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.

(The Pretense of Craft in Contemporary Construction, Part 1)

Decosterd and Rahm have a great reference to Nietzsche and his concept of a phsyiological art as part of the introduction to their book Physiological Architecture. Unfortunately, I don’t remember exactly what it is except that it was really hard to read (white print on white paper) and awesome, but trying to be more a blogger than an online magazine writer, I’m too lazy to look it up. Maybe you can look it up. Something about how an aesthetic experience can have a physiological effect on people. So perhaps for the only time in history, Decosterd and Rahm and Marc Kocher (Palais Kolorectalbelle, and the building below, etc.)  in one text. Carpe dieminis, or whatever.

I don’t want to end up a bitter man all alone, walking around with the eccentric shuffle of an orthodox Jew, whose bent frame and flapping arms serve the sole purpose of taxiing his brain from A to B, lamenting the decline of a once exciting city full of architectural potential. So I check my initial reaction, try an open mind. Yeah, maybe this is not so bad, he’s trying to loosen the strict Prussian window bands of Gründerzeit urban blocks. I want to have positive reactions to Berlin’s new buildings one is often too quick to bash.  But I can no longer ignore the feeling of nausea spreading to my limbs from my gut, and I know this wobbly building is doing it to me. I mean, if this is origami (the architect’s project inspiration according to his website), then this pile of orange polyester construction netting might as well be Macramé. If I were mean, I might speculate that the origami spiel conveniently masks the fact that the developer one day value engineered any Italianate and expensive to build curves away with the highest arc segmentation setting in FunCad when the financial crisis hit. I want to sneeze, or cry, or puke, just flush it out, this physiological effect of an architecture that my entire aesthetic apparatus wants to reject and eject and purge.

I have to check myself. I must be getting carried away, here. But it’s there, undeniably, a visceral reaction, a feeling of having ingested something bad with my eyes, a dead oyster, some shady street food, too much cake, the fumes of a burning tire.

By God, what are these drops on the underside of the window’s top molding? (excuse the phoney pics, but if you look closely) Are they a 21^st century aberration of Guttae?  Towards the window’s bottom, the unfinished application of acrylic render reveals blocks of extruded polystyrene. You’ve got to be kidding. If I remember correctly, guttae are stylistic vestiges of a time when Greek temples were still built of wood thousands of years ago. Guttae originally were wooden nails that fixed the timber roof to the wooden architrave. It’s amazing that this little, millennia-old tectonic detail that pertains to craft, to things made by skilled hands as an expression of an architecture of assembly, has found its way onto a building made of goo, poured, spackled and sprayed together of concrete and polymers, and entirely not assembled, let alone by craft.

How did it all get so muddled? The Greeks started it, I guess, emulating wooden nails in stone, but that’s ok, they did it for tradition, and I assume they knew that they once were wood. Not sure what happened in between then and now. But here we have it, a renaissance of the wooden nail, on thermoplastic buildings, a haphazard stylistic reference to something whose meaning is entirely lost, the architectural equivalent of an Arschfax (see below), Chinese characters haphazardly applied on someone’s lower back for looks. Guttae (Greek drops) articulated as droops seems a lot more appropriate for an architecture of pouring. Make them gooey drops next time, please, make me chuckle, a more pleaseant physiological reaction to architecture.

Arschfax (German ass facsimile,  often meaningless motifs applied as tattoo to someone’s lower back)

image courtesy: http://www.photofunblog.com/fashion/free-lower-back-tattoo-designs-for-women-2011-12/attachment/kanji-and-flower-free-lower-back-tattoo-collection/

A pet relationship is essentially about belonging. Pets are also faithful derivatives. The signage on the imbiss is a recognizable graphic iteration of the GSW’s famed meat-pixeled rose-pixeled windows hovering above it. It is a tiny copy, a pocket version of a great novel, “paperback” architecture.

Structurally it is a prop, a simple decorated shed. And, as such, a billboard of sorts, albeit one that does not advertise currywurst. No loud drawings depicting smiling sausages attempting to eat their own kind, no giant 3-D wurst toothpicked onto the roof. While the GSW sells you insurance, this imbiss sells you the GSW. In place of mystery pork, it flogs architecture. This shack has staked out an optimal perspective for viewing the building, and invites you to look up, admire, and while you’re there, enjoy a currywurst. Maybe a coffee.

Pets say a lot about their owners. One can evaluate the merits of the building by investigating its tiny copy. And, standing there, I have to ask myself what makes the GSW so special. Special enough that a currywurst seller invokes it to sell sausages.

It is in fact a structurally gymnastic building. The original rectilinear tower from the 1950s not only still stands, but acts as a sort of stiffening spine for the wing-shaped addition. The wing is essentially tied back to the tower, and each junction between platform and wing and tower is beautifully, cleanly detailed. Shadows obediently follow built lines, the framing is delicate but not fragile.

As with many SH buildings, a colourful facade smiles upon the city, and it is perhaps this gesture that Berliners, as well as the little imbiss, rarely see are drawn to. Within the complexities of built endeavors: contracts, codes, budgets, intricate air management systems, it is the procurement of a soft device: the fabric window shade that garners the GSW’s celebrity in Berlin. Amongst an infinite set of built parts, the window shades, in ca. 8-10 colors, become the building’s most obvious architectural gesture.

A passive heat gain strategy is responsible for the positioning of the massive glazed elevation, and this, as the building’s driving design principle, made it a winner with the clients, for sure.

But for the rest of us, it has more to do with its west-facing facade and the sun. Standing on Rudi-Dutschke-Strasse at Friedrichstrasse at various times of the day, you will encounter constant references to the cosmos. At noon, the facade is lit up in sunset oranges, reds and pinks, shades drawn against the sun, and later, in the evening light, shades open, the glazing reflects the real thing. Perhaps it is the quiet, intuitive performances of buildings that really communicate with us – on a frequency below glass domes, gurkens and pregnant oysters.

The first time I came across the imbiss was in March 2010, at which point it was blooming with GSW pride: red-orange pixel window ornament on 3 sides. It has since been “modernised”, namely in its reduction of colourful pixel-rectangles to one applied sticker on a newly painted cream metal box. Yet, in the end the little imbiss remains loyal to its owner, keeping the last panel, the last semblance of its pet relationship, on its west-facing facade.

There’s been talk for years within the Slab camp about launching a full-scale investigation of this particular detail, so well loved by frustrated German architects. With this article I hope to formally initiate such an action, prompting my colleagues to dig up their own pictures of this particular architectural absurdity. Inspired by sun-drenched holidays in southern Europe, louvers of this kind have been implemented in a most reckless fashion. Berlin and large parts of Germany are generally overcast, as it indeed is at the time of this writing.

The example presented here is adorns a community sports and recreation center on Winstraße, and the state of its as-built condition should have anyway taught its designers a lesson. The east-facing louvers serve no other function than to provide delinquent youths with a firm scaffolding upon which to stand whilst spraying their degenerate tags. If the quality of the graffiti in Berlin were better, one could perhaps show more understanding for such an architectural vagary. As it is, such louvers are worse than useless. They are an aesthetic and environmental abhorrence that has been desperately applied in order to distract us from the sober truth that is represented by these boxes of architectural boredom.

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.

Or should I have written “Abortion of Hans Stimmann’s tenure as Staatssekretär für Planung in der Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung, Umweltschutz und Technologie”?

…and its Nevus

Anyway, here’s a tattoo for your forehead. You’re not even completely done yet, but its just the first of many such impromptu ornaments that will adorn you, I’m sure…so get used to the feeling.

*Big shout out to Walter Benjamin

This gravestone is next to Farahy Church near the village of Kildorrery, County Cork, Ireland. It is one of the small number of older graves in the churchyard which seem to have been retouched in the last couple of decades. The groove of the original calligraphic carving has been cleaned and reinscribed with black pigment. The result is this striking combination of a weathered slab with the crisp new lines of recent re-etching. The facelift draws attention to the fact that the slab would itself have originally been a pristine near-white, and so the writing would have been even more impressive in 1799.

Strange to our eyes are the haphazard-seeming abbreviations, particularly on the right margin. Given the quality of the lettering, surely the stonemason could have foreseen the lack of space for the final letters of some words? In fact there is sufficient space for the letters in question, it just has not been used. Two explanations for these abbreviations come to mind: 1. the mason was charging a per-letter rate and the client saved some money and still got the vital information on the slab, or 2. they simply did not see these abbreviations as anomalous in the way that we might now.

Over 120 years later, the Kelly family erected another headstone alongside, this time in the Celtic Romanesque revival style that had taken hold in the 19th century. This type of gravestone is in imitation of the surviving Irish monastic high crosses, which date from as early as the 7th century. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, resurgent Catholicism and nationalism cherished the early monastic tradition as a key source of indigenous (pre-English colonization) Irish iconography. Stonemasonry had clearly undergone some changes in the intervening years, as the newer grave seems to have been mechanically lettered in a standard font and with a modern respect for left and right margins, and for consistent abbreviation. It is also worth noting that only the lower section of the newer grave has been tailored to the Kellys’ needs, the small connecting part and the cross itself being generic. A further change is in the kind of information that is conveyed and emphasized. Whereas the more recent grave simply lists the names and death dates of the dearly departed (the most recent member of the family was buried here in 1994), all of the flash-bang lettering of the older grave is used to record the name of the person who paid for the grave (Dan Kelly), and not for the poor old dead father.

And here’s Juergen Mayer’s accompanying press release text:

JOH 3 – New Apartmenthouse Johannisstraße 3, Berlin

Property development group Euroboden is building a unique apartment house at Johannisstraße in Mitte, Berlin’s downtown district. J. MAYER H. architects’ design for the building, which will soon neighbor both Museum Island and Friedrichstrasse, reinterprets the classic Berliner Wohnhaus with its multi-unit structure and green interior courtyard. A suspended lamella facade not only provides privacy but also draws historical reference to the elaborately decorated facades from the Wilhelminian period. Plans for the ground floor facing the street also include a number of commercial spaces. The generously sized apartments will face south-west, opening themselves to a view of the calm, carefully designed courtyard garden. Spacious, breezy transitions to the outside create an open residential experience in the middle of the city that, thanks to the variable heights of the different building levels, also offers an interesting succession of rooms. The units’ varying floorplans and layouts indicate a number of housing options; condominiums are organized into townhouses with private gardens, classic apartments or penthouses with a spectacular view of the old Friedrichstadt. The integrated design concept, which incorporates everything from façade to stairwells, elevators to apartment interiors, promises a unique spatial and living experience with an eye to high design.

This seems more the language of a property developer than the artist-cum-architect, and I wonder who really penned these words. As far as the new building’s “historical reference to the elaborately decorated facades from the Wilhelminian period”: really? I have to be honest and state that this is not far off from the tricky-ricky lingo we’ve become accustomed to whist browsing promotional material for such projects as The Fellini Residences.

And the last sentence is pure fluff. The architect – who has been touted by several publications as one of the hottest young German designers of the last few years – appears misguided in the approach he’s taken to representing his own work. Why not save such low-brow stuff for the people who actually have to sell the real estate? Because consumers and producers of culture, to whom an architect would presumably be directing such a press release, generally want to use their minds while reading such blurbs.

The terms in question are waltritus (wall + detritus) and necoration (non + decoration). The first image here is classic waltritus. This featureless and yet busily adorned wall in a Dublin alley displays a downpipe, double guttering, staining, wiring, a wiring sheath, window bars, vents, various boxes and traces of former installations. No decision was made to make this wall like this, yet many separate decisions have been made to achieve this end result.

Classic Waltritus

If waltritus is the material object or objects that we can see, then necoration is the process by which it gets there. Necoration is the unplanned, taste-less, undesigned, ad hoc embellishment of an existing structure.

Now onto the boot scrapers. These photographs were taken on a snowy January afternoon in a network of small Victorian streets of workers’ housing in and around Lennox Street in Dublin 8. The boot scrapers are all identical and very simply fashioned.

The more we look at these boot scrapers, the more their individuality begins to emerge. The one above has been painted the same colour as the front door, for example. This is perhaps not necoration, rather a deliberate aesthetic decision. Then again, it was most likely the most sensible, ad hoc decision for the painter who noticed the rusting hoop beside his or her bucket of light blue paint.

Further observation reveals true waltritus and necoration, however. A thin white plastic housing has been installed to cover gas pipes on many houses, for example. There are also small green boxes affixed to cables, as well as plain metal boxes, and modern ventilation grilles have been inserted.

In some cases the boot scraper has been removed, while in others the cavity in the wall has been painted. For some it has use-value, while for most I suspect it hardly exists at all. When it is used, it is for locking bikes. Every boot scraper is clean, with no sign of being used for cleaning shoes, even when they are caked with snow.

We find ourselves paying attention to the small adjustments made to door sills. Some have tiles, some not. Some doors have a hinged lip to let the rain run off, while others have brass strips housing draught seals. Some people paint their door a different colour to the narrow frame around it, while others don’t go to the trouble.

Some have retained the antique-looking perforated ventilation bricks. They are often to be found at the least well-kept doors, and at doors of the most conservative, dark colours. Are they a marker of poverty?

The aim of these admittedly monotonous image is not to reveal or document detail, rather to show how waltritus has an accumulative, unselfconscious and monotonous effect. Necoration is a process that is the result of a combination of neglect, year-to-year maintenance and renovation, so we tend not to see it, or rather we tend to regard it as a process of natural change.