There were no anarchos and no champagne and no prosecco, just the Prosecus security company, and not much else. Their presence was announced by a printed tarpaulin that had been hastily zap strapped to the construction site’s fencing.

Within the now infamous courtyard a portly employee of that company leered at me from a distance as I appeared at the front entrance, then slowly started to walk in my direction. Between him and me there stood only some more fencing, newly added to block the uninhibited access that I’d enjoyed during my covert, drunken operation a few weeks before. A couple of schicky micky (shitty mitty?) residents then fortunately stepped into the scene, preventing the kind of confrontation that I dread.

For those more impatient readers, the really dubious bits have been highlighted. Just click on the images to read them in higher resolution and hit your browser’s “back” button to return to this page.

Anyway, I look forward to seeing some hoardes of angry citizens on Sunday, and maybe even to guzzling some free bubbly. It should be a blast.

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.

You can link to the gallery site at this address, but please be aware that a flash animation is embedded that may cause seizures to be suffered by people diagnosed with epilepsy:

http://www.kaihoelzner.de/

For those of you that don’t want to brave that test of speed reading in German, here is a tickling frame that was furnished to me in the press release for the show:

As our more steadfast readers already know, the Berlin townhouse is a subject that is both seductive and perplexing to us, going all the way back to Ian Warner’s piece from November 2006, ‘Upper-Middle-Class Homes for the “Classless” Society’, as well as Karen Elliot’s seminal follow-up from one year ago, ‘A Whiff of Density’.

So now let’s see where this conversation is going, should be an awesome thing to check out this weekend. From 7:00pm on Saturday, July 17th at Galerie Kai Hoelzner, Adalbertstr. 96, 10999 Berlin.

I initially felt some reassurance by the recent BLDGBLG entry on a record breaking artificial tornado created in the Mercedes Benz museum in Stuttgart.  Only to then find out that the motivation behind this vortex was not semiotic or representative at all, but the result of a pretty amazing fire strategy that allowed for an open floor design completely free of fire doors.

From Autoblog, via BLDGBLG:

“The twister takes around seven minutes to materialize and is generated by 144 jets and 28 tons of air. The low pressure area at the center of the tornado works to create a jet stream that draws smoke out of the building’s corridors and funnels it upwards and out an exhaust vent on the roof.”

The tornado fire strategy seems intrinsically linked to the morphological concept of the museum: an ascending double helix (The Mercedes DNA) spins and ramps the museum program continuously around the central atrium space, which is now revealed to us as the focus not only of of the building’s representative program and circulation, but also of it’s more utilitarian fire strategy. As so often the case,  this unintentional utilitarian detail, afterthought or interpretation provides an aspect of a building (the helix as a system of ordering) that is at least as interesting as the original and intentional design.

A Happy New Year to all of our readers! Many thanks for your interest and support, which undoubtably helped make 2009 SLAB’s fattest year to date.

With five active writers and an upcoming print publication, next year is sure to be an interesting one. We also have a couple of surprises in store … so keep your browser locked to this address.

Roll on year-five, and may 2010 be a peaceful and prosperous one. Despite that weird-looking number.

The venue

SLAB remains quietly sceptical: a recent interview with curator Dan Borden goes only halfway to clarify what needs saving in Berlin, and completely fails to explain from whom. In place of an analysis of the complex web of political and financial interests which are currently shaping the city, we are instead repeatedly referred to “bankers and bureaucrats” who are intent on “destroying” the “intangible” aspect of Berlin which makes it so special. But what has made Berlin so special since the fall of the Wall is very tangible: it’s full of gaps, for example, and it’s (still fairly) cheap. The so called “bureaucrats” are just convenient bogeymen. This is distracting: it tells us nothing about how a city is run.

Whilst the concerns of Save Berlin are totally legitimate, there is a sloppiness in the way they are being voiced. This is dangerous. Downright careless are statements such as: “This is a city that’s been a canvas for brilliant schemes, for utopian schemes. After the Wall came down, that died.” Which city is meant here? West Berlin or East Berlin? Let’s not forget that the former was a state-subsidised island incapable of financing itself (employees were payed a 7% bonus to encourage them to live there). And which brilliant utopian schemes are meant? No answer is given: does he mean Germania, or IBA? So far, we are left speculating in the dark.

A further question, hopefully answered by the Fest, is that of the “creatives” themselves who are now encouraged to save the city. Is it not the same creative scene which has made Berlin such an attractive place for developers in the first place? This needs to be addressed in an honest manner.

The worst thing that could happen is that Save Berlin remains the isolated voice of a small circle of Anglo-American ex-pat “creatives”, worried that their beloved Berlin of the 1990s is being taken away from them by The Man. SLAB sincerely hopes that a larger dialog is the result, even resulting in some kind of coordinated movement a la Not in Our Name in Hamburg.

From the newswire:

Join EXBERLINER’s Save Berlin Fest 09!

Friday Nov 13 – Sunday Nov 15, Stattbad Wedding, Gerichtstrasse 65, www.stattbad.net

Save Berlin is a three-day extravaganza of art, music, film and performance in and around the disused swimming pool of Stattbad Wedding. There will be three floors of exhibitions, live performances, installations, films, food and drinks, and even a Souk-style market.

Inspired by the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, architects, artists, performers, musicians, and other imaginative Berliners will present their ideas and visions. They’ll be revisiting the past, challenging the present and showing their alternatives for the future – in the form of concrete proposals and artistic works. The exhibition will show drawings, models, photographs and installations of the people’s vision for 21st Century Berlin, while each night we’ll also have a varied programme of performances, films, music and discussions.

Full list of participating artists and projects here.

We’ll be serving delicious, affordable food and cheap drinks all weekend long…