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.

This gravestone is next to Farahy Church near the village of Kildorrery, County Cork, Ireland. It is one of the small number of older graves in the churchyard which seem to have been retouched in the last couple of decades. The groove of the original calligraphic carving has been cleaned and reinscribed with black pigment. The result is this striking combination of a weathered slab with the crisp new lines of recent re-etching. The facelift draws attention to the fact that the slab would itself have originally been a pristine near-white, and so the writing would have been even more impressive in 1799.

Strange to our eyes are the haphazard-seeming abbreviations, particularly on the right margin. Given the quality of the lettering, surely the stonemason could have foreseen the lack of space for the final letters of some words? In fact there is sufficient space for the letters in question, it just has not been used. Two explanations for these abbreviations come to mind: 1. the mason was charging a per-letter rate and the client saved some money and still got the vital information on the slab, or 2. they simply did not see these abbreviations as anomalous in the way that we might now.

Over 120 years later, the Kelly family erected another headstone alongside, this time in the Celtic Romanesque revival style that had taken hold in the 19th century. This type of gravestone is in imitation of the surviving Irish monastic high crosses, which date from as early as the 7th century. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, resurgent Catholicism and nationalism cherished the early monastic tradition as a key source of indigenous (pre-English colonization) Irish iconography. Stonemasonry had clearly undergone some changes in the intervening years, as the newer grave seems to have been mechanically lettered in a standard font and with a modern respect for left and right margins, and for consistent abbreviation. It is also worth noting that only the lower section of the newer grave has been tailored to the Kellys’ needs, the small connecting part and the cross itself being generic. A further change is in the kind of information that is conveyed and emphasized. Whereas the more recent grave simply lists the names and death dates of the dearly departed (the most recent member of the family was buried here in 1994), all of the flash-bang lettering of the older grave is used to record the name of the person who paid for the grave (Dan Kelly), and not for the poor old dead father.

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.

To refer to them as simply brutal would suffice, with a capital “B” – Brutal – perhaps not. I’m not sure if Reyner Banham could handle the term being applied to something that’s so fucking ugly at first glance. But the idea is elegant; that a single shape could be configured in two different ways and repeated so as to form infinite combinations of benches or planters.

Now, of course, its only weeds that are growing in the exposed cavities. I’m sure that these things would be summarily carted off and crushed to pieces long before anyone would go to the far more cost-effective measure of planting some geraniums in them.

I also wonder if it’s at all conceiveable that any hot-shit avant neo-brutal architect would ever dare to employ this pebble-coat type surface. It was all the rage back in the 60’s and 70’s, in the Western world as well. I remember an octogonally-shaped drive-up bank in Charlottesville, Virginia that was covered in it, punctuated by dark brown tinted plate glass windows.

Could it be that Nivea’s new Volume Sensation Styling Spray was itself developed in reaction to the obvious marketing opportunity that the eastern face of the scaffolding presented? Or maybe that the idea for the product, as well as its name, were indeed derived from the cladding technique that Kollhof had employed a decade before in the construction of this titan in the pantheon of fakeytecture?

The upside is that it looks better covered in scaffolding than it did before the brick-look panels began to peel away.

The phrase was a kind of mini revelation, and one of my first lessons in basic economics: the correlation between storage and market price.

So here’s what this tale has to do with architecture:

Caring for the aged (this sick building is less than ten years old)

The Pro Seniore Residenzen is a care home for the elderly directly on Hackesche Markt, a busy junction, tourist hot-spot, and historically speaking, a market place. Building-work carried out in the neighborhood since the early 1990s has concentrated mainly on rennovation, and the handfull of new projects which went up are all unremarkable. But the Residenzen building has always been conspicuous for it’s complete rejection of façade design. It is an essay in dreariness: a filing cabinet for human beings, to misquote architecture critic Niklas Maak*.

Keeping the elderly in the center of town is well meant and a welcome sight.

Imaginable, too, that the building was designed automatically by some wretched piece of software which extrapolates a ‘logical answer’ from a data-set of building directives and profit forecasts. Judging by the current need for façade rennovation some ten years after completion, it is clear that the building also represents a rejection of craftsmanship in favour of the lowest bidder.

It’s not the first time I’ve seen major rennovation work being carried out on the façades of newly built structures. The rennovation of freshly rennovated buildings is also not an uncommon sight in Berlin’s new Mitte.

* A reference to the following quip in the New York Times from 2006:

Mr. Stimmann “couldn’t imagine that a street could look like this,” said the architecture critic Niklas Maak, grabbing a pen and pad in a Berlin cafe to sketch a streetscape with buildings of varying heights and widths. He followed with another sketch, in which all the buildings were the same size: “Like this the street looks like a file cabinet,” he said. “That’s what Berlin looks like right now.” [link]

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.