It’s kind of a weird thing to do, relative to the other activities that fill our days. A bit like meditating, an unavoidable question seems to be: “what the hell am I doing here?”. This problem becomes especially acute due to (a) the deterrent pretension that crackles through the air at so many gallery openings and (b) the esoteric, self-referential bubble that the actual work seems to be trapped within. Add to that gooney art scenesters checklisting your scruffy appearance and practicing an eastern religion starts to look a lot more self-explanatory.

Looking at architecture is something that’s comparatively simple, if only because it’s a lot easier to make a statement about it without sounding stupid. It seems a given that we’re all entitled to an opinion about the buildings we live in and around -a basic tenet of this very publication’s existence. Architects and their works are somehow easier targets than artists and theirs, primarily because we think we know what the hell it is they’re doing, often times better than they do. There’s a legitimacy, even a moral obligation, in making a very base, or even obscene, criticism about an edifice with a corresponding appearance. And the work of architects seems to have some kind of effect on every moment of our lives, while art must first seduce us or offend us to be noticed in the first place.

“Take A Slow, Deep Breath! Elastic Impressions”

The title of Hella Gerlach’s show up at Studio commands and seduces us in equal measure, and in doing so initiates a necessary rupture from the profanity of everyday life and all the messiness of its architecture, physical and otherwise. This chunk of language is weird and at the same time totally(?) accessible, a kind of textual gateway that might give cause to investigate something that sounds kind of fun. On the other side of an exhalation and a sheet of plate glass is an offering that coaxes a closer look and, following the directive of the title, an emphatically meditative attitude. All of the elements and objects inside are both autonomous and at the same time the constituent parts of a bizarre phenomenal aggregate. The red cabinet, perfectly level, is actually balancing on its spindly legs as precariously as it appears to be…so be careful breathing out!

An untitled ceramic ball that was mistaken for a tomato, sits on the floor just to the right of the entrance.

Element I and Element II (Studiolo) are hung from the gridded substructure of the gallery’s semi-dismantled acoustic tile ceiling.

The semi-transparent ramie and viscose fiber walls of the three Element pieces have pockets in which objects were placed.

At the invitation of the gallerist, I dug the work Stab out from a pocket on one of the fabric walls. Also made of ceramic, it was uncannily heavy; it felt like a bone until I took it from its sleeve. “Stab” translates to “rod” in English, which is what I first thought the title was supposed to mean. Yet the shape of this thing could definitely be used to put someone into a world of pain.

Teil für Zwei (Piece for Two)

Further into the gallery are three more of those ceramic balls, one of which has been smashed. It was actually here that I first realized the ball in the front wasn’t a tomato. It all has something to do with a Greek housewarming ritual, I was told. The attempt was made to smash the balls all around the gallery just before the show opened, but they were fired to such a high strength that three of them survived.

Handstück (Hand Piece)

and

Schulterstück (Shoulder Piece)

were both cast from the artist’s body. But the visitor is free to try them on as well. These, I take it, are the “elastic impressions” mentioned in the title of the show.

This inconclusive set of objects, spaces and associations is like an architecture of the subconscious. That makes it difficult to talk about in any rational way, but I see the work as operating on the fuzzy line between art and architecture. Like a building, the show doesn’t presume anything of the viewer/occupant; it seems to be actually unable to. A pre-knowledge of what the work is about would if anything preclude understanding it for what it is, I think. As such, the work operates at a very base level, in spite of its elegance. Something down there, back there, at the beginning of architecture, seems to be making its presence known.

Take A Slow, Deep Breath! Elastic Impressions is on view at Studio, Adalbertstr.96, 10999 Berlin, until November 26th.

For the event we’ll talk a bit about what we’re doing and why, as well as define such terms as “blurbanism”, “remerrhoids”, “advertecture” and “brutiful”. We’ll get back into themes such as “The Bland Box” and introduce new ones like the timely “The New Death Strip: Architectural Mediocrity and Worse Along the Site of the Former Berlin Wall”. And we’ll also talk a bit about the object in question, and explain what the above detail says to us.

All this will be presented in a stunning, panoramic dual-projector format…so please feel free to come on down to the KOW gallery at Brunnenstraße 9, tomorrow at 18:00 EST.

So it seems that after having a SLAB business card thrust into his palm, he’d read my piece a couple of weeks ago, and for whatever reason he’d wanted to meet us at the building. We showed up at the place right on time, and Mr. Brandlhuber casually rolled up on an old ten speed a few minutes later. After meeting and greeting we found a nice place on the second storey terrace at the back to sit and rap for 45 minutes or so. We expected a bit of lively debate, and that’s what we got, but he was elusive when it came to the building itself. And the reason why is because he actually wanted us to particapate in a workshop/symposium/lecture series thing (!) for Seminarblock 2 of the Master of Architecture program he heads at the AdBK Nürnberg, called a42.org. The event will be centered around the construction at Brunnenstrasse 9, and is to be held right there in the building itself. Needless to say we were flattered by the invitation, and kindly took it up. But in order to keep the debate at the event as lively and spontaneous as possible he’s putting a lid on it till then, which does make some sense. That said, I hope a SLAB reader or two will be there for the proceedings. We’re scheduled to be a part of what’s going on there on the evening of Sunday, November 8th.

Before

From there the conversation wandered here and there, I remember there was a bit of Rem-bashing. It really seems like we were on the same wavelength! In all he was an extremely down-to-earth guy, appearing more relaxed and at the same time on top of the situation than either of us, in spite of the stresses he’s got to be under as a hot architect. I wish I was wired like that.

I realize now how great it would have been to have gotten a picture of us there so as to have made this rambling text more interesting. All I’ve got instead is a bit of before and after visual journaling of the door details inside the passageway. I took the ‘before’ pictures because I have this fetish for how things look before they’re finished. I wondered: why not just leave these doors the like this; clear coat it with something, call it done?

But I really like the solution they’ve found. Who could have guessed that slapping on that super coarse East-German-style rough-coat would look so right. The building needed something to offset the smoothness of the front facade, and this is definitely doing it. Beautiful, or maybe should I say “brutiful”?

After

I still can’t hardly believe how good this thing’s coming out. A few months ago construction began on the long-abandoned site of some ill-fated 1990’s Berlin real estate speculation, right next door the Kim bar at Brunnenstrasse 10. The address for the new building must be #9. Every once in a while I’d notice how things were coming along, and was halfway ready to start snapping away at the work in progress. But it can really be a ridiculous thing to do, as so many shitty buildings were beatiful until they were completed, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with all these shots of construction sites. To be honest they can be pretty boring pictures.

So I waited, and now that this thing’s gettin’ done I actually have the feeling it was a waste to have not actually started making a visual journal of its construction. The whole time it was being built I kept saying, yeah, nice, but they’re gonna fuck it up with some lame detailing or whatever. I had actually read something about the building in the Tageszeitung (I think); a short piece by Thomas Demand. I looked and looked but the article’s nowhere to be found, either at the apartment of my friend to whom I lent the clipping, nor online: sorry about that. Anyway, it sounded good, particularly the architect Arno Brandlhuber’s idea for the façade to actually be determined by each of the individual occupants of the building -a kind of verticalized teutonic favela. I wonder what happened to that idea.

It would be okay with me if they kept this wall finish inside the passageway to the courtyard.

If it had been executed it would have been heroic, the kind of messianic (non)design that we at SLAB could be absolutely fanatical about. Unless, of course, the polycarbonate sheeting that’s in place right now is a provisional solution until all the units are filled, at which time the elevation will be adjusted accordingly. At the moment the most legible sign of an easy-going, radical (’rad’) sensibility is the stepping of the floor lines, legible on the façade, presumably indicating that they were so formed so as to match up with the elevations of the neighbors on either side. Or, perhaps, as an emblem of contextual consciousness. Its a little bit of a gimmick, sure, but its not easy for soul-seeking functionalists to justifiably jazz up a facade, and, damn it, that relationally aestheticized contextual consciousness does stand for something.

What I like, though, is that the façade is good, really good. Looking at it at night, all glowing from the inside through the translucent polycarbonate sheeting, makes me feel like one of those little 1:100 models of a guy standing in front of an architecture model. It also feels kind of like I’m on a steet in another city. I’m feeling Tokyo, or Singapore, or something.

The unfinished rear elevation still has the random look that was first promised for the front. Nice railing.

The only real bad news, and it is bad, is that this building also stands for the end of the party, again, as far Berlin-Mitte goes. Yeah, the party’s over already, of course, and Berlin must move forward. But as one of the four proprietors of Kim’s – okay, I admit it – I’m honestly scared about the chi-chishification going on. One of my guests, Marlous, in fact reacted quite differently to Mr. Brandlhuber’s project. She said its doing to Brunnenstrasse what the New Museum did to The Bowery; how it looks and what it stands for; what it’s an emblem of – not to the dicipline of architecture – but rather to city development. And oh fuck, she’s right. Funny thing is, back in my school days I was a big fan of Kuzuyo Seijima. And I was a fan of the Lower East Side, but not any more.

Peeking inside at the K.O.W gallery’s groovy stair.

The performance was curated by Collegium Hungaricum, and kicked off the 2nd annual Cinema Total meet. Greenaway started with a rousing speech about the changing nature of cinema, delivered in the type of booming, effortlessly authoritative English accent which should underpin all documentaries, and leaves you feeling thoroughly impressed without really knowing why.

Vintage Greenaway: The Draughtsman’s Contract

Citing a date in 1983, Greenaway refered to the introduction of infrared TV remote controls into the living rooms of the world; gadgets which allowed us to zap through multiple channels and surf a sea of pictures. The remote control helped usher in the jump-cut era of MTV, and arguably quickened our ability to sort and evaluate visual information, but also shortened our attention spans. Greenaway’s point though, was that this has left us with an innate ability to digest multiple information sources: the past, the present and the future, simultaneously, with only the loosest of narative threads. And this, he insisted, is what people want, and what might shape the cinema of the future.

Vintage Greenaway: The Belly of an Architect

But what followed was a 60-minute barrage of short film loops, indiscriminately distributed across the screens. Most of the time the same loop was to be seen running simultaneously on one or more neighboring screens, making the five beamers pretty much redundant from a dramatic point of view. Just as there was no interaction between screens, no attempt was made to incorporate the architectural quality of the Collegium Hungaricum building or the surrounding urban space. Night trams, however, occasionally trundled along between the stage and the building, providing occasional but much needed absurd interlude.

The audio coupled to each film loop was fed mercilessly into an echo effect for the entire duration of the set, which might have served to merge one clip into the next, but the result was a cacophony of repeated accoustic phrases as disjointed as the visual onslaught. Far from representing the future, it sounded like an embarrasing throwback to the early days of political sampling in mid 1980s hip-hop or early 1990s industrial music. Every so often a beat would emerge out of the soupy mess, as if to remind us of the enduring relevance of rhythm and syncopation, linearity and digression.

Yonderboi (l) and Greenaway (r) on stage

Due to multiple simultaneous communication channels, the typical office worker these days can only expect to enjoy a three-minute burst of concentrated work before the next interruption. In this context, the thought of a new form of cinema, in which plot and dramatic arc are traded for more of the same, seems like a nightmare.

What makes Portal so completely mind-boggling is the way its developers have combined natural physical laws (such as gravity), with the stuff of science-fiction (wormholes) in a relatively familiar gaming surrounding (a sinister science facility).

Familiar territory, unfamiliar strategy

Portal rethinks space by rethinking weaponry. Instead of a gun, you are given a tool with which you can punch wormholes into walls, floors or ceilings. A kind of temporary, sub-atomic interaction with the architecture is the result. The principle is simple but the consequences are spectacular. Shoot with one hand and you make an orange hole, shoot with the other hand and you make a blue hole. The holes are connected, allowing you to enter one and exit from the other. A great way of crossing unsurmountable obstacles: don’t jump them, suggests the game, bend space/time around them.

Mirror effect: looking at yourself through a portal in the ceiling

The player can also combine the wormhole principle with the effects of gravity: crossing a hole too large to jump can be achieved by shooting a hole in the wall behind you, then jumping into the hole and shooting a second hole directly into the floor below you as you approach it. Momentum then propels you over the top of the hole you just jumped down.

The portals also radically subvert the the first-person-shooter (FPS) game-genre by enabling the player to inspect their alter-ego as in a mirror by using two adjacent wormholes. In doing this Portal also exploits the inherent coyness of the FPS-typical camera viewpoint, exposing the fact that you are actually playing a female character, still a rarity in this type of game despite Lara Croft.

Joe McNeilly, senior editor of the online gaming journal Games Radar, has in fact written a lucent feminist reading of Portal in which he offers a Freudian reading of the portals whcih are «metaphorical birth canal through which the protagonist is constantly being born into new trials». Where Lara Croft blasts her way through Tomb Rader with a rich arsenal of weapons, Portal’s protagonist, Chell, makes subtle architectural changes to see her through. I urge you to read McNeilly’s article, and consider why such intelligent writing about computer games doesn’t appear in the mainstream architectural press.

Chell confronts herself

The disturbed geometries of the architecture are matched by the equally disturbed psychology of the gameplay. A malfunctioning computer (with a female voice) called GlaDOS taunts you from the off, offering dubious advice, and alternating between insult and praise for your actions. One recalls the dramatisation of Arthur C. Clarke’s HAL9000 in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, but also more recent films such as the disturbing but not quite so satisying Cube, in which a group of people wake up in a nightmarish architectural puzzle with no recallection of how they got there.

I’m no expert in gaming, and I don’t own a games console even though Portal is as good a reason as any to do so. But I’d like to know if there are any more games out there treating architecture not just as a dumb backdrop, but as an integral part of game dramatology. As I’ve coming to understand it, Portal’s makers, Valve, are responsible for the game Half-Life 2 in which a «gravity gun» comes in to play. This is what I’m after, physics-busting, architecture-warping, wormhole-pimped fractal geometry in a gaming environment inspired by M.C.Escher.