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.

Layering programs, the old fashioned way

This spontaneous intervention lends some much-needed radness to what can otherwise be seen as classically Remorrhoidian architecture; its scrappiness defies the still-reigned in aestheticizing that OMA -and its legacy of wunderkinder- have as yet appeared reluctant to loosen their stranglehold upon.

A more elaborate proposal, requiring special ordinances for the temporary use of pavement customarily used for the parking of automobiles.

A festive variation, found at a popular purveyor of Indian cuisine.

A more aggressive approach, fashioned with the assistance of a professional scaffolding contractor.

Message Mixer XXL

So I guess this is the cultural resonance of OMA’s Seattle Public Library. For anyone wishing something that avant would ever get built at a similar scale in the heart of poor, uncultivated Berlin, I mean by poor rich, uncultivated Federal Rupublic of Germany, well, I’m sorry to break it to you, not any time soon. Although the Humboldt Forum is a project being driven at the federal level and to no small extent by the donations of private interests with dubious motives, we in Berlin are, politically speaking, willing victims.

But I don’t even know how to begin with really looking at this situation I took a picture of, there’s so much going on. Its a cartoon of some futuristic rhomboid printed on an info box/viewing platform which is itself nothing more than glorified scaffolding wrapped in vinyl tarpaulins. The pavilion being represented on the pavilion is in direct contradiction to the project that will in fact be built on this site, though its depiction has been done in such a silly way that it seems to indicate a certain patronizing attitude of those powers that be. And that, I think is it, I get it. This whole thing is just so cheap, not only in how a massive cultural center has been conceived, but also in how another has been destroyed, as well as in how a temporary pavilion has been constructed, not to mention in how that very entity of the information box itself has been not only degraded but also mocked. Way back when the design of such a pavilion was seen as an opportunity to give some hot young architecture office to chance to get out there and mix it up – like in the case of Schneider and Schumacher on Potsdamer Platz. Here such an opportunity has not only been denied but also cynically derided, and yeah, its kinda funny, ha ha.

Then my eye wanders to the other picture, printed around the corner, and I start to feel the heebee jeebees all over again.

The terms in question are waltritus (wall + detritus) and necoration (non + decoration). The first image here is classic waltritus. This featureless and yet busily adorned wall in a Dublin alley displays a downpipe, double guttering, staining, wiring, a wiring sheath, window bars, vents, various boxes and traces of former installations. No decision was made to make this wall like this, yet many separate decisions have been made to achieve this end result.

Classic Waltritus

If waltritus is the material object or objects that we can see, then necoration is the process by which it gets there. Necoration is the unplanned, taste-less, undesigned, ad hoc embellishment of an existing structure.

Now onto the boot scrapers. These photographs were taken on a snowy January afternoon in a network of small Victorian streets of workers’ housing in and around Lennox Street in Dublin 8. The boot scrapers are all identical and very simply fashioned.

The more we look at these boot scrapers, the more their individuality begins to emerge. The one above has been painted the same colour as the front door, for example. This is perhaps not necoration, rather a deliberate aesthetic decision. Then again, it was most likely the most sensible, ad hoc decision for the painter who noticed the rusting hoop beside his or her bucket of light blue paint.

Further observation reveals true waltritus and necoration, however. A thin white plastic housing has been installed to cover gas pipes on many houses, for example. There are also small green boxes affixed to cables, as well as plain metal boxes, and modern ventilation grilles have been inserted.

In some cases the boot scraper has been removed, while in others the cavity in the wall has been painted. For some it has use-value, while for most I suspect it hardly exists at all. When it is used, it is for locking bikes. Every boot scraper is clean, with no sign of being used for cleaning shoes, even when they are caked with snow.

We find ourselves paying attention to the small adjustments made to door sills. Some have tiles, some not. Some doors have a hinged lip to let the rain run off, while others have brass strips housing draught seals. Some people paint their door a different colour to the narrow frame around it, while others don’t go to the trouble.

Some have retained the antique-looking perforated ventilation bricks. They are often to be found at the least well-kept doors, and at doors of the most conservative, dark colours. Are they a marker of poverty?

The aim of these admittedly monotonous image is not to reveal or document detail, rather to show how waltritus has an accumulative, unselfconscious and monotonous effect. Necoration is a process that is the result of a combination of neglect, year-to-year maintenance and renovation, so we tend not to see it, or rather we tend to regard it as a process of natural change.

Point your browser of choice to this location: http://twitter.com/slab_magazine

Photos: Chipperfield Architects/Rik Nys [top]; DDP [above], via Berliner Morgenpost

The work has been criticised by some for fetishising war damage. But the old and the new have been sensitively intertwined. Homegrown critics always misunderstand that the whole point of Berlin is that it’s history’s freakshow. And Chipperfield should be commended for giving Berlin something with dignity and honesty.

The New Museum is so called, because it was completed in 1855, and is slightly newer than Berlin’s Old Museum, which was completed in 1828. The former shouldn’t be confused with the New National Gallery, which opened in 1968, and the latter shouldn’t be confused with the Old National Gallery, which was completed in 1876 but is younger than the New Museum. You follow? Shit just swings that way in Europe.

One concluding observation though: this temporary ticket office is clearly the most exciting piece of fully contemporary architecture on Museum Island at the moment.