Sorry, I can’t hear you, in my Motel-One turquoise “viel Geld für wenig Design” (plenty-design-for-little-money) Arne Jacobsen Egg chair, I’ve got a Caterpillar in my ear. How can this man slouched on the modernist sofa in the hotel’s loggia be so calm among the construction mess that surrounds him?

I guess because he’s really not here. He’s cyborged himself into his smart phone and has found placid serenity somewhere else cyber. Something distant has temporarily gotten hold of his brain through his eye sockets. Maybe he’s near the nadir of a tanked investment that has just crashed through the 50 day moving average, or in a candle stick graph of his short sell that’s just brushed a Bollinger band, and he’s already booking a room at the Mandala, or he’s checking Zalando for the latest model of Geox shoes he has a knack for? Who knows? But he certainly doesn’t seem to be here.

These are some really interesting thoughts. I appreciate the opportunity of having them every day. Commutes in Berlin change almost daily depending on the circulation requirements of the many construction sites that dot one’s way to work. The last few months things have really crescendoed to new levels on my commute, around the future junction of Leipziger Straße and Axel-Springer-Straße that is nearing completion. This connection was severed by the Wall. Soon, it will direct four lane traffic right past my studio window towards the A111. The adjacent Motel One was finished earlier this high season, touting viel Design für wenig Geld (plenty design for little money) to Berlin’s many visitors. “But why in German?”, I ask “who speaks German that stays here?” and now I feel this has got to be deliberate, this taunting on my way to work, reminding me of all the design I offer for little money.

As the finishing touches are put to the new intersection, I get shepherded around Motel One in constantly changing ways. I am led through makeshift channels of galvanized steel mesh that cut fresh twists and turns through heaps of rubble and virgin construction sands like CNC tool paths. Different facets of Motel One’s rich value designs reveal themselves to me every day, brushing up against different factory fresh surfaces, pieces of furniture, or topiaries. I come comically close to people in designer furniture, closer than ever intended, spot new superimpositions of myriad reflections, or almost run into an old lady and dog or get hit by a cyclist on the loggia, lost for a passage around Motel One. It feels like universes colliding on a smaller, more mundane scale. Pedestrians seem like machines whose algorithms cannot cope with a new, unexpected topography. With each new choreography and disparate encounters, each new vista, Motel One seems to acquire some mysterious dimension. Did I just spot Yul Brynner, are those cables sticking out of this man’s chest?

The courtyard reminds me of New York, somehow. Below, there’s a green amenity space of manicured lawns and wood chip covered terraces. Beach recliners in Motel One turquoise and brown look forlorn amidst all the construction paraphernalia and soaring GDR era high rises, look like creatures themselves. Occasional guests in slacks and other business casual slurp Cosmos or wash down Alfons Schuhbeck sandwiches with a wheat beer, on timber decking stained in mahogany. Brand is everywhere. Retracted linen parasols carry a promise of intense sunlight; an empty promise, given the eternal shadow cast by the adjacent GDR high rise. Unless there is foreboding in these parasols? The whole thing feels like it came out of nowhere, plopped down and teleported from a parallel reality, where it left a gaping absence, as alien as the presence it has created, here, and tearing some people out of context along with it. Through kaleidoscopic glass, I see projections of films that show this place in the twenties and thirties, topical mementos excavated by all this digging. On one of my daily recurrences around Motel One, it feels as if it has solidified or cured into a monolith of pure carbon. I suddenly think of the Ka’ba and Mecca, of tourism and pilgrimage and meditative recurrence, the infinite verticality of meteorites and of sacred spaces that can only be attained in mind and not in body, and all the things sinister and divine that happen behind the dark, silent reflections on its Low-E glass.

Here we present the last of three installments of Oliver Miller’s rejected text intended for our upcoming print publication, The New Death Strip. To read the previous sections, and to find out more about this, our most exhaustive project to date, please read the preceding entries from January 8th and 15th, 2011. The New Death Strip is at the printer now and should be available both in hard copy and online by the end of the week.

-Ed.

The edifice was virtually dissolving before me as I became entranced in these spectral reflections, and looking back down at the rest of the campus’s landscaping and architecture it all appeared less solid than before.

The grass struck me as uncannily thick, vibrant and uniform in color and density, the brick cladding of the other buildings at the institute had the familiar look of the scanned texture map I’d noticed back on Brunnenstrasse. Preposterous fountains spurted upwards from greenish ponds that appeared unimaginably shallow.

Everything looked clean and new and in a certain sense no less reflective than the polished glass of the new building’s curtain walls. In a world of Photoshop effects, smoothing filters, color balancing and corrected saturation, it seems there’s an irresistable drive to create a world in the image of the image.

A there-but-not-there feeling overcame me, and I spent the next hour or so wandering more or less aimlessly around Hasso Plattner Institute. The pristine artificiality of the place, its sheer made-up-ness, had put me into a space of existential contemplation. I had quite simply ceased to feel like I was anywhere anymore.

People use the metaphor of a desert to describe a place -or a state- in which you feel empty or placeless, but my childhood in New Mexico gave me a sense for the richness of life to be found there. At HPI I felt a truer form of emptiness, and now I wonder why I became so transfixed by the polished reflections of the new learning and research center. They seemed to have a cathartic effect, somehow canceling the irritation I’d felt from sustained exposure to high levels of bogusness traversing the vicissitudes of The New Death Strip . To just look away entirely, straight into the sky or towards the rail line or a group of trees outside the campus’s border, seemed like the denial of something. But by gazing into the reflections I could somehow look at the architecture without flinching. I found a way to suspend judgment on an architecture that I’d initially found to be plainly deterrent, and the act seemed to have implications for the rest of my survey in general. The NDS can be seen as a panoply of disassociated visions, each one highly specific in the minds of those who were responsible for turning them into something more real. Because it exists in a space lacking cultural legacy, anything seems possible on the NDS. But for whatever reason, whether economic, sociological, historic or psychological, there’s not much along the line of the old Wall that’s exuberant or experimental. It may just be down to the fact that it’s much easier to have a vision than to be visionary. The entire ensemble at HPI, and along the New Death Strip as a whole, is a mirage. It is the production of so many irregular conditions that float within a cultural vacuum, a cross section of refracted and disassociated allusions to the culture of its makers. Only by accident, it seems, has something taken seed there that can be seen to be legitimately either conservative or radical.

After the time spent at HPI the mirage feeling kept recurring. Following a much needed bucolic romp along the Stichkanal we came upon Europarc Dreilinden, a towering island of commercial real estate speculation built upon the former site of the largest border crossing between the old East and West, the place that was formerly Checkpoint Charlie’s lesser-known big brother, Bravo. Navigating our racing bikes over the bumpy terrain of the footpaths to its north, the back end of the some multinational HQ rose from the sandy forest like a volcano of capital from Brandenburg’s economic wastelands. It was totally covered in glass curtain walls, some shuttered a la HPI, and I immediately began trancing out on more of those puffy clouds being mirrored back to me. For a moment I looked deeper, behind the reflections, and was able to identify the building’s occupant without the need for any signage or cute logos.

The walls of the hallways had been color coded floor for floor in Ebay’s signature palette of red, blue, yellow and lime green. Beyond, two more office blocks gently imposed themselves upon the scene. The first was clad with polished black glass, the second in perfectly planed limestone tiling. If HPI were a talented pup showing industry and promise as it explores the new surroundings of its Prussian socio-cultural landscape, Europarc would be a hyperreal alpha male wolf, lurking silently but ready to pounce. The expanses of smooth façades drew my eye from one consummately ludicrous high rise to the next, until the biotope landscaping feature at the center of it all tempted me to supplant reveries born of glass and steel with the picturesque vision of their own reflections in the watery stillness of an artificial wetlands preserve. To the south, beyond the reeds and willows of the landscape feature, I saw the backwards letters of the two great “EUROPARC.de” billboards. They stood side by side above naturalistic ground cover, like twinned sentinels protecting this corporate fantasy from the forbidding threat of the A115 highway beyond.

I turned back and after a little while happened upon a cozy loop road doing its best to link up the motley cast of architectural characters that make up Europarc Dreilinden, each one the fragment of a collective dream that offers no rest. Amongst the such neighbors as the Porsche dealer, Ebay+Paypal and the Ibis hotel there stood a pristine, new, and un-demarcated building. Like the learning and research center at HPI, it was so fresh that it hadn’t been finished yet. Refuse from its construction littered the edges of a freshly asphalted parking lot, and the place felt calm as I continued to document the paths of clouds reflected in the structure’s expanses of glass.

Only a lone a window cleaner interrupted my meditations as he carefully wiped their panes clean; the mirage, I then understood, has to be diligently maintained.

Eurotrash burial, on the cheap.

In this case I have to wonder if having fun as a window dresser could be costing a business valuable customers. You never know in the east side of Berlin. Is the responsible party in fact winning their business with this unlikely scenography? Or perhaps the people who enroll the services of this undertaker are just oblivious to it all, and are simply taken in by the assurance that the work will be done on the cheap.

Life Death under blue light.

The artistry demonstrated here does nevertheless provide a brave response to the quandary as to how in the name of the lord an undertaker should decorate a shop window. What dreams of death were occupying her subconscious while she hung these curtains of mirror mail? To be sure: as far as purely affective power and the ability to provoke the viewer goes, this work trumps anything you’re likely to see in the trendy art galleries to be found in the same neighborhood.

Next up: Berlin hairdressers’ trashy storefronts. Send us your pics!

“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?

I always look forward a little to this strange surrealist juxtapostion, by mytonomie, of plane through pub. Both, passengers and pub, seem to have lost their hull (Hull?). It reminds me of the jet engine crushing through a suburban home in Donnie Darko. There’s got to be a space-time portal in here somewhere leading to the beginning of a mind blowing narrative.

Check out the Tudor detailing and the micron-thin carpet, crisply bisected by the terminal flooring. Is it to assure that the cleaning contractor can clean right through, for insurance purposes, or because they haven’t come up with a carpet that can withstand the steps of 6.6 mio annual passengers that pass through this pub a year? That’s got to be a record, and talk about Laufkundschaft.

Using Lego’s Digital Designer Software, I have built a shed. Joy is a real shed; faint amusement is a virtual shed; and unadulturated eccentricity is a virtual Lego shed. It’s an unconventional way to spend your time, but when you get into the groove of deep, left-field architectural research, you just have to ride it out and see where you end up.

Building with virtual Lego is a trade-off between the complete lack of tactile fun, and a limitless supply of bricks. It’s like Google’s SketchUp, except that when you’re done, you can click the ‘Order’ button and have your shed shipped out to you at enormous cost.

These are great times.

Hot damn! Just look at the web address in the fourth line: «Enjoy Rome. Walking. Fascist.» What grotesque poetry! There should be an annual literary prize for URLs.

What makes Portal so completely mind-boggling is the way its developers have combined natural physical laws (such as gravity), with the stuff of science-fiction (wormholes) in a relatively familiar gaming surrounding (a sinister science facility).

Familiar territory, unfamiliar strategy

Portal rethinks space by rethinking weaponry. Instead of a gun, you are given a tool with which you can punch wormholes into walls, floors or ceilings. A kind of temporary, sub-atomic interaction with the architecture is the result. The principle is simple but the consequences are spectacular. Shoot with one hand and you make an orange hole, shoot with the other hand and you make a blue hole. The holes are connected, allowing you to enter one and exit from the other. A great way of crossing unsurmountable obstacles: don’t jump them, suggests the game, bend space/time around them.

Mirror effect: looking at yourself through a portal in the ceiling

The player can also combine the wormhole principle with the effects of gravity: crossing a hole too large to jump can be achieved by shooting a hole in the wall behind you, then jumping into the hole and shooting a second hole directly into the floor below you as you approach it. Momentum then propels you over the top of the hole you just jumped down.

The portals also radically subvert the the first-person-shooter (FPS) game-genre by enabling the player to inspect their alter-ego as in a mirror by using two adjacent wormholes. In doing this Portal also exploits the inherent coyness of the FPS-typical camera viewpoint, exposing the fact that you are actually playing a female character, still a rarity in this type of game despite Lara Croft.

Joe McNeilly, senior editor of the online gaming journal Games Radar, has in fact written a lucent feminist reading of Portal in which he offers a Freudian reading of the portals whcih are «metaphorical birth canal through which the protagonist is constantly being born into new trials». Where Lara Croft blasts her way through Tomb Rader with a rich arsenal of weapons, Portal’s protagonist, Chell, makes subtle architectural changes to see her through. I urge you to read McNeilly’s article, and consider why such intelligent writing about computer games doesn’t appear in the mainstream architectural press.

Chell confronts herself

The disturbed geometries of the architecture are matched by the equally disturbed psychology of the gameplay. A malfunctioning computer (with a female voice) called GlaDOS taunts you from the off, offering dubious advice, and alternating between insult and praise for your actions. One recalls the dramatisation of Arthur C. Clarke’s HAL9000 in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, but also more recent films such as the disturbing but not quite so satisying Cube, in which a group of people wake up in a nightmarish architectural puzzle with no recallection of how they got there.

I’m no expert in gaming, and I don’t own a games console even though Portal is as good a reason as any to do so. But I’d like to know if there are any more games out there treating architecture not just as a dumb backdrop, but as an integral part of game dramatology. As I’ve coming to understand it, Portal’s makers, Valve, are responsible for the game Half-Life 2 in which a «gravity gun» comes in to play. This is what I’m after, physics-busting, architecture-warping, wormhole-pimped fractal geometry in a gaming environment inspired by M.C.Escher.

The ease with which Google (an internet search engine) enables us to access photographic material, and the cryptic fuzziness of search results, plunges us into a serendipitous space lacking any kind of context. The search results page, with its bland grid of suggestions, brings us unapologetically close to answers to questions like «how many photographs have ever been taken?»; «what would they like look like side by side, unsorted?», «how high would the mountain of photos be if they were all developed or printed onto paper?».

Indeed, context-free collections of unrelated pictures have become something of a micro-phenomena with websites such as ffffound.com and the similarly named as-found.net offering an addictive daily update of pictures torn from their source, and offered up without comment or judgement. Whereas fffound.com is more concerned with pronounced aesthetics, as-found.net considers itself to be a place of quiet, where pictures, with their inherent inner perfection, may be contemplated anew, without all the distraction of their original context. Of course, their new context is a framework in which an anti-aesthetic of imperfection might thrive. Vive le crap, so to say.

The picture above has been lurking on the desktop of my computer for months, doing nothing. I’ve had to create a new category for this posting: «hyperreal». It’s where SLAB would like to turn its attention slightly away from architectural siutations which are directly experienced, and take a look at spaces and structures caught somewhere between the real, the fictional and the downright daft.

Volume of Google search-queries for each architect’s full name in all regions throughout the year 2006.

Frank (in green) comes out on top overtaking Zaha (in red) in February whilst loosing favour towards November. Rem (light blue) bumbles along quite steadily but Daniel (yellow) dissapears off Google’s radar in July, only to reappear in August.

Here are the results for the period 2004 to 2006:

Here Zaha enjoys a huge surge of popularity in Jan 2004 as she wins the illustrious Pritzker Prize. The only rush of interest for Daniel arrives for a short moment in June 2004 around the opening of the Jewish Museum in Copenhagen.

The Big Four are often refered to as “star-architects”, so it’s easy to forget just how utterly insignificant they are when compared to someone of true significance: Britney Spears (dark blue). Add her to the equation, and architectural discourse flatlines: