SLAB Magazine

Most of Berlin’s Bland Boxes went up in the 1990s. This one was completed less than a year ago. The smeggy rag-rolling paint job, the fake balconies and the Borg window box thing are all doing their best to diguise the fact that this is a Bland Box. But it’s not working.
By the way: the [...]

This building does not have a roof. It has a lid. And unlike most lids it’s not keeping the freshness inside, it’s keeping the blandness from escaping outside.

Thanks to Thomas who sent us this photo of a pretty novel looking power transformation substation in Tel Aviv. SLAB is heartily amused by the super-redundancy of the columns, the decorative security fence and the beautiful integration of faked ceramic insulators as doric capitals.

SLAB Magazine referred to it before and now it happened again. The strangely pink shopping mall at Berlin’s Alexanderplatz «Alexa» is still presented in the media (www.tagespiegel.de 18.04.2008) like this:

But the «Alexa» mall still looks like this, as I checked today:

Yes it’s pink and it’s got a completely different facade. Are the investors themselves ashamed [...]

Mummified: undead sculpture in front of ‘Alexa’ by Mirko Siakkou-Flodin
As I may have mentioned elsewhere, the newly opened ‘Alexa’ Shopping and Leisure Behemoth™ bears more than a striking resemblance to an ancient Egyptian burial monument. I was dazzled, then, to discover that the entrance to Alexa has been decorated with a 9 meter high, stainless [...]

The Department of Design at Hamburg’s University of Applied Sciences is housed in two buildings: a stately old house and a 1970s add-on. The buildings are joined at the hip, siamese-twin-style, and because the floor-heights don’t match up, you have to ascend a small set of stairs when entering the newer part from a corridor [...]

My deep and heartfelt contempt for Berlin’s Schönefeld Airport is actually unfair because the airport itself isn’t all that bad: it’s just a shed. The real focus for my anguish and dispair is its railway station, the second architectural situation one encounters when returning to Berlin from a trip abroad.

Rumps on ramps
The architecture is bovine. [...]