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.

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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.