According to the developer’s website we have a real good vintage of a building here, with all the potential of an instant classic. Though I’m not sure that the EIFS polystyrene will be around when that happens one day. Some maggots or a woodpecker thinking of a maggot lunch might take a bite out of it. Careful and unbiased research, using a popular search engine, into failures of EIFS led to this insight. On occasion, I repeat this research when I feel I’ve leaned out the window too far proclaiming that fact with too much emphasis and glee. The evidence I spotted on the building itself left me first incredulous and then somewhat elated and hopeful. May I draw your attention to the dark blotch at the top left corner of this image of a townhouse entrance:

Close-up, the cluster of reddish-black globules on the entrance’s ceiling revealed itself as Prenzlauer Bogen’s first residents: an infestation of ladybugs that had already started to crap all over the acrylic render, perhaps drawn to its relatively mild surface temperature or hooked on its evaporations, a veritable ladybug crack house.

Now, a key to preventing vermin infestations in exterior insulation is to ensure that the facade is properly sealed. Here, I found plenty of access points for insects to a warm, moist, hydrocarbon foam feast.

But how did I get here, poking my 10x zoom at a lost hole in the acrylic render facade of this uninhabited building’s darkest recesses on a cold and dreary afternoon? I was immediately drawn to it when I first saw it. I was overcome by a reminiscence of the buildings of East Berlin, maybe ten, 20 years ago – paired down belle epoch buildings finished in uniform crude grey stucco that bore their fate with honesty and candor, stripped of all their ornament, either because the Commies thought of it as bourgeois or because they were too skint to repair what hadn’t been shot off in the war, or both. This building looks like that to me, like the former buildings of East Berlin, before they were subjected to the vandalism of sponge effects and pastel hues. It, too, seemed to have lost its ornament through a tragic event in history – only prior to its construction – a financial crisis, or the advent of some sustainability standard.

I was intrigued and studied architect Tobias Nöfer’s concept on the project website, but didn’t like what I read. Normally, developments of this kind aspire to places seemingly higher up the pecking order of cosmopolitan desirability, such as Rome, New York, or Paris. This example of “highest building art” (developer’s usual modest marketing blah) is taking things down a notch. The reference is of pulsating, cosmopolitan, Bath, England. Apparently, what we have here is a fine example of “Old English Crescent” (!?) an architecture style I had never come across prior to studying the project’s website, and of which there had hitherto existed but a single proponent, John Wood’s Royal Crescent in Bath, and now also, the Prenzlauer Bogen. If you find yourself trapped in the city of Berlin, but yearn for the quaint, slow-paced town life of a place like Bath and are a fan of “Old English Crescent”, this is for you.

The historicist facade stripped of ornament invokes former buildings of East Berlin. Could this be an unintentional proponent of the critical regionalism in the Kenneth Frampton style? But why Bath? Why England? Don’t we have our very own Berlin crescent housing? Nah, that’s a horseshoe. This is a crescent, I mean a sickle, no, an arc (see the development’s concept). Yet, the stripped down historicist style lends this radial structure a penal appearance. By god, it’s a panopticon! At least if must feel that way playing in that sandbox and I wouldn’t worry about having your bike stolen.

Nice to see that Towards a New Architecture was mandatory reading for architecture students in the East as well, as we can tell by this example of building design taking cues from naval structures, in this case cruise ship architecture. Something like the MS Arkona has collided with a modernist tower block and spilled its cargo to create a cornucopia of shops, restaurants, and wig boutiques that make up the shopping deck of this strange proto-decon iteration of an unité, which subsequently sank to the bottom of the sea. This one can tell by the schools of fish that roam a veritable reef of dreams of distant places such as Hanoi, Cuba, or Hungary.

After entering this waterworld through vortices – revolving doors adorned with sand dollars and other marine flotsam – why not start your day with a relaxed cocktail under plastic palms at bar Tropicana while admiring said schools of fish. Stroll along a sunken interior east German street with parked Trabis frozen in time, then rest on a bench under a street lamp for some people watching or to read the paper before you stop in Hungary represented by paper thin sheet of photographic rustic brick that creates a romantic flair of sunken towns like Atlantis, for a bowl of Gulash. Then, stock up at a sort of Skymall of GDR memorabilia on Tempobohnen, Atoll Memory (!) deodorant, or Novum soap at Ostpaket. Complete your evening under the pasted cealing of the Brauhaus Mitte for a farewell dinner of Eisbein with Sauerkraut accompanied by old shanty.

vortex flotsam

the shopping deck

collision schematic

bar tropicana float

this is so relaxing

Herr Latzke, hallo, nice leasure wear!

Hubert, remember Hungary 1982

atoll memory deodorant

sea shanty in Brauhaus Mitte

italianate mural

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.

7 October 1969. High above the representational void at the heart of the bombed city, the Telecafe at the top of the TV tower is set in rotational motion. This celebratory carousel of solo entertainer with organ and some selected guests draws out first circles around the representational center of a fledgling republic in honor of its 20th anniversary.

It is the architectural equivalent of the refrain as a strategy of place making: “A refrain…is like a song that creates the beginning of order in chaos – as in a child singing in the dark…the beginning of the refrain is fragile. Next, a refrain creates a territory, an organization of a limited space with a circle drawn around it.” 1

Centripetal forces of the first refrain soon draw others – circular follies as markers of places and commerce: the C&A sign, the Weltzeituhr, the Berliner Verlag, a spinning display of rare Döner meat, the rings of Saturn, the spiraling logo of Media Markt.

If the surveying tool of Cartesian town planning is the groma, the strategy of place making by refrain is best represented by the dreidel:

More dreidel with Ira from Jesse Morros on Vimeo.

“For your own safety, no wading or swimming”.

That’s what the warning sign says. Proof that fiction can kill you. If trans fat doesn’t get to you first. Or your satanic neighbor. In hindsight, I wish I had taken many more pictures during my three week sojourn in the burbs of California. It’s hard to pick out whats significant if you are totally immersed in a seamless landscape of illusion stitched together by things like this.  By “Things like this” I mean higher degree simulations, copies of copies that have no traceable origin in something that is not an image. Only, but welcome, reminders of an alternate reality were a few black hawks and a flock of turkey vulchers that had convened on a housing association’s club house. For me, there is a fundamental difference between something like this and, for example, immigrated Welsh farmers of Bruce Chatwin’s Patagonia making themselves at home by the continued use of the Welsh vernacular, or their neighboring German immigrants doing the same by planting cherry trees.

Oh yeah, and those stairs really don’t lead anywhere …

I shudder to think my existence could end then and there in the foot deep rippling reflection of Hadrian’s petrified mirage of the Spanish Steps …

… uh, I crave a spumante …

Any ideas for alternate inscriptions?

A belated tribute to the writer John Updike, who died in January:

«She was the friend of a friend, and she and I, having had lunch with the mutual friend, bade him goodbye and, both being loose in New York for the afternoon, went to a museum together. It was a new one, recently completed after the plan of a recently dead American wizard. It was shaped like a truncated top and its floor was a continuous spiral around an overweening core of empty vertical space. From the leaning, shining walls immense rectangles of torn and spattered canvas projected on thin arms of bent pipe. Menacing magnifications of textural accidents, they needed to be viewed at a distance greater than the architecture afforded. The floor width was limited by a rather slender and low concrete guard wall that more invited than discouraged a plunge into the cathedralic depths below. Too reverent to scoff and too dizzy to judge, my unexpected companion and I dutifully unwound our way down the exitless ramp, locked in a wizard’s spell. Suddenly, as she lurched backward from one especially explosive painting, her high heels were tricked by the slope, and she fell against me and squeezed my arm. Ferocious gumbos splashed on one side of us; the siren chasm called on the other. She righted herself but did not let go of my arm. Pointing my eyes ahead, inhaling the presence of perfume, feeling like a cliff-climber whose companion has panicked on the sheerest part of the face, I accommodated my arm to her grip and, thus secured, we carefully descended the remainder of the museum. Not until our feet touched the safety of street level were we released. Our bodies separated and did not touch again.» — from Museums and Women

The book explores the role of imagined architecture in world literature, documenting 120 examples, many of which were visualised in the exhibition in the form of drawings, models and computer simulations. Kafka’s Castle is featued, as are Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Katsuhiro Otomo’s Neo-Tokyo in Akira as well as Thoreau’s wooden hut on Walden Pond.

Two nights ago I came across the book’s essay on Windsor McKay’s Little Nemo comic strip, which ran from 1905 in the New York Herald. I’d never heard of it before. Little Nemo explores the dreams of a boy whose nightly adventures revolved around the single aim of reaching Slumberland. Nemo invariably fails in his quest, waking up at a crucial moment in the unfolding drama, having been crushed by giant mushrooms, enslaved or turned into a monkey.

Architektur wie sie im Buche Steht illustrates one of Nemo’s adventures and I was surprised to see that the last panel – showing Nemo standing in his bed – bared more than a passing resemblance to a similar panel from Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen, a story that was a childhood favourite of mine.

Junior insomniacs: left Sendak’s Mickey and right McKay’s Nemo

Scouring Sendak’s story for clues, I found the detail (below right) on page 12 showing a carton of “Hosmer’s Free Running Sugar”. Around the base of the package are the words “Chicken Little, Nemo Masc …” Remove the comma from the middle and you have, of course, the words “Little Nemo”. The name of Sendak’s protagonist, Mickey, is also surely an expansion of illustrator Windsor McKay’s own surname.

Mauric Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen, banned in four US states

Sendak’s Night Kitchen is a surreal mix of bakery and city. The buildings which form a backdrop to the story are reminicent of 1930s Manhattan skyscrapers but are all made of food packaging or kitchen utensils. Sendak plays with dream-typical effects such as a distorted sense of scale, such as when Mickey takes flight in a small airplane fashioned out of dough and leaps into a giant bottle of milk. At this point too, it becomes clear that the buildings in the background aren’t part of some distant city, but are enlarged freestanding objects within the kitchen itself.

The city as dreamland bakery

Mickey eventually leaves the Kitchen in the same way as he enters: with a fall. Architecture, or at least, bizzare architectural situations have played a large role in my own more memorable dreams of the last few years. I can’t imagine early exposure to Sendak’s story has anything to do with this, but the role the built environments plays in forming and reflecting the psyche must be one of great important. Maybe I’ll document a few of my own architectural dreams in a future posting…

Protagonist Gaston Lagaffe (French for ‘the blunder’), is a pathalogicaly lazy and accident prone office boy working in the fictionalised setting of the comic’s own publishers. When the first strip appeared in 1957, Franquin was already well known for his work in the comic magazine Le Journal de Spirou. Gaston was to become his most famous work, which he continued until his death 40 years later.

Although I understood nothing of the text, I was immediately fascinated by Franquin’s super-detailed style of drawing: an almost obsessive density of visual infomation was packed into each panel with an eye for detail that made the reading of the texts only a secondary concern. I could spend hours losing myself in the lines of a background roof-scape, or wondering about the arrangement of rooms in the pen-and-ink virtuality of the office, a kind of omnipresent meta-character.

Gaston Lagaffe, downtown

Looking at the comics now, I have a feeling they’ve played a role in shaping my own perception of European city architecture, especially Paris. Many Gaston stories feature street scenes of tumble-down, late 18th Century buildings: all shuttered windows, steep roofs and crooked chimney pots. These are occasionaly juxtaposed by 1970s office blocks and are invariably decked out with the chaotic contemporary patina of commercial signage, nonsense trade names, neon lights, TV aerials and telephone wires.

The backdrop as protagonist

It was Franquin’s skill as a caricaturist which enabled him to distill so many features of urban life into vibrant drawn replicas which feel right without strictly having been drawn ‘right’. Franquin’s style was technical but never cold. Pen strokes often taper to a hair-line and are left unjoined in expressive gestures. This, combined with an intuitive feel for lighting, both natural and artificial, imbue his work with an organic warmth.

Memorably in one episode, Gaston and friend take a rubber ball and two wooden paddles out onto the street for an anarchic game of city-wide racquetball. The little red ball dissapears down busy city thoroughfairs and alleyways causing havock. Of course, it bounces back some time later for the magical return volley, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake. To my pre-teen mind, the thought was mind-boggling and exhilarating. Despite the rain soaked streets, grumbling old men and the heavy traffic, Gaston’s home town was city I wanted to live in.

Neon, sodium lamps and moonlight

Visionary office transport

All images taken from the German edition “Gesammelte Katastrophen, Band 11″, Carlsen Comics, 1994