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.

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

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!“

There were no anarchos and no champagne and no prosecco, just the Prosecus security company, and not much else. Their presence was announced by a printed tarpaulin that had been hastily zap strapped to the construction site’s fencing.

Within the now infamous courtyard a portly employee of that company leered at me from a distance as I appeared at the front entrance, then slowly started to walk in my direction. Between him and me there stood only some more fencing, newly added to block the uninhibited access that I’d enjoyed during my covert, drunken operation a few weeks before. A couple of schicky micky (shitty mitty?) residents then fortunately stepped into the scene, preventing the kind of confrontation that I dread.

This corner is on a narrow street along the main building of the Sorbonne. The railing prevents people using the corner either as a place to urinate or to sleep, or both (note how the spikes point upwards and downwards). The stench of urine from dark urban nooks and crannies can be overpowering, and clearly it can lead to desperate measures in some parts of the world. It is easy to understand the urge to preserve the building and the street in this way. This fairly brutal instance of preservation is interesting, though, because it reveals a feature of preservation efforts in general that is not always apparent. While the task of preservation seems to be concerned with the past, and with the future survival of valued objects, really what is at stake is the control of the streetscape in the here and now.

The construction of the spiked bars (here is another example from a few streets away) are an effective effort at protecting something without destroying it. The space is still public, but it simply cannot be used. The space is negated. So it might be better to put it like this: what we have here is a way of destroying something without protecting it, because the space itself is being protected for non-use. Better to destroy the space than let it be used. In fact, what is being protected is the adjacent space, i.e. the pavement where those who are not mad or homeless walk by. Similarly, churchgoers in Saint Sulpice, a short walk in the other direction, are protected from beggars at the door by this bar which doubles as a boot scraper (for more on boot scrapers in these pages, you might like to read this and this). Admittedly, a beggar could stand here, but would be prevented from sitting. Well, they have to do something to be the deserving poor, don’t they?

Friedenssäule on Mehringplatz with Angel missing

The vacant symbolism of a column bulging under the weight of nothing made me think of the Stadtschloss. There had been recent news of the snags the project had hit. With public enthusiasm waning into mild boredom, it is increasingly unlikely that the target of 80 mil. in private donations required for the construction of the cupola and the baroque facades will ever be met. Apparently, the budget in place only allows for the construction of the castle’s bare concrete core. It’s ironic that the representational center of Berlin would then be filled with a building not that different in aesthetic from the gutted Palast der Republik aesthetic it was meant to dispel.

Which brings back to mind the Stadtschloss competition entry by Kuehn Malvezzi, vindicated by these developments. I found an English translation of Philip Oswalt’s very insightful discussion of the conundrums of this whole undertaking and of Kuehn Malvezzi’s entry here. Their entry plays on the dire financial reality of the Stadtschloss project and turns them into a concept. Their phased proposal was to first construct a stripped down castle out of brick that could persist on its own, to which the baroque facade could be added later, once funding allows. With almost clairvoyant foresight, it omits the cupola altogether.

The botched undertaking of plonking a castle cum cupola on the Palast site in order to erase any memories of a building with associations that, in the eye of some, continue to taint our history like an oil slick, is fast turning the Stadtschloss into an architectural Deepwater Horizon that is now, debt crisis and all, increasingly revealed as the castle in the sky pipe dream that it always was, to many of us. The Prussian turd might just be sinking.

Deepwater Horizon

7 October 1969. High above the representational void at the heart of the bombed city, the Telecafe at the top of the TV tower is set in rotational motion. This celebratory carousel of solo entertainer with organ and some selected guests draws out first circles around the representational center of a fledgling republic in honor of its 20th anniversary.

It is the architectural equivalent of the refrain as a strategy of place making: “A refrain…is like a song that creates the beginning of order in chaos – as in a child singing in the dark…the beginning of the refrain is fragile. Next, a refrain creates a territory, an organization of a limited space with a circle drawn around it.” 1

Centripetal forces of the first refrain soon draw others – circular follies as markers of places and commerce: the C&A sign, the Weltzeituhr, the Berliner Verlag, a spinning display of rare Döner meat, the rings of Saturn, the spiraling logo of Media Markt.

If the surveying tool of Cartesian town planning is the groma, the strategy of place making by refrain is best represented by the dreidel:

More dreidel with Ira from Jesse Morros on Vimeo.

Dublin underwent an intense building boom during the ten years or so until early 2008. Under Ireland’s neoliberal economic policies, the emphasis was (and continues to be) very strongly on private enterprise as the key force in transforming the built environment. Government, local and national, was dominated by parties that believe in small government and a minimum of interference in the delicate balance of the market. This meant that there was virtually no social content in most of what was built in that period – no transport infrastructure, no educational insfrastructure, no energy efficiency, no green spaces, inadequate living space, insufficient drainage, poor materials and poor aesthetics.

This box on Cork Street, which presumably contains a local telecommunications switch, is a product of its times. It once stood flush with the line of the buildings on the street, but the new structure behind it has a recessed entrance with a broad swathe of pavement in front of it. I suppose the broad pavement was designed with a view to creating a dynamism to the entrance to the glass-fronted atrium. However, whether by design or by default or by mistake, the box and its contents were never shifted back to the new wall line. And so it stands, ruining the pavement-to-atrium effect (lame though it would have been) and creating a pointless blockage on the public way.

The problem here is not just lazy design and planning, it is a result of a toothless local government and planning regime, run by people who, when they are not being witless in their monitoring of how this entirely rebuilt street functions, are spineless in their attitudes towards builders, developers and property investors. It is a box of neoliberalism.

Is this dead space ‘dead space’ because its function is over generalised, or because its function is over specialised?

I might say the latter, but its function isn’t clear. It seems to be the entrance to a hotel, but the brightly lit overhang speaks more of warehouse loading bay than a welcome mat for the weary traveller. It looks like somewhere service personnel might smoke.

However, if the space is dead because it is over generalised, then why is it so secretive and paranoid? The ramp is guarded by pot-plant sentries, the four possible entrances are unsignposted (with the main one taking on the form of a decelerating turnstile) and the windows conceal their contents with opaque foil.

The upper atrium of this massive concrete structure has an elegant modular roof structure, where the light somehow permeates the whole space, in a way that reminds me of the Mezquita in Córdoba in southern Spain. As you stand waiting for your train, the scratched patterns on the concrete panels on the wall opposite provide a welcome respite from the advertising-drenching that is air travel. The mode of construction — embedding and then removing the twisted rods used in reinforced concrete into the surface of the wall — is brutifully apparent. It is hard to resist trying to reorganise their sequence in your mind, but you soon realise they could never match up. Does the weary traveller enjoy looking at this jumbled railway route map, or does it awaken a certain anxiety that you may have read the RER map (below) incorrectly and be waiting for the wrong train?