What better way to begin a new year than with a fresh reminder from Slab Magazine that the “Berliner Republik” is crumbling! Yes! It is falling apart at the seams!

Cast your mind back to April 2011 (or open another tab, if you wish), and you might recall a similar case in this series, where the anchoring pins of a sandstone panel had become painfully visible. I claimed that the phenomena was not uncommon, so feel duty-bound to reveal another example of façade-failure, this time affecting the generically named “Bürohaus Neue Grünstraße 22”.

Whilst listed in the Senate Department’s database of post-1990 architecture (here), the office building seems to have been disowned by its architects: “no data available”. Even the client is anonymous, and the Senate has no record of when building work begun or was completed. It is a textbook example of the “Planwerk Innenstadt” building typology: six stone-clad floors of misery punctured by a monotonous cooky-cutter grid of windows.

Ah yes. Stone cladding. It’s not as though Berlin isn’t short of a good example: Emil Fahrenkamp’s Shell-Haus of 1932, is masterful proof that the technique isn’t evil per se. But Hans Stimmann’s berkish insistence that the future of Berlin should be a freeze-dried Imperial Era travesty sealed stone cladding’s fate as a sort of cheap, heavy, foundation cream. It was slathered on by mediocre architects, and probably greeted by investors keen on quick ROI with little Senate-side friction.

A quick fix, then, for battered Berlin. And repair will be the reigning paradigm for decades to come when dealing with Stimmann’s crumbling inheritance, as these pictures show. One assumes that those yellowed globules are the coagulated residuum from the flubbed patch-job to the crack on the right. Maybe the gaps between panels (don’t tell me these gaping crevices are expansion joints) are just being used to store putty for the next round of repairs.

→ Modern Façades Today, Now

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.

On the northern edge of Potsdamer Platz, the line of cobble stones marking the course of the former Berlin Wall thrusts under the stoney skirt of Hans Kollhoff and Helga Timmermann’s office building ‘P5’. A crack has appeared. Are cheap materials to blame, or are cosmic forces at play?

Recent studies show that infrasonic tremors, resonating just beyond human perception at around 17 Hz, emanate naturally from the line and are focused by the convergence of vertical and horizontal planes. Accumulated psychogeographic vibrations, combined with winter frosts, have severed the façade element, and hair-width fissures penetrate deep into the steel reinforced superstructure.

Furthermore, staff and visitors of the ground-floor restuarant commonly report feelings of anxiety, queasiness and even sorrow after prolonged exposure to the location. Some are even afflicted by mild, temporary disturbances of their peripheral vision: blurrings, grey blobs and hatchings just beyond the field of view.

The guardian spirit of Potsdamer Platz, a latter-day Genius Loci with her cornucopia of casino, fast-food franchise and VIP shuttle service is running out of patience. Without regular sacrifices made at the temple alter, the rumblings are set to increase their amplitude. Profound structural failure followed by collapse are inevitable.

This has to be the architectural equivalent of a split fingernail. And if that’s the case then the whole of Berlin could do with a damned good manicure because this kind of thing can be seen city-wide. Gah! It makes my nostrils curl up at the edges just looking at it.

The dinked column in question is part of a structure aping the peristyle of Roman architecture and belongs to a building with the sphincter-clenchingly horrid name of “SpreePalais”, meaning that it’s a palace on the river Spree. Geographically speaking, the name is not in dispute, but a palace? Getouttahere. Historically, the peristyle surrounded a lush courtyard with a fountain, but at SpreePalais, architects Nägele, Hofmann, Tiedemann & Partner have cleverly used it to enclose a draughty sandstone quarry where exiled office workers are required to smoke.

You wouldn’t believe how hard it was for me to take this picture, a lady barged in front of me as I was pulling my camera out, ordering me to step aside because she was late to her yoga class at Fitness Company in Schönhauser Arkaden and needed to lock her bike up right there and at that instant. Then it occured to me how this panel of glass facia had probably gotten busted in the first place, so I had to both curse and thank her for her idiocy. After a frustrated, slightly violent and futile attempt to wrestle her supermarket brand bike from the steel pole it was U-locked to, I came to my senses and just laid it on the ground so I could get on with my business.

On the evidence of the sign pictured here, the control of chewing gum seems to be a pressing concern, too. Discarded chewing gum on the ground may be undesirable, but it seems that the drive to avoid it in Kingston has lost sight of the fact that used chewing gum is possibly even more disgusting when displayed at eye level. The sober tones of alcohol control are replaced here with jaunty, children’s-TV humour. This is social control achieved with the carrot, not the stick. It is friendly, light-hearted, playful, just like the celebrity culture it exploits. The waterfront is saved from disfigurement, but not these women’s faces. It is fine to disfigure them. Nothing like a little symbolic sexual violence to keep the place looking neat. Nothing like smearing famously assertive women with ejaculation residue in order to keep Britain tidy.

Thanks to esteemed colleague Mr Buhr, who kicks off this new SLAB Collection with the above photo he recently submitted. This series will probe the challenging aesthetic dimension of damage in modern façade design, and in doing so will debunk the authority of the surface in contemporary architecture. It will also be good for a whole bunch of laughs.

Let’s go at this one layer for layer. First there’s the smeggy, cream-cheese surface treatment; the exterior equivalent of anaglypta wallpaper and just as soul destroying. Below this a chalky crust of hardened powder has been adhered to a flimsy aluminium mesh, underneath which everything becomes rather obscene looking. I should imagine that the mud-encrusted anus of a Merino sheep is not dissimilar in appearence.

Judging by the subtle dent in the blue metal surface, this is probably a door frame which has been rear-ended by some motor vehicle or other. The resulting scar is a vulgar reminder of what is keeping modern homo-sapiens safe from the elements, and poses the quesiton of whether or not we are happy for our most visible of art forms to appear as if it has been congealed rather than composed.

Was it thermal expansion by sunlight?  On the east, a clustering of events along the left edge seemed to confirm this. Thermal differentials of materials – cooled by night, then heated by the morning sun – were perhaps here the highest. The southern surface showed a much more uniform distribution of incidents, with a more gradual increase in surface temperatures before exposure to the sun. Inward surfaces without direct solar exposure displayed no incidents.

The observed increase in events at human height between the aluminum profiles is attributed to the frequent posting and removal of bills.

There’s so much Berlin crammed into this scene. For those not well aquainted with the city, let’s go through the picture point for point, and then not draw any conclusions.

1) The burnt bin: a recurring motif in the city. The bin is a great target for the hobby arsonist. They produce tonnes of thick black smoke, and a whole neighborhood can stink like hell for days afterwards. Recently though, Porsche Cayennes and VW Tiguans have become the objet du jour for a new breed of semi-professional arsonist, who reason that torching cars is a legitimate political act which will help bring back low rents to gentrified neighborhoods.
2) If the bin is pushed against the wall of a freshly rennovated building before ignition, it’s possible to melt away the polystyrene foam cladding and leave a crust of plaster dangling in front of a narrow cavity. Old brickwork is exposed, and a temporary canvas for street artists is revealed.
3) The daubed number 6 and the yellow smiley are the work of graffiti artist ! 6-_-.4rtist.com#-_-. Rumor has it, that ! 6-_-.4rtist.com#-_- is a friendly 46 year old with a robust collection of 500 vandalism charges.

Sometimes though, the whole city seems like a giant Zwischennutzung. The 18.000 square meter recreational lawn which has replaced the Palast der Republic is a case in point:

Berlin: a bustling lawn metropolis of 3 million people

The adage about life imitating art carries little weight in Berlin where there is often no clear boundry between the two. As structural interventions go, there is little aesthetic difference between the wooden gangways in the lawn ‘project’ shown above, and the improvisational ‘necessity’ of shielding pedestrians from the falling plaster of an unrennovated building, as shown below. The only real difference is in their formal reception.

Sturdy measures taken in the name of art, health and safety

Both phenomena are temporary. They are things which get done before Something Else happens. But they open up an exciting grey zone, where artistic appraisal may be applied to utilitarian ventures. If someone had said to me that the debris catcher currently being built on Gormannstraße was a feeding station for giraffes, and therefore ‘an artistic intervention in public space’, then this would have been equally plausible.