SLAB Magazine

To be read carefully
This could be an interesting development in the Deutsche Bahn vs. von Gerkan case. Here are some of Hauptbahnhof’s house rules where in paragraph 3 (shown above),
“misuse of the fittings, surfaces, ceiling and walls”
(my italics) is strictly prohibited. Now I’m not a lawyer, but maybe it’d be possible to have the CEO [...]

“Welcome to Skulpturenpark”
I was pleasantly surprised to discover that my favourite piece of inner-city wasteland has been lovingly converted into a colourful Skulpturenpark. Whoever is behind the scheme has put up a sign written in Deunglish, so as to make it clear that the project is young, hip and of international orientation, things which apparently [...]

Whilst the rest of Germany discovers it has a “new underclass” it didn’t know existed, currently dubbed the die neue Unterschicht, Berlin meanwhile is busy building townhouses right in the historical center of the city, no doubt for the comfortable middle-class, who don’t exist in Germany either.
Right opposite the Federal Foreign Office, two whole city [...]

Gustav-Heinemann-Bridge: room for 65,280 bottles of beer
Has anyone else noticed the quite unmistakable resemblance of the Gustav-Heinemann-Bridge to a row of plastic beer crates? Fifty-one such crates should be enough, side by side, to create a decent scale model. I can’t seem to get this image out of my head. It’s not just the [...]

At some point in the summer of 2005 I realised that a subtle transformation was taking place in the streets of my neighborhood. As it so often is with these things, as soon as you notice something in one place, you see it everywhere else too. I’ve called this grass roots phenomena “Kiezgarten“, which means [...]

As mentioned in the last installment, the true centepiece of Berlin’s prestigeous new Main Station, is a four meter high shopping bag cordoned off with an official Deutsche Bahn fabric barrier. Here it is:

Big bag theory
More revealing than this sculpture, which blatantly betrays the station’s true identity as being a shopping mall, is the message [...]

Hauptbahnhof Berlin: Platform 6, seatless
Once a week I travel to Hamburg on a part time teaching job which runs until the end of January 2007, and so each Tuesday morning I leave from Berlin’s freshly erected Main Station (Hauptbahnhof), which is truely an impressive construction. A good opportunity then to compile a miscellany of notes [...]

I’ve been photographing the same piece of wall for just over a year now, such is the nature of routine when combined with the availability of portable digital technologies. The corner in question represents the front-line in a low-intensity battle between taggers, depositers of household junk, and the property managers of the building the corner [...]