of the detailing. A canopy opening out onto the central courtyard looks tawdry: like a remnant from late 1980s municipal leisure pool architecture.

However, the emergency lighting in the courtyard, has a plasticky, off-the-shelf cheapness that I kind of dig in the context of this post-industrial hurt-zone. It’s an honest bit of pragmatism that pulls the rest of the ensemble into line: as though reassuring the onlooker that there’s nothing particularly special going on here: just a genuinely good piece of architecture going about its job, its posturing nothing more than well-dressed efficiency.

In 2010, the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat voted Broadcasting Place as its Best Tall Building Overall in its annual awards program, beating the Burj Khalifa in its own innaugeration year.

Your Slab contributor, cognizant of the fast-approaching quarter finals of the Champions League, and always conscious of the many Tottenham Hotspur fans out there among the readership, considers it time to look at things on aggregate. When it comes to buildings, aggregate is the term for any fine material that is used to bulk up the volume of a composite, such as concrete. In this sample, taken from the front of an art gallery on Rue Bonaparte in Paris, the shards of black and white are the aggregate.

Generally, I would associate such large-scale use of aggregate with certain institutional buildings of the 1960s and 1970s, such as this industrial school, now an art college, in Dublin.

The suburban slouch of this low-slung staircase, where real estate is not at a premium, contrasts with the verticality of the next staircase, from a Dublin city-centre hospital refit of the same era.

The material itself is of course not made for close inspection. Its effect is intended to be aggregate, you might say. But close inspection reveals a scattery world of disorder and chance, where the distribution of elements follows no pattern.

These samples provide good illustrations of how random arrangements appear to us. A truly random array of elements has a high chance of containing clusters of the same element, and of what seem to be patterns or geometrical arrangements. Of course, by definition there is no arrangement in something that is random – it is merely our pattern-seeking tendency that sometimes finds arrangements within them. It is when clustering and incipient patterning are absent that we should suspect that a human hand has intervened and smoothed things out, ironically leaving a trace of itself in the very act of trying to do the opposite.

Last night I would have been supporting my colleagues Oliver and Dan at an archi-shindig in Mitte were it not for a rotten, seasonal cold. The shindig in question was a lecture evening entitled “Void and it Value in Art and Life”, which marked the end of the exhibtion “Archeology of Hole – Creating an Archive”, curated by Marlena Kudlicka and Claudia Kugler. It’s the latest in a line of speaking engagements Slab’s attended, the last being the presentation of The New Death Strip last month, and it probably wouldn’t have been entirely decent to turn up and just sneeze at people. So I stayed home and drooled on the sofa.

L40, by Roger Bundschuh. A taut anthracitic stack of stacked anthracitic tautness

Interestingly, last night’s event was held in L40. That’s not the name of some club or squat, but rather, the name of a new apartment building which went up on Rosa-Luxemburger Platz last year. I actually had the chance to tag along with a tour of the building with its architect Roger Bundschuh last year, a treat organised by Jim Hudson of Architecture in Berlin. We learnt some interesting things about the building that day: for example, that the entire structure rests on a layer of shock-absorbing, super-dense styrofoam blocks, which just sit on the foundations and aren’t actually ‘connected’ to them. The reason for this is the adjacent metro line and tram interchange: a source of metropolitain seismic activity. Seeing as the apartments will be sold to high-flying art collectors, and are designed more like the aristocratic long-galleries of yore, this probably makes good sense. The last thing you want, after stepping off the red-eye from the Art Basel Miami Beach, is to have your sleep robbed by the early morning M8 to Ahrensfelder rumbling by, throwing your Basquiat off the wall.

Hans Poelzig’s historical ensemble, and the Volksbühne theater. Reflected in the glass: a wretched turd from the 1990s across the road

So I missed my chance to see the place actually finished and semi-functional. When I was there, part of the charm lay in the fact that this unabashed piece of modern design – looking so alien in the surrounding Hans Poelzig ensemble – was still in the process of unpeeling itself from a nest of scaffolding, protective foils and the rough felt floor coverings of the painters. Still, the interior geometry couldn’t hide the fact that this was a hard-edged piece of white-cube living in the making.

Getting a grip on the Void

I haven’t caught up with my two colleagues yet to hear how the evening went, but our purpose there was to join the discussion about voids. Dan was planning on taking a surgical sledgehammer to the whole intellectual notion of the void by reminding the gathering that true voids don’t exist, and that they are a phenomena of perception governed by resolution. Oliver was going to approach the perceived emotional void in super-precise hi-tech architecture, and I was going to avoid the subject altogether (pun intended), by deviously skirting around the theme, and talking about the transformation and mediation of landscapes. All three angles were to be heavily informed by our field trip and resulting work on The New Death Strip.

Decorative boulders, awaiting tedious redistribution by landscape architects

One of my trips along the former Berlin Wall took me to the south-east of the city, where the district of Neukölln borders with the surrounding state of Brandenburg. It was here that I cycled into the middle of a landscaping project called ‘Am Dörferblick’, a park slated to open to the public in June 2011. It’s a part of the compensatory ecological measures being taken by the new Berlin Brandenburg International airport, currently under construction some kilometers to the south. The site was in wild disarray. Not a void, as such, but caught on this particular day in a state of suspended animation between two phases of being. There is a richness to the condition of incompletion which is unmatched by the finished artifact: a kind of taboo-aesthetic unarticulated in the design mainstream, and probably all the more seductive for its transience. This had once been the Death Strip, a militarised zone chemically stripped of vegetation, carpeted with sand and combed daily like some malignant Zen garden. Not a real void either, but an arcanely elaborate mechanism built to prevent trespassing.

The park experience, as experienced by non-people

The developer’s sign at Am Dörferblick was calling the project a “nature experience”, one of those dubious ad-land phrases which sound as though a crack team of Manhattan lawyers was on the creative team making sure that anything which sounds like a promise is sufficiently ambiguous not to stand up in court. I could just as easily call my breakfast a “breakfast experience”, and indeed I shall from now on, for my own private amusement. The sub-text though is easily deciphered: a nature experience is the experience of nature, but not neccesarily nature, which doesn’t need an experience to be exerienced. The “experience” is an imposed program, not quite a simulation, but close enough. Which is fine, because that’s what parks, historically, have always been about.

It just leaves to be noted though, amid all this vacuous phraseology (theirs, not mine), that the architect’s illustration of the future park includes human figures rendered as white silhouettes – little voids cut out of the landscape, implying life and activity, but still absent, not yet there.

Here we present the last of three installments of Oliver Miller’s rejected text intended for our upcoming print publication, The New Death Strip. To read the previous sections, and to find out more about this, our most exhaustive project to date, please read the preceding entries from January 8th and 15th, 2011. The New Death Strip is at the printer now and should be available both in hard copy and online by the end of the week.

-Ed.

The edifice was virtually dissolving before me as I became entranced in these spectral reflections, and looking back down at the rest of the campus’s landscaping and architecture it all appeared less solid than before.

The grass struck me as uncannily thick, vibrant and uniform in color and density, the brick cladding of the other buildings at the institute had the familiar look of the scanned texture map I’d noticed back on Brunnenstrasse. Preposterous fountains spurted upwards from greenish ponds that appeared unimaginably shallow.

Everything looked clean and new and in a certain sense no less reflective than the polished glass of the new building’s curtain walls. In a world of Photoshop effects, smoothing filters, color balancing and corrected saturation, it seems there’s an irresistable drive to create a world in the image of the image.

A there-but-not-there feeling overcame me, and I spent the next hour or so wandering more or less aimlessly around Hasso Plattner Institute. The pristine artificiality of the place, its sheer made-up-ness, had put me into a space of existential contemplation. I had quite simply ceased to feel like I was anywhere anymore.

People use the metaphor of a desert to describe a place -or a state- in which you feel empty or placeless, but my childhood in New Mexico gave me a sense for the richness of life to be found there. At HPI I felt a truer form of emptiness, and now I wonder why I became so transfixed by the polished reflections of the new learning and research center. They seemed to have a cathartic effect, somehow canceling the irritation I’d felt from sustained exposure to high levels of bogusness traversing the vicissitudes of The New Death Strip . To just look away entirely, straight into the sky or towards the rail line or a group of trees outside the campus’s border, seemed like the denial of something. But by gazing into the reflections I could somehow look at the architecture without flinching. I found a way to suspend judgment on an architecture that I’d initially found to be plainly deterrent, and the act seemed to have implications for the rest of my survey in general. The NDS can be seen as a panoply of disassociated visions, each one highly specific in the minds of those who were responsible for turning them into something more real. Because it exists in a space lacking cultural legacy, anything seems possible on the NDS. But for whatever reason, whether economic, sociological, historic or psychological, there’s not much along the line of the old Wall that’s exuberant or experimental. It may just be down to the fact that it’s much easier to have a vision than to be visionary. The entire ensemble at HPI, and along the New Death Strip as a whole, is a mirage. It is the production of so many irregular conditions that float within a cultural vacuum, a cross section of refracted and disassociated allusions to the culture of its makers. Only by accident, it seems, has something taken seed there that can be seen to be legitimately either conservative or radical.

After the time spent at HPI the mirage feeling kept recurring. Following a much needed bucolic romp along the Stichkanal we came upon Europarc Dreilinden, a towering island of commercial real estate speculation built upon the former site of the largest border crossing between the old East and West, the place that was formerly Checkpoint Charlie’s lesser-known big brother, Bravo. Navigating our racing bikes over the bumpy terrain of the footpaths to its north, the back end of the some multinational HQ rose from the sandy forest like a volcano of capital from Brandenburg’s economic wastelands. It was totally covered in glass curtain walls, some shuttered a la HPI, and I immediately began trancing out on more of those puffy clouds being mirrored back to me. For a moment I looked deeper, behind the reflections, and was able to identify the building’s occupant without the need for any signage or cute logos.

The walls of the hallways had been color coded floor for floor in Ebay’s signature palette of red, blue, yellow and lime green. Beyond, two more office blocks gently imposed themselves upon the scene. The first was clad with polished black glass, the second in perfectly planed limestone tiling. If HPI were a talented pup showing industry and promise as it explores the new surroundings of its Prussian socio-cultural landscape, Europarc would be a hyperreal alpha male wolf, lurking silently but ready to pounce. The expanses of smooth façades drew my eye from one consummately ludicrous high rise to the next, until the biotope landscaping feature at the center of it all tempted me to supplant reveries born of glass and steel with the picturesque vision of their own reflections in the watery stillness of an artificial wetlands preserve. To the south, beyond the reeds and willows of the landscape feature, I saw the backwards letters of the two great “EUROPARC.de” billboards. They stood side by side above naturalistic ground cover, like twinned sentinels protecting this corporate fantasy from the forbidding threat of the A115 highway beyond.

I turned back and after a little while happened upon a cozy loop road doing its best to link up the motley cast of architectural characters that make up Europarc Dreilinden, each one the fragment of a collective dream that offers no rest. Amongst the such neighbors as the Porsche dealer, Ebay+Paypal and the Ibis hotel there stood a pristine, new, and un-demarcated building. Like the learning and research center at HPI, it was so fresh that it hadn’t been finished yet. Refuse from its construction littered the edges of a freshly asphalted parking lot, and the place felt calm as I continued to document the paths of clouds reflected in the structure’s expanses of glass.

Only a lone a window cleaner interrupted my meditations as he carefully wiped their panes clean; the mirage, I then understood, has to be diligently maintained.

The following is the second of three installments of Oliver Miller’s rejected text intended for our upcoming print publication, The New Death Strip. To read the first section of the text, and to find out more about this, our most exhaustive project to date, please read the preceding entry from January 8th, 2011. The New Death Strip is at the printer now and should be available both in hard copy and online by the end of the week.

-Ed.

Sitting on a pillow of newly laid sod, the brand new learning center at HPI is basically an asymmetrically curved block of plate glass window walls built around a steel frame, sheathed in metal shutters that can be opened or closed according to the needs and desires of its individual users and abusers.

Behind them I can imagine never-ending blinds-down project sessions glued to a Setu task chair, eyes glazed wide open before a 22” flat screen display, or the spontaneous expression of repressed desires by design team colleagues who have been engaging in furtive eye play for weeks on end. The finely ribbed pattern of the aluminum slats in their ‘down’ position was perhaps designed to shield glaring light from the outside, though it seems to me it would work just as well to confine an inner world, so earnest in its virtuality and secretiveness, to demarcate an existence held within strict boundaries.

But that is merely my own projections of the building’s inner life, and it was, needless to say, impossible for me to actually get in. This was due not simply to the fact that the doors were locked, but also because a reception desk and bored security guard were already in place well in advance of what I assumed would be an extravagant grand opening within the next few days. So all my more concrete impressions needed to be garnered from the outside, and from here the structure appeared remarkably smooth, due mostly to the exquisite flushness with which the outside surfaces has been rendered – a quality that’s only possible through the specification of the most high-end building systems.

The dimensions between the planes of the window walls, the frames holding the metal shutters, and the panels of glass or limestone fascia had been kept to an absolute minimum. All of the building’s details, if not its larger formal gestures, exude the well-mannered professionalism you would expect from someone with the pedigree of its architect, the late ex-Foster project leader Mark Braun. The results are in keeping with the long tradition of Modernist construction since the beginning of the last century. Nothing very new but something very now, a quality that I’d already discerned to be quintessential of the New Death Strip.

All of these ideas, impressions and fantasies coalesced into an inner vision of what it was all about, this single structure, this vapid corporate campus cum vocational college, this whole trip through a cultural wilderness we’d embarked upon. It was the ‘mirage’ metaphor specifically embodied in the stripes of glass fastened to the façade at the edge of the floor plates, between the upper and lower edges of the window walls. It’s these panels that articulate the muteness of the building specifically and the NDS in general. Serving absolutely no functional purpose whatsoever, they are familiar looking anti-ornaments intended on the one hand to aid the eye in reading the building’s form as unified and impenetrable, further flushifying the surface, and on the other to symbolically represent transparency. But the material’s capacity to transmit light and color; qualities that were so celebrated by those pioneers in forming the ancestral language from which this building’s vocabulary originates, e.g. Bruno Taut or Peter Behrens, not to mention their successors, is here sold short for another attribute with which glass is also identified, though not quite so highly revered: its reflectivity.

Having circled the building I gazed up at its southern façade, which directly faces a rail line and the asphalt corridor that had previously served the island enclave of the West embedded within the East: the ‘village’ (suburban community) of Berlin-Steinstücken. I was dazzled by glare from the summer sun being reflected not off one of the window walls, but from the glass fascia things. The aluminum shutters appeared to float in space and the material quality of the building began to evaporate. I was taken aback by the romantic quality of something that was paradoxically so restrained-verging-on-stone-cold in its planning and execution.

But the sun can always dazzle, and the play of clouds on this summer day was particularly lively: nice low altitude cotton-candy-cumuli morphing at the edge of light beams pouring down from the heavens. I found myself entranced by their movements, reflected first in the narrow strips of ornamental glazing, and then, further along the building’s façade, in the broader expanses of glass where the shutters had been left up.

To be continued…

In this excerpt from a rejected text intended for Slab’s first print publication, Oliver Miller gives us a taste of our soon to be published opus magnum, The New Death Strip. In it we investigate the contemporary state of a vast non-location, the old militarized zone that used to encircle West Berlin along with its famous wall. That border zone was dubbed by the Germans “der Todestreifen”. It was called the “death strip” because it was a place to die, and the New Death Strip is kind of a place to die, too, or if nothing else to experience the uncanny shallowness of contemporary building culture.

The New Death Strip will be published in the next couple of weeks by Arno Brandlhuber and Silvan Linden / a42.org / AdbK Nürnberg and will be available both at fine booksellers as well as in pdf form via www.a42.org . Just click on Publikationen > Schriftenreihe “Disko” in order to access a whole range of downloadable journals free of charge, they come highly recommended by the crew here at Slab.
-Ed.

The latest addition to the campus of the Hasso Plattner Institute is a glaringly coherent chunk of Germanic design professionalism plopped onto the far western edge of Potsdam-Babelsberg. Needless to say, I approached the complex of buildings where this learning and research center is sited without any previous knowledge of what I was about to get into, and from the first moment I set foot on its immaculate terrain I was taken aback by what I found. My colleague Daniel had in fact heard of HPI, which is a privately funded and independently administered academy kind-of belonging to the University of Potsdam, though he, too, was surprised to find it along the path of our survey of the NDS. Although it sits at the edge of the university’s western campus, HPI sports its own logo and nowhere on its grounds or website does that of its mother institution appear. HPI is named after its sole benefactor, who is one of the founding partners of SAP and consequently one of the richest men in Germany. According to information I found using Google, a popular search engine, the institute is supposed to be his philanthropic contribution to the greater good. It is purportedly a laboratory where ideas for the future, as well as their producers, are grown.

Although it’s by no means an extraordinary case, I find it curious to have named this philanthropic project after its benefactor. It just seems to taint the presumed selflessness of the altruistic act. Stranger still is that the main donor is also at the head of a multi-national corporation that without any doubt whatsoever directly benefits from the production not only of ideas at HPI, but also of IT “designers” who who are eminently hirable upon graduation. Further compounding this contradiction is the fact that the institute’s persistently stated ideals center themselves around the concept of teamwork and the denial of the author as a guiding force in design. This approach was pioneered, among other places, at the “d.school” of Stanford University, which is an institute whose main benefactor is, as it turns out, also Mr. Plattner. Its from there that HPI has borrowed not only its guiding principles of teamwork and the denial of authorship, but also the subtitle “School for Design Thinking” -a moniker it has self-consciously not bothered to translate into German.

The d.school, aka The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University, follows the American precedent of branding buildings, libraries or institutions with the names of their benefactors. So if we can just forget for a moment all the mumbo jumbo about collective intelligence it makes perfect sense, I guess, to stop subordinating the ego and start heroicizing the individual by continuing to name institutions after Mr. Plattner. The fact that this even seems weird within HPI’s local context is indicative of inherited German societal norms, within which the notion of gloating in one’s own name is not (yet) quite so accepted as in the US -and of how it’s possible for these norms to be contradicted on the NDS. This is a cultural as well as a physical tabula rasa, a forlorn non-location where there’s too much to forget, and not enough to remember, to prevent you from doing whatever the fuck you want to.

It was upon first seeing this branded structure that an overarching leitmotiv for my odyssey across the desolate plane of the NDS’s architectural no man’s land first made itself apparent. Sitting under a tree on the manicured grass of HPI’s parkscape I sketched a first draft of the above diagram, which I was to later refine back home on my computer. It’s a simple adaptation of the diagram used to explain inferior mirages. Like a prism through which a beam of light is refracted and dispersed, so it was that I here began to see a breaking down of the hitherto unrelenting bluntness of our entire project’s subject matter. Looking back, I suppose any single example of the contemporary architecture I was to encounter along the way could have provoked a similar reaction. It’s a matter of timing, and upon reaching HPI, the effective apogee of our trajectory around the old West Berlin, I was starting to feel both overloaded and exhausted. I had sweated the commercial developments in Falkensee and Glienicke, travelled the long stretches of terrain vague running from Stolpe to Potsdam, and witnessed everything from the daftness of big box car part stores to the insensitive siting of newly-minted dream homes constructed of perfectly formed bricks, serially produced window systems and blue ceramic roof tiles. My encounter with the building seems to have come at the critical moment where a deluge of perceptions and ideas needed to be more definitively made sense of.

To be continued…