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.

A Liter of Light

The diguises fall into two categories: cloaks and costumes, and with ‘cloak’ I mean the science fiction variety; an invisibility shield.

The doric order shithouse

The BVG, Berlin’s public transport network operator, have been busy building toilets for its bus and tram drivers across the city. Whilst taking the picture above, I got chatting to a tram driver seeking relief at a terminal stop at Nordbahnhof. He told me that all the BVG loos have been decorated differently. Which means we won’t need to put up with badly painted Roman temples, but a wide variety of shakey costume architectural parodies. Whilst I dig the idea, the execution leaves a lot to be desired. However, I must admit to being fascinated by the positioning of the two tell-tale, off-the-shelf vent coverings, which look as though they were added after the paint job.

Convenient canvas

Out in Fürstenberg, a small town 75km north of Berlin, some wag has produced a stunning portrait of SpongeBob Squarepants using a ubiquitous curb-side Grey Box as a conveniently shaped canvas.

The Lennon box

Another costume, produced, one assumes, by an anonymous pupil of the John Lenon Secondary School in Berlin’s Mitte district. For me, this marks an artistic zenith in the quiet conflict which has been waging for months between sprayers and Deutsche Telekom buffers. I’m hoping this piece of urban decoration will be lasting, but some other can-weilding cretin has already blemished the piece since the photo was taken.

The stealth cottage is visible enough not to be seen

I’m going to leave this meander with another example from the countryside: this time from Neuglobsow, a lakeside hamlet close to SpongeBob’s home town, and a great example of a ‘cloaked’ hut. It turned out to be an electrical substation, and obviously one of such aesthetic embarrasment to this history-conscious community that it was worth disguising as a timber frame cottage. Apart from the exaggerated perspective, and the peculiarly uninterrupted view of a distant lake, the effect is pretty convincing even from a distance of just two meters. So absorbing is this example, that the undisguied Grey Box to the right goes by unnoticed. Paradoxes abound.

For me this is all about a healthy erosion of the boundry between individuals and the civic infrastructure. Regardless of whether the decorattion of these non-descript structures is legal or illegal, it’s a way of reclaiming the streets and turning them into an extension of private domestic space. Customisation and reappropriation of that which is nominally out of bounds is a reaffirmation that the place you call home extends beyond the four walls of your dwelling.

It is difficult at first to put your finger on what is odd about this cottage, especially when you are standing there beside it. Fortunately, the local walking guide tells you what you’re looking at:

” … Some of the old houses have been renovated or knocked, and new houses built. Meelmaan has the unique distinction of a number of cottages with roof ridges which parallel the steep downward slope of the road, so that the gable at the top end is some five feet higher than that at the bottom. It has been suggested that if children had their bedrooms in the attics, they would move from the lower end to the higher end as they grew. It seems that the same unsung artisan was the author of most of the village houses, and ruins showing his original feature also remain. One hopes that those refurbishing the latter for holiday homes will retain this priceless feature of design.”

The remark at the end of this quote about renovations in Meelmaan is perhaps more pointed than it might first appear, when we look at what has in fact been built in recent years.

The new holiday homes, with their inauthentic, non-artisan aesthetic, are indeed less interesting and even more soulless, but on what grounds can we make an objection to them? Surely the needs, materials, skills and circumstances of the present day are just as contingent and worthy of authenticity as the conditions that prevailed in the old days? These concerns come to mind in the aftermath of Slab’s recent intervention in the renovation of the Hejduk Tower, a renovation which paid little heed to the spirit of the original design. When I contacted an architect friend about ‘the petition to save the Hejduk Tower from defacement’, as this site put it, she replied that she would happily sign not because she is a fan of Hejduk, which she is not, but because (in her words) she knows ‘how it feels when people mess up your design with crappy add-ons – though most of us just have to live with it and hope that the building design is robust enough to take it’.

My point here is a general one about the idea of saving a certain kind of built environment: if change must come, given that buildings age and must be renovated, then does there come a point when the thing that you are trying to save has stopped existing anyway, just as the circumstances in which it was built have also stopped existing? What exactly are we trying to save when we try to save valued buildings?

On green-bin-day, thousands of identical green bins are wheeled onto the streets of this Dublin neighbourhood for emptying by the city council trucks. There are also black-bin days for general refuse, and brown-bin days for organic waste. In the past, everyone would buy their own bin container from the hardware shop, put all of their rubbish in it, and put the bin out on the street for collection. In that system, you knew which bin was yours because it was newer, older, bigger, smaller or different in some other respect to your neighbours’ bins. Perhaps yours had a metal body and a plastic lid, or vice versa. Ours had a highly distinctive crumpled edge, a result of being accidentally thrown in under the refuse crusher in the back of the lorry.

However, market-friendly policies pursued by the government, and in line with European Union legislation, has led to private companies moving in on the waste disposal market. These companies are paid from the city’s funds, and they run a leaner, union-free service. Less lucrative contracts for certain parts of Dublin are not taken by private companies, so the city council still has to cover them. Effectively, the city council is subsidising the private bin collectors.

This process is part of the ‘greening’ of refuse policy, which encourages people to recycle. A bin collection charge has been levied by the city council, but has met considerable local opposition and boycotts. Now in some parts of the capital, the city council has receded from public consciousness as the body that runs the city’s rubbish, while in others it is a bogeyman that brings poor people to court over non-payment.

One side effect of these policies is people stuffing domestic waste into public litter baskets, which are often full and overflowing as a result. Another is ‘fly-tipping’, i.e. driving your rubbish around until you find a secluded spot and dumping it there. The Dublin and Wicklow mountains to the south of the city are particularly scarred by this.

There are many other side effects, not to mention complicated controversies concerning an incinerator (another case of the city contracting out its work to private business). But the rather prosaic side effect illustrated here is that now each household is issued with a standard bin, each identical to the next. They have barcode identity tags, which are scanned when the bins are emptied and the owners charged accordingly. Rubbish presented in any other container is ignored. Because the bins are now all the same, people write their house number, and sometimes their street name, on the side of the bin. That way, when the collection has been made, you can be sure you are wheeling your own bin back in, and not someone else’s. What has developed is a weird array of fonts and handwritings, most of them achieved with an arresting slovenliness. Though, as we can see above, some people try to beautify the things.

This is one hell of a tasty table. Rough, super-thin concrete slab on top, bandy steel legs below. The dreamy thing about the legs is that they’re made of hot dip galvanized steel bars, commonly used in reinforced concrete. So-called “rebars”. The table is one of about twenty examples to be found on the terrace of Hotel Diogenis in Tsagarada, all hand made by the proprietor’s brother-in-law.