Looking back, House fits precisely with the early 1990s postmodern (’pomo’) Zeitgeist, where insides and outsides and the permeable, shifting liminal zones between them were in a flux of radical undecidability, even of alterity. Clearly, the period’s critical theory buzzwords still flow fluently. In 1993, I was a student of English literature, particularly taken with critical theory, and it shows. It also explains why House made its mark on me, or should I say, it accounts for the continuing inscription of the Zeitgeist’s discourse onto the palimpsest of my (en)cultur(at)ed Weltanschauung. Still, it’s easy to sneer.

From Zeitgeist to Geistzeit. It was Halloween when I first noticed the moulding on this exterior wall of a basement in Dublin. Perhaps it was something to do with the way the drapes hang like a white-sheet ghost that drew my attention. The moribund plant container and the odd negative jail-cell bars on the frosted glass certainly played a role too. But I think it goes deeper than just association of ideas. Things that are inside-out can be disturbingly uncanny because they give solid form to what is not normally solid. That is not to say that inside-out buildings are always uncanny – the exposed entrails of the Centre Georges Pompidou or of the Lloyds Building are merely interesting. But when a building or its surfaces bear the trace of something now missing, as in House, or when concrete bears the mark of the piece of wood that contained it (example here), we are faced with some kind of ghostly remnant (if this sounds like Derrida, it is because it occurs to me that his Specters of Marx also dates from 1993).

On a cold winter’s day in Paris, when you notice the marks where, months before, the kickstands of parked motorbikes have sunk into the softened tar, the ghostly heat of that summer’s day brushes your cheek.

In Derry, are these micro-sculptures meant to be emerging from beneath the pavement, or have they fallen from above? Either way, they are imprints of the missing oak wood – Derry comes from ‘Doire’, which means oak wood – that once occupied this spot. The name of the city is contested – officially it is Londonderry, the colonial name, but the great majority of its residents call it simply Derry. The micro-sculptures are evidence that the ghost of the original wood has not forgotten, and will not forget, that this is an undead doire. It’s a good example of how the nationalist population of that city have won the cultural war, spending UK-exchequer money on deconstruction-influenced sculpture that proclaims the passing nature of the centuries-long British occupation.

The grisly curtains in Dublin make me wonder, with a quickening of my pulse, if the original curtains are still in there, undead and entombed inside the plaster? Whiteread’s scultpure always did have something of the sarcophagus about it, as if some ghastly entombment had happened there. Years after House was demolished, I lived in London and for a long while passed the spot regularly without knowing what had stood there. What I always thought of as I passed that spot was how 200 people were made homeless and 6 were killed there in 1944 by the first successful German V-1 ‘flying bomb’. There’s no trace of that.

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.

…for traffic swamped Winskiez. By the looks of it, a new stretch of Hadrian’s wall is under construction. Ah, no, just the next installment of public space improvements on Winsstraße these days, presumably to link up with the exclusive condominiums of current development Wohnquartier on the corner of Jablonskistraße, a kind of Kollebelle light in aircrete and pvc by the same architect. By the looks of it, someone imported Kollebelle’s curved facade into Vectorworks with the wrong arc segmentation settings, though the architect says it’s a reference to the Japanese art of origami. Aha.

kollebelle origami facade by the man himself, Marc Koch

This city really takes care of you. Phew, glad I am just inside this perimeter of respectibility and decorum, qualities directly proportional to the redundancy of bollards and pedestrian traffic lights in the ‘hood. Earlier that day the Ordnungsamt had saved me from unknowingly purchasing grilled salsiccie that a rogue organic butcher had tried to cook from a raw state at Kollwitzplatz market. He only had a license to grill cooked sausages. What people try to get away with! And I know how busy they have been in the trenches of the newly installed neigborhood parking in this area. So hats off to them. In fact, let’s dedicate these bollards as tiny monuments to the noble travails of our friends from the Ordnungsamt, scouring our sidewalks daily for first signs of decay and traffic indiscipline. Protect and serve. Things are looking up.

gentrification bridgehead into unchartered territory

This corner is on a narrow street along the main building of the Sorbonne. The railing prevents people using the corner either as a place to urinate or to sleep, or both (note how the spikes point upwards and downwards). The stench of urine from dark urban nooks and crannies can be overpowering, and clearly it can lead to desperate measures in some parts of the world. It is easy to understand the urge to preserve the building and the street in this way. This fairly brutal instance of preservation is interesting, though, because it reveals a feature of preservation efforts in general that is not always apparent. While the task of preservation seems to be concerned with the past, and with the future survival of valued objects, really what is at stake is the control of the streetscape in the here and now.

The construction of the spiked bars (here is another example from a few streets away) are an effective effort at protecting something without destroying it. The space is still public, but it simply cannot be used. The space is negated. So it might be better to put it like this: what we have here is a way of destroying something without protecting it, because the space itself is being protected for non-use. Better to destroy the space than let it be used. In fact, what is being protected is the adjacent space, i.e. the pavement where those who are not mad or homeless walk by. Similarly, churchgoers in Saint Sulpice, a short walk in the other direction, are protected from beggars at the door by this bar which doubles as a boot scraper (for more on boot scrapers in these pages, you might like to read this and this). Admittedly, a beggar could stand here, but would be prevented from sitting. Well, they have to do something to be the deserving poor, don’t they?

I was not around in the 1960s or 1970s to see the buildings of the South Bank Centre in London, so I don’t know what the signage was like in those days. But I do know that the big colourful signs that are tacked all over the complex now betray a certain lack of love for their architectural heritage on the part of the people who run these buildings. 1960s brutalism, as exemplified by the Hayward and the Queen Elizabeth Hall, both pictured here, can indeed be hard to love. That is, it can be hard to love if what you love is flat, multi-coloured, letters-as-cartoons.

These flaky masks deny all the qualities (volume, substance, materiality, roughness, depth, anchoredness) that the buildings stand for. The original design is so uncompromising, however, that the undeniable, unconquerable volumes win out, and the contemporary signage looks like so many price-stickers that one day will be faded, curled and outdated as they cling to a forgotten tin in the back of your cupboard.

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.

So, here’s what happened

On Monday 19th April a senate organised “Baukollegium” was held, where Robert Slinger, Florian Kohl and Matthias Reese presented the case for Hejduk’s “Tower With Wings” to Senate Building Director, Regula Lüscher and others. At this meeting they gave a general presentation about the history of the building, and the context in which it was built. They also read out a letter penned by Renata Hejduk, who had intended to come to Berlin, but had been held back by recent volcanic activity, and delivered the petition. Present too, was the building’s new owner.

Hejduk’s colour for Berlin: RAL 6011

The 3000 signatures gathered in support of the buidling, were literally a weighty indicator to the Kollegium and its panel of experts that informed opinion held the changes for a defacement of Berlin’s cultural heritage. In short, the petition helped to turn around a situation in which Mr Prajs wasn’t actaully legally required to seek anyone’s approval.

Results of the meeting were announced in the Berliner Morgenpost on the 24th April in the form of an interview with Frau Lüscher: the building is to be restored to its original design, including the colour scheme – which of course means that the removed balconies will need to be rebuilt.

An unexpected twist

As if this weren’t good enough by itself – and this is where the story takes a really unexpected twist – two pavillions designed by Hejduk could now end up being built on the scrappy bit of land in front of the building, thus “completing” the ensemble. Robert Slinger of Kapok proposed the idea in a mail written to Hejduk three weeks ago. Although he seemd to think the idea was a bit of a pipe dream, it was clear that realising these structures would make perfect sense in the context of a public park. Funding might well also be secured out of a pot set aside for urban parks and public spaces.

Hekduk’s x-ray drawings of the Tower with its two pavillions

The two pavillions, “Studio for the painter”, and “Studio for the musician” were both exhibited as centerpieces in 1987 IBA exhibition held at the Martin Gropius Building in Berlin. Why they never made it from the museum to the street isn’t clear, but I can well imagine that they probably just looked too damned scary. Robert Slinger offered a more practical reason when we chatted last weekend: if built at the scale suggested by Hejduk, the pavillions would have to confirm to all the regulations to which a ‘normal’ building must abide. Fire safety and questions of maintenance, ownership and access all come to mind. Shrink the pavillions to the size of sculptures though, and the idea dies.

Asides

I’d like to quickly go back to the Baukollegium. One salacious detail about the meeting is that the tower’s new owner, Mr Sruel Prajs, turned up with absolutely no defence prepared for the changes made to the building. He simply didn’t know what he’d aquired, which seems a little odd. Is a passing knowledge of architecture not required of property dealers, in the same way that, say, a fishmonger knows a thing or two about fish? No wonder they talk about ‘objects’.

Admittedly, defending one’s own ignorance is a hard thing to do, but an honest answer would have had some dignity. If I might be allowed to speculate for a moment, it’s worth noting that the Berlinhaus’s offices are located in a building next to Hejduk’s tower. It’s a detail I hadn’t noticed whilst the campaign was hotting up, but maybe the reason for the white paint job and pink balconies was to pretty-up the view from Prajs’ office window. A bone-headed whim. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, this sounds like a case of “a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

Signs and signifiers

Just out of interest, I dropped by BerlinHaus’ office building the other week. I’m not sure why. Probably a bit like when Columbo makes a false exit, then comes back to his suspect and says “just one more thing …” Maybe I was childishly looking for a detail which would smugly confirm my worst suspicions about a property dealer. But a quick look at the company’s sign made details irrelevant:

The many faces of BerlinHaus

Chasing down evidence to support your own grim world-view can fill you with a great sense of purpose. But having all your darkest prejudices confirmed so swiftly is thoroughly deflating. I mean: thirty-six companies? Alright: it doesn’t have to mean there’s something dubious going on. But there’ll be a benefit to it which far outweighs the disadvantages of a complicated tax-return.

Is this dead space ‘dead space’ because its function is over generalised, or because its function is over specialised?

I might say the latter, but its function isn’t clear. It seems to be the entrance to a hotel, but the brightly lit overhang speaks more of warehouse loading bay than a welcome mat for the weary traveller. It looks like somewhere service personnel might smoke.

However, if the space is dead because it is over generalised, then why is it so secretive and paranoid? The ramp is guarded by pot-plant sentries, the four possible entrances are unsignposted (with the main one taking on the form of a decelerating turnstile) and the windows conceal their contents with opaque foil.

Tight æsthetic concept [Photo: Flickr user RobotSkirts]

The Sony Center is conceived as an ensemble of buildings surrounding an inner courtyard, and are topped by a roof which mimicks the profile of Mount Fuji. This is an impressive fabric construction, rather like a set of sails which radiate down from the summit like the spokes of a bicycle wheel. Although completely kitch in its approach (it’s dramatised at night with slow-mo disco floodlighting), it does mean that the elements gets in; snow, rain, wind and all. At night in wet weather, if you squint hard, it’s a bit like being in a Syd Mead rendering, which does lend the Center a smattering of grittyness. But let’s get back to those floor panels.

Caution! Danger of slippage on metal plates despite winter maintenance. [Click to enlarge]

Metal floor panels in a plaza? Excuse the parlance, but what in shit-fuckery were Murphy/Jahn Architects thinking? Here’s a little hint from your friends at SLAB, free of charge: metal is slippery when wet. That’s sound advice, write it down. Even in summer you have to watch how you go here with a pair of tread-worn sneakers on your feet, but in winter, after almost two months of snow and freezing weather, this is trecherous madness.

As a work-around, signs have been put up. Unfortunately they fall just short of blaming the architects directly for their misjudgement, stressing instead that extra care should be excersized, despite winter maintenance. Whether or not this constitutes a legal waiver remains to be seen, and as much as I find a litigious society loathsome, it might take a lawsuit or two before improvements are made.

Precariousness abounds. [Click to enlarge]

But I doubt that improvements will be made, because, like it or ot, the metal plates belong to a tight æsthetic concept which is obviously of more importance than Grandma’s shattered hip bone. Notice, then, the blue neon strips flush-fitted into the floor. They contribute much to the mysterious doctrine of low-friction surfacing, but also serve to dazzle the visitor from below. This is an important device since it directs attention upward towards the surrounding commercial propositions of beer, bratwurst and block-buster. Other important details include the steel-cage seating, the reflective black surface of the central fountain, the use of glass in exterior fittings and the red paneling on the courtyard façade of one of the buildings. It’s the æsthetic of the pre-pubescent boy’s bedroom translated into architecture: pimply proto-adult taste articulated through the careful hanging of a Ferrari Testarossa poster in a black varnished frame from IKEA.

This article ends as suddenly as the new Coen brothers film, which I saw in the Sony Center.