Flacid: the Black & Decker KR 500 CRE Pansy Pants

After a recent drilling session ended in the usual fit of foaming-mouthed rage, I decided to blame to the tool and get my hands on something a bit more pro, just out of curiosity. The guy at the counter of my local DIY store did a lousy job of hiding a knowing smirk when I told him I’d been using a Black & Decker, which I’d admittedly bought out of a vague sense of patriotism a few years ago. Like a kindly doctor he gently recommended an 800W Bosch GBH 3-28 DFR. “A completely different quality of drilling,” he noted. “Like the difference between a rocket and a …”, and then after some careful consideration, “… and a tennis ball”.

Thrilling drilling: the Bosch GBH 3-28 DFR God of Thunder

Doctor Drill was right: a bit of Bosch GBH was exactly what was needed. The drill bit melted into the wall like the proverbial hot knife through butter, and once the six holes were done (which took little more than two minutes) I seriously started wondering if I shouldn’t just carry on, and drill a few more holes for the future. You never know when you might need a good hole.

I have since reflected that a country’s tools must surely be a reflection of the substances they are required to work. A hole in the wall of a Victorian terraced house in England may require nothing more than a domestic-grade Black & Decker tennis ball. But before an Ø8mm wall plug can be sunk into the fired ceramic bricks of a Berlin Altbau, some serious Stuttgart-made shit must be wielded. It’s a simplistic and worringly nationalistic reading of the situation, and doesn’t take Black & Decker’s entire product range into account nor the international market in which Bosch operates, but I’m a convert all the same. I now Know. The bad workman always blames his tools. Maybe so, but a good workman is also able to pass informed, if frothing-mouthed, judgment on ones felt to be woefully inadequate.

No-nonsense interior

Back in Berlin, I searched for opticians to have the lenses replaced. I went to Fielmann first, looking for a budget solution, but left in mild disgust. The sales person was competent and nice, but had the expressiveness of a Family Guy character. A search on qype, a popular whinge platform, left me with two options in my neighborhood. A place called Brillen in Berlin and Optiker Bösche. Photos of the first showed a designery interior with Berlin wall graphics of the TV Tower at Alexanderplatz. Design tends to attract annoying people and any self-aware reference to place disgusts me. I am here to buy optics not Berlin, which is the place where I live, not a commodity. Optiker Bösche had a gray no-nonsense interior. Gray makes everything else look great. This must be an optician that understands seeing. No identity graphics, just a solitary poster advertising eye wear, which is what I was looking for. I was drawn to that. The signage said: “Bösche – contact lenses – eye glasses.”

When the architecture recedes as scaffold, the life it supports pops forward, which is why I like the propped up makeshift feel of the great Anglo-Saxon cities, prior to Giuliani and his imitators, or Madrid, prior to EU funding and the ensuing flotilla of pavement cleaning vehicles.

I spotted a familiar large neon sign on the roof in one of the photos. It looked like it was from the fifties. I could never figure out why it was still there and had even survived the building’s recent renovation. With neon circles rippling from what appeared to be a pair of eyes, I always thought of it as an owl standing guard, trying to hypnotize me while I wait for the green light at the intersection of Greifswalder Straße and Am Friedrichshain, where once stood the king’s gate or Königstor. The Prussian king Frederick William III passed through it in December of 1809 on his return from Russia, where he had found refuge from Napoleon. On an intermediate level of consciousness, I somehow associated the sign on the roof with the optician below when I read that the Bösche business had been there since the 50s.

In case you forgot: in order to improve our service, we will record this and any other conversation

The service was great and the staff very friendly and chatty, even though I had a hard time following Herr Bösche’s deliberations on the current state of optometry in this country through the eye-test glasses that were seriously distorting my already strong astigmatism. Opticians and dentists seem to share a tendency to debilitate their subjects with medical instruments before subjecting them to lengthy monologues.

It was the flak tower of nearby Volkspark that had protected the neighborhood from allied bombings. Pilots simply tried to avoid its reach. The conquering Russian army turned left off what is today Karl-Marx-Allee to get to the center, sparing this neighborhood. Where today townhouses in the British style create an air of the Cote d’Azur at Schweizer Gärten, there used to be a recreational park, with a ball room much like Clärchens, and a coffee pavilion. People brought their own cake and bought coffee. We discovered we shared a certain distaste for our city’s recent obsession with superfluous pedestrian lights and other Keynesian measures to jump start the local economy. The Lebanese shop owner around the corner collects old post cards of the area. Just after unification, East Germans craved Italian and Chinese food. The famous Chinese restaurant across from the Chinese embassy started here during that time before moving to its current location when locals developed a taste for fake Mexican and Thai or Sushi cooked by Vietnamese.

I asked him about the large neon sign on the roof of the building. It’s an advertisement for an R-F-T BG 19 or Smaragd, maybe ca. 1951/52, a GDR tape recorder. Apparently it’s structurally so intertwined with the building that they haven’t been able to demolish it. The advertisement was for a different range of the electromagnetic spectrum than I had inferred with my owl analogy. Sound is this sign’s subject, not vision. I appreciate the physicality of the fabricated sign over the digitized flatness of the ubiquitous fabricated image and wonder how many conversations start over a megaposter. There’s something here about the animation of inanimate buildings (Immobilie in German). I should look up John Hedjuk.

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

I’ve come to lament the prevailing mediocrity of my re-adopted country, the Bundesrepublik Durchschnitt, where the news seems to only deal with fractional changes in percentage points up or down from a compromise or an average. This averageness has made steady inroads into PB, where I still live, somehow finding expression in a surge in Geox shoes as the hallmark of practical averageness. I am hoping that at some point the gentrifcation carousel will catch up with itself and place me back at the cutting edge, marked by a good mixture of migrant workers and the next version of the flat white, though I hope Cafe CK will stick around, that bastion of excellence and decadence.

Which is why I am so proud of our relatively recently upgraded Kaisers as a place to spend your additional 5 EUR social security per month, because it certainly isn’t average, more Running Man goes shopping. First, they didn’t fall into the glaringly obvious trap of removing the old GDR Kaufhalle aluminum modules that adorned all Kaufhallen around here, communicating “Kaufhalle” to everyone in a nice example of meaningful ornament. Thank you Kaiser, for the sensitivity of sparing us another mindless act of effacing any historical trace of the class enemy with the ephemera of globalized consumer culture. Second, the shit they pulled off inside is absolutely first rate, absolutely daring, something beyond the wildest imagination of anyone daydreaming the future into a void of Tempobohnen (parboiled, freeze dried “speed” beans) in this former Kaufhalle 25 years ago.

Kaufhalle ornament

An array of ceiling mounted, rotating gobo lights and computer controlled strip lighting daube the aisles in pulsating hews from chartreuse to mauve. A weird Ballardianate mare, shopping unsuccessully for arrow root amidst a pop-up border patrol carneval in the flood light zone of the death strip. Background music: The Great Escape, whistled, muffled only by the slightly crude humming of the rotating gobo lights. And in the end, the cashier’s recurring question, a bold pretense of normality: “Sammeln Sie die Herzen?” (”do you collect hearts?” – Kaisers’ reward program). I think they should add the sound of helicopters and the odd bomb whistle. I can see the next stage. Shoppers are handed laser price scanners and shoot down bar codes of sales prices that pop up randomly around the market. If you make it to the cashier without stepping into one of the rotating gobo light cones, you receive double the amount of Herzen. After a few attempts, advanced shoppers master the parcours on Segways and peyote in just under two days.

And it really has an effect, though I’m not sure it’s the intended one. I’ve spotted Incidents of open displays of schizophrenia, a suspiciously skinny, scruffy man in very short red shorts giving his best rendition of an opera overture in the snack aisle, seemingly mislead by this environment to open displays of madness. In the evenings, after the few remaining nice old ladies in PB have cleared the aisles, the show starts, the gloves come off and the most frenzied, primordial shopping experience this side of spear hunting a mamooth begins, for organic avocados, biodegradeable tensides and increasingly, Sternburg Export.

(The clips were shot just after the show starts at 19:00 every day. It picks up after, when hungry shoppers abound. It’s a bit long, but I was really trying to get the sound of the lights rotating.)

Back in the day

Robert has been very active over the last few of days in getting this story out into the world, and has something to offer to the discussion which few of us can match: he lived in the tower with his partner and children for several years. Rather than have his comment fester in the cellar, I’ve decided to post it here:

A former resident speaks.

I lived in the 8th/9th floor of the tower for 8 years. It was extraordinary. The light is absolutely fantastic (maybe not so in the first floor of the wings, but those flats have other qualities too, such as gardens). The plan of the tower is not your standard plan, but they were designed as artist’s studios and transferrred into social housing post facto when the DAAD programme which they were supposed to facilitate was stopped.

It’s a plan that makes demands of you; but gives and gives and gives, too. I lived there as one part of a couple, with one and then two kids, and the plan always adapted. Where else do you pay for 80 m2 and get two 36m2 rooms with light from four sides? This is difficult to understand from the severe exterior – but anyone who tells you these flats are dingy has just never been inside.
The fact that the previous owners went bankrupt had nothing to do with the building. I lived through their death rattles whilst there, and it was horrific. The rest of the time, they were merely dreadful.

Our Vormieter’s [previous tennant - Ed.] last words to me were, “Join the Mieterverien [a Berlin tenant’s organisation] – you’ll need it; and always refuse to pay the Betriebskostennachzahlung [suplimentary payments on running costs], as they will systematically try to rip you off”. Good advice. Had them in court once, and permanent trouble the rest of the time. You do not want to know the gory details, but we were not alone. They never did anything to maintain the property at all.

The owners were a nightmare all by themselves, and managed to devalue their entire portfolio without any help from the architecture – so don’t blame the building – it only suffered from long years of neglect.

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.

However, I was amused to find that the penmanship was of the same dire, subliterate quality that you’d expect to find in a junior school boy’s loo. From the original German, SLAB translates:

– Whoever reads this is stupid.
– Whoever wrote that is even more stupid.
– Whoever reacts to that is the stupidest.
– And what about the one reacting to the reaction?

I anticipate this casual observation will now become something of a hobby: spotting lowbrow scrawlings in highbrow settings. Something along those lines. Send us your own finding on a postcard to the usual address.

“Babette”/view from the street

I don’t really know what this was built for; one would guess a showroom of some kind but a showroom is what you sell things in and that wasn’t a process of daily life that was celebrated behind the iron curtain in the way that this thing was celebrating whatever was supposed to be going on inside of it. Whatever it was, it was definitely an activity that was on show for all to see, the entire envelope of the thing being sheathed in plate glass. A true celebration of something. It is Modernist, idealized, Functionalist space, the kind we love around here, because in the end the function probably didn’t really matter that much to those DDR Baumeisters, anyway. Though some historians and theory wonks might disagree with this point, and we kindly invite them to school me if they do. Because this is (supposed to be) a blog.

Yeah, so I’m sitting there waiting for this dude to show, sipping a glass of overpriced red wine. Gazing at the cars slipping by in the rain, feeling decadent. I glance upward at the ceiling and this blatant flaw in the jewel box’s construction slapped my trained eyes of an architect in the face.

“Babette”/view of ceiling. This collision of modules wasn’t even symetrically placed.

Seeing this really makes me realize what hell people like Mies van der Rohe and his disciples had to go through to really get that high Modernist architecture to be tight. I mean, what their construction contractors had to go through. Its the kind of nonsense that one never would find in a similar situation in West German constructions, never ever I don’t think. But in America, yeah, probably somewhere, but not like on the big boulevard in Washington DC where the soldiers would parade by in front of ICBMs towed along on tractor trailors.

That said, seeing something like this feels like a lilting sigh of relief, a gentle pause from the persistent rigor that glues 60’s Modernism together.

Above and below is Finnish artist Eemil Karila’s Surface Values, currently installed in Program, an architectural project space in Berlin.

The typical austerity of the white exhibition space is shifted in this installation by the periodical switch from standard white neon lighting, to ultra violet black light. The swirling forms on the floor are the traces of UV ink mixed into the cleaning fluid of the gallery’s cleaning lady.

Vernissages are peculiar things at the best of times, but the opening night of Surface Values was particularly disorientating. On opening nights the art in question is of little importance. It must take second place behind the social gathering in which communication is reduced to a blur of distracted introductions punctured by neurotic who-else-is-here gazes over shoulders. What was interesting here though, was the same thing that eventually drove me out of the place: the room was making me feel terribly ill, and the single bottle of beer I had drunk, felt more like ten.

Aesthetically they’re a bit difficult – though I generally do like the tough and functional look – and are even weirder to think about. What do these buildings say about how much people in Copenhagen value the safety and protection of their bikes? I mean, does a bicycle shed really need to have steel gates that open via electric motors that are key-activated?

The seriousness of these constructions can only be partially justified by the fact that they were full-up with bikes at noon on a weekday. Okay, the location’s not far from the central station … but really.

Hopefully we’ll be out securing the perimeter if the base gets hit.