Looking at the facade so unwillingly, my eye is drawn to the strange house-like monument that stands before it. Its primitive form, coated with the dregs of neon-colored billpostings, exudes a raw, spontaneous energy that’s in stark contrast to the church’s insipid architectural contrivances.

With this image we hereby draw to a close the publication of Victor Brigola’s wonderful series of photographs of rowhouse churches. It is, I think, a fitting way to end. Ever since the project began, this image has been the can being kicked down the road, an ugly truth that I wanted to ignore. But in the end it has served as an inspiration, a testament to the fact that a beautiful picture can be taken of something that isn’t.

Aesthetically, the former church seems a likely candidate to have been abandoned by its congregation. To be honest, it’s really just a clumsy hodgepodge of disparate elements slapped together with little sensitivity or grace, the highlight of which is the little towerette on the right hand side, crammed cozily against the wall of the neighboring apartment house.

Many thanks again to Victor Brigola for this, the penultimate photograph to be featured in this series. All of the pictures are on view in the show “Feeling the Void” at the Vero Linzmeier Galerie until November 17th.

This Catholic job on Dänenstrasse appears incredibly secure in its standing, having little need for the kind of overwrought historical pastiche of its protestant brethren featured elsewhere in this collection. Its appearance has something more to do with an ideal than the contingencies of history, I would argue, and references to previous styles have been sublimated by a vision so reduced that it seems to be simultaneously both primitive and futuristic. A little dab of razzle dazzle hasn’t been forgotten, though: the guilded cross provides a not-so-subtle reminder of who’s got the money and isn’t afraid to show it.

As you may have seen by clicking onto the photographer’s link above, Mr. Brigola will be showing works from this series from Thursday, Oct. 27 in the show entitled “Feeling the Void” at the Vero Linzmeier Galerie. The opening party will be from 6:00-9:00pm on Thursday, I hope to see you there!

In a sense, the presence of such a covering simply heightens the rather abstract structural qualities that these churches all seem to have. None of them are as elaborate in their detailing or as dense in their rendering as the models from which they were derived, in spite of the fact that their façades are generally coated in a rife-running admixture of decorative treatments. And in this case, as the church + cloister stood before the photographer on a chilly morning last spring, the most juicy parts of all have been both muffled and abstracted. Beneath the white sheathing can be found the rich combination of a loggia, crenellated turrets, a circular white clock face and a broad, gothic-arched drive that leads to an inner courtyard which is has been touted as a verdant Shangri-La, far removed from the city’s bustling streets -in essence, a real hodge podge of turn-of-the-19th-century eclecticism. The architect, whoever he was, truly red-lined his understanding of historical styles, having shifted his encyclopaedic knowledge of them into a proverbial overdrive, if you will, which was his reward, perhaps, for having finished top of the class at some stiflingly oppressive Wilhelminian Bauakademie.

Campanile, campanilo, campanilotto -as the Wikipedia entry on Italian diminutives states, “there are no limits to suffixation, which could continue”.

Thanks again to Victor Brigola for his photographic offerings to this humble channel of architectural conjecture.

One more for the collection of photographer Victor Brigola’s edition of images produced for Slab.

Perhaps the ‘jects surrounding this baby are more reminiscent of Beograd, or its suburbs, than the church itself -at least on the outside. It’s apparently a classic retrofit, indicating demographic shifts in the working class district of Berlin-Wedding. Or could the church have been purpose built? Indeed there is some arcane romance in both the design of the crenelations, as well as of the steppy triangle things over the tripartite entrance way. There’s no real info on the edifice itself on the parish homepage, though a nice synopsis of the order is presented. Lots of strife, of course. All the agonizing multiculturalism seems to have started with the physical location of the Serbian homeland being stuck between its two major Christian influences, Constantinople and Rome.

Still, I remain convinced that the surroundings look more yugo than the church itself.

Had some friends in town, a German-Nigerian couple from Tel Aviv, who had met in Lagos. He’s doing alright running a factory producing custom transformers for the West Bank and Gaza, so they’d asked me which city I’d recommend out of Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Singapore for their trip over last New Year’s. I had quickly picked Hong Kong. I hadn’t been to any of them, but I try to mask my terrible indecisiveness with split second decision making, post-rationalizing and a poker face. They didn’t like Hong Kong. They said it was sterile and bland. What about the 3D character, the elevated free-ways, the escalators soaring past skyscrapers, the hive like shanties full of country folk trying to make it in the big city, I said. Nope, boring, they said, like any other city the world over, today. The shanties are gone, swiftly developed away to ever further fringes by the usual in-your-face brand architectures and architectures of convenience rapidly replacing anything with character and a little bit of dignity, certainly any shanty towns or anything else harboring the unexpected, the uncontrollable, in short, all the stuff the well adjusted consumer abhors and exactly what big cities were once about, organic, creative messiness replaced by retail junk with obsolescence built into it, I snarked into my ridiculously inflated Burgundy bulb.

Humbox at correct resolution

“Everything today is built for the image. Cities are reduced to locations, for tourists, for tourism ads, and commodity as image. It’s like all these design hotels and culture outlets popping up, all the Foster, MAD or BIG or whatever acronymed OMA franchise or knock-off buildings. Once you walk up to these buildings, it feels like several layers of details and intricacy are missing and all that seeming sophistication from a distance falls apart in an instance. The detail is now in the image, forged in GPUs with multiple pixel shader pipelines, workstations with twin socket quadruple core CPUs and 128 Gigs of RAM, ever faster render engines, with print technology and abseilers that graft terapixels of imagery onto megaposters. Who looks at buildings from close up anymore? You stand in front of the Humboldt Box to look at the Altes Museum, at the Altes Museum to look at the Funkturm, on the Funkturm to look back at the Humboldt Box. You’re not supposed to look at buildings from up close. Surfaces strive for smoothness, nothing’s there to obstruct the flow from location to location and into the souvenir shops. Everything’s being set up for street view or Flickr or Picasa or augmented imagery. The image contains more information than the building. It’s the age of hi-res imagery and low-res buildings!!!”

So I went down to the Humboldt box the next day to test my point and took some macro photos and close-ups. One of the project initiators had recently used the Anglicism “Top-Location” outlining his project’s impending success in a German press release. How great then to still experience the wonderland of analog continuity with plain eye and macro lens and delve in the nitty-gritty of the in-betweens of the discontinuous image raster. Let’s see how it panned out…

humbox alucobond

CMYK construction

back-off: the image bolted together starts falling apart

further signs of megaposter progeny

macro humbox bolt

The building which previously served as a prop for hairspray, bikinis, and sandals now advertises so-called high culture, or the absence thereof, the Humboldt Forum, in a classic case of low-high-middle-brow confusion often found in the  cultural logic of late capitalism. The Humboldt Box is essentially a folded megaposter, parading a similarly flat message of representation and merely evoking the 3D. In that sense it is not fully three-dimensional, but a sort of relief or pop-up image building with some slapped on applied facing to conceal the detailing that it shares with its true progenitor, the megaposter. Imagery parading as building.

hi-res hairspray iconography – st.diane and st.laetitia

Cold, hard eclecticism: Evangelische Advent-Zachäus-Kirchengemeinde, Danziger Strasse/Heinz Bartsch Strasse

But today we’re looking at a protestant heap of bricks on Danziger Straße. Though sober in its rendering of materials, there’s nonetheless a fairy tale/warped dream quality to it. Dramatically clashing chunks of geometry combine in the name of spiritual whimsy. The result is intriguing, though not exactly something that beckons me to join in on Sunday mornings and pray to Jesus.

None of its surrounding accoutrements regard it as so:

The stout little soldier trash bin, standing guard like a de-commissioned Stasi agent  serving as art museum security, darting behind columns in hopes of some action.

The steel fence that wags its Berliner finger at you, shallowly planted in a time when punishments were harsher, inviting only the very disobedient, or very tall, to stride up the fluted roof, climb onto an architectural monument, and strut around in Berlin’s famous silhouette.

The shy capitalist bike rental sign, inching away from this vortex-vertex, seeking its own meagre limelight.  The not-so-carefully raked triangle of sand below the roof rejecting its fate as planter for vegetation, in favour of planter for architectural vanishing point, at the same time providing a rather generous urban ash-tray.

In a landscape of whirling signs, ducks (if you’ve ever considered the Fernsehturm to connote the toothpick and olive of the terrible martinis served atop), and the golden hands of well-petted statues Marx and Engels, this architectural point has been undersold.

Perhaps what’s needed is a loud neon sign blinking “Stop! Momentous!” or “Damn Right it’s a Pin Joint!“