This is the Rotating Earth Hydrosphere, which you can pick up for a mere 870 British Pounds, should you wish, though the price doesn’t include pump or resevoir so you’re going to have to stick it in the bath tub and wizz it round with your hands if you’re on a tight budget. Watch it go round and round. I’ve filmed a good 19 seconds or so of hydrospherical action, and if you want any more you’re just going to have to imagine it, or go out and buy one of the damned things. There’s a garden centre in Farnham Royal, England, which will be delighted to get rid of one.

On a recent trip to the UK, my Mum happened to mention that garden centres had mutated into fully-fledged recreational destinations, and were no longer the damp horticultural points-of-sale I remembered from my childhood. They had become places where, having stocked up on Catherine and Royal William rose bushes, you could eat a traditional Sunday roast in the restaurant, have your car washed by hand, and read the papers whilst the kids molest coi carp. Tapping into these suburban rituals, it sounded as though garden centres had subsumed the entire idea of a typical Sunday afternoon into a commercial venture.

A rock solid investment.

Hoping to back up Mother’s claims with some hard data, I briefly dredged through the internet where I came across a 2008 catering report entitled “More Than Tea & Cake” [PDF, 410KB], published by Britain’s Horticultural Trade Association. In it, the garden center coffee shop is specifically identified as “a place to meet and socialise” where customers “don’t have to eat, but … can be persuaded to do so”. This sounded promising, and hinted at subliminal architectural features design to coerce and stimulate.

So once at Farnham Royal, I was primed for an orgy of 24-hour cream teas and an acre of retail space, but the catering revolution had yet to penetrate this particular enclave, as had customers, judging by the empty car park.

Stones were on sale, some sorted geographically (Rutland Limestone, Cornish Slate), others sorted by generic aesthetic merits (Clear Green Drilled Glass Stone), hinting strongly at two opposing petrographic fractions amongst local gardeners: the authenticists and the artifists. Woe betide them that mix their stones.

But things really started getting interesting in the ornament section. Just what the hell those pieces of bent aluminium conduit were is anyone’e guess. Close inspection revealed few clues: they could just as well be some kind of fountain (I’m guessing the manufacturer might call this a “flanged cascader”, or something), or possibly a lighting feature. It is not to my taste, but the sign said it had won some award or other. That’s one trophy I do want to see.

The “Dubai Self Contained Water Feature, £317.17” looked more familar. As a seven year old I had watched it torture Princess Leia in Star Wars. Now is was a garden accessory, and probably had some kind of undocumented death-ray function for the neighbor’s cat. Seriously though, aren’t you happy that the price of LEDs has dropped so much that humanity can now pull off shit like this? And why “Dubai”? How many sci-fi desert–themed gardens can be found within Buckinghamshire?

Farnham Royal was pretty much the damp horticultural point-of-sale I remembered from my childhood. Long may it stay that way.

This non-humanist, or post-humanist, worldview yields some interesting results for those of us who are interested in the built environment. Clearly, the built environment is a human product, but this does not mean that it cannot produce its own consequences, independent of human intention or even knowledge. Doors require opening and closing. Who is to do this work, and what kinds of social practices develop as a result?

This elaborate carved door to an ordinary-looking apartment building in Paris draws our attention. It is the first line of defence for the security of those who live in the building, and clearly there seems to be a problem with how well it is doing its job. How do we know this? Because the following notice is affixed to the inside of the door:

Please excuse the photography. The notice may be translated as follows:

Why has nobody attached a hydraulic door-closing arm to this door? Possibly because the door is too valuable an antique to desecrate in this way. Or possibly because it is cheaper to put up this plaque. Why not just put in a modern door? Probably because the door is cherished for its aesthetic properties. What is happening is that the door is enlisting our help because it cannot perform its task properly. Its beauty and its age are not its greatest assets, as it would have us believe, rather they are its weakness. The mode of address, from the door to its user, is interesting too. The door needs to remind us how to operate it, that is, how to behave in relation to it. Design usually aims to perform functions on our behalf, instead of us, to save us the trouble; but then it relies on us to operate it properly, or to know how to act in its presence. Revolving doors require a very specific mode of behaviour, for instance. Hinged doors, such as this one, need to open and, especially when our security is at stake, to close when we need them to.

It may be objected that the message is not actually from the door, it is a statement by a human that has been affixed to the door. This is true, and Latour would concur, as his call to pay attention to the social lives of objects is not so naive as to anthropomorphize them. He does not propose that the door addresses us. Rather, he proposes that the social world is mediated through designed, technological objects, and this door is one of them. The particular features of this door results in a particular kind of social relation and mode of address – humorous, admonishing, friendly, self-deprecating, apologetic, and so on. The problem that people have not been closing this door properly in the past is a problem for the social life of a particular set of humans, and so the door has become the medium through which one group communicates its frustration with another group. The door and its functionality, or non-functionality, are part of the glue that holds this microcosm of the social together in a particular network of relations.

And I bet you thought I would talk about the trompe-l’oeil carving.

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.

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.

Normally this kind of thing would be called a doubly redundant system, would it not? Only here, the entire ensemble is redundant. What remains is art, clearly. No one thinking seriously about ram-raiding the Aedes Pfefferberg tonight is going to be particularly worried by the two surrogate bollards standing in for their absent yellow counterparts, which seem to have gone AWOL.

Colleague Andreas (who took the photo), Florian and myself watched on amused as a security guy scurried out of his hut, removed the two central posts, and ushered a large white Transit van into the goods yard. Colleague Andreas then transposed the already ridiculous situation into high parody, by insisting that the posts were repositioned for the above picture.

Anon!

These boot scrapers, seen last week in Eton, reminded me of how a sense of place and a sense of self-identity in that place, is curiously entwined with the mundane set of props specific to that place. For me, these 19th Century objects were a reminder that I was “home”, but also a reminder that I had become a stranger.

Actually noticing the scrapers, and singling them out as something special meant that I was now on the outside looking back in. Belonging to a place is forgetting what makes it different from another place.

But why aren’t boot scrapers to be found in modern architecture? Whilst paving stones and tarmacadam rid towns of muddy thoroughfares, horses remained in use for some time. Besides mud, one can assume that a significant amount of horse manure was removed from shoes and boots too. Seen in the context of the contemporary city street, bestrewn with dog turd, and the question of their disappearance remains.

Excitingly, there is a boot scraper pool at Flicker. Make sure to watch the slide show with a brandy this evening.

To refer to them as simply brutal would suffice, with a capital “B” – Brutal – perhaps not. I’m not sure if Reyner Banham could handle the term being applied to something that’s so fucking ugly at first glance. But the idea is elegant; that a single shape could be configured in two different ways and repeated so as to form infinite combinations of benches or planters.

Now, of course, its only weeds that are growing in the exposed cavities. I’m sure that these things would be summarily carted off and crushed to pieces long before anyone would go to the far more cost-effective measure of planting some geraniums in them.

I also wonder if it’s at all conceiveable that any hot-shit avant neo-brutal architect would ever dare to employ this pebble-coat type surface. It was all the rage back in the 60’s and 70’s, in the Western world as well. I remember an octogonally-shaped drive-up bank in Charlottesville, Virginia that was covered in it, punctuated by dark brown tinted plate glass windows.

A piece of 21st centurey hardscape that looks perfectly at home in the environs of the small, yawningly conservative German city of Oranienburg. It only needs to be slid over about six inches to be on axis with one of the bays in back of it, and the fact that its not makes this pic really annoying for me to look at. I would slide the bench over as well, just to line everything up.

The town of Potsdam on the other hand, overtly aware of its Historical Importance, has taken a radical step and seems to be camouflaging its grey boxes, Liu Bolin-style.

Click to enlarge

I guess you could go a step further and turn the idea into a real concept for architecturally “sensitive” tourist hotspots. Imagine a similarly camouflaged hot-dog stand in front of the Chateau de Chaumont in the Loire Valley …