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 …

… Alpine cascades …

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: