Kollhoff’s tower (center) on Potsdamer Platz, seen from Leipziger Platz [Click to enlarge]

Ute von Vellberg, spokeswoman for Daimler-Chrysler – the building’s owner at the time – called the measures “precautionary and voluntary” and hadn’t followed any particular incident. However, the preceeding winter was blamed for unspecified damage to the large brick-look tiles which coat most of the building’s twenty-five floors. Looking back, the Tagesspiegel seems to deliberately tempt fate by quoting von Vellberg as saying that work would be completed by Christmas 2006.

Ms Cruz, the face of modern hairspray

Four Christmas’ later, and the scaffolding is still there. In fact, it’s getting hard to remember a time when it wasn’t there, and harder to think of a reason why it shouldn’t just stay as it is, in a permanent state of rennovation. At the base of the tower, a whole street has turned into a wooden village for builders and façade specialists. The scaffolding is some five meters deep around the base of the building, turning pavements into darkened tunnels. One can imagine that the businesses in the ground floor might soon want to extend their storefronts out into this new exterior space with tents, pieces of corrugated iron or plastic sheeting. A kind of high-class boutique slum.

By December 2006 though, it had become clear that extensive rennovation was needed, and that a messy and protracted legal battle was going to be the only way to find someone to blame. In October of 2007 Hans Kollhoff went on the record as saying “We’ve built so many buildings and proven that it can’t have anything to do with us”, which carefully avoided slandering some contractor, or making any sense whatsoever. A couple of months later Daimler-Crysler sold the building to the Swedish bank SEB for 1.3 billion Euros, and with it, one assumes, the 10 million Euro rennovation costs.

Hidden messages

But what this is really about is the twofold irony which has afflicting the building during the whole escapade.

The first is to be found in the choice of advertising attached to the scaffolding, which has always striven to acknowledge the extreme verticality of the space available. Adverts for hairspray are particulrly succesful. The proportions lend themselves particularly well to 50 meter pack-shots, whilst the product itself boasts of properties sadly lacking in Kollhoff’s tower: in the above detail we read that L’Oreal’s Elnett (hairspray to the stars) has “Ultra starker halt”, meaning it has super hold. Shame Kollhoff’s brick-look tiles don’t.

The second irony is that, in its wraped-up state, the northern flank of Kollhoff’s po-mo tower bears an eerie resemblance to Renzo Piano and Christoph Kohlbecker’s streamlined wedge next door, and with it, an altogether different approach to building high in a city proud of being squat.

The phrase was a kind of mini revelation, and one of my first lessons in basic economics: the correlation between storage and market price.

So here’s what this tale has to do with architecture:

Caring for the aged (this sick building is less than ten years old)

The Pro Seniore Residenzen is a care home for the elderly directly on Hackesche Markt, a busy junction, tourist hot-spot, and historically speaking, a market place. Building-work carried out in the neighborhood since the early 1990s has concentrated mainly on rennovation, and the handfull of new projects which went up are all unremarkable. But the Residenzen building has always been conspicuous for it’s complete rejection of façade design. It is an essay in dreariness: a filing cabinet for human beings, to misquote architecture critic Niklas Maak*.

Keeping the elderly in the center of town is well meant and a welcome sight.

Imaginable, too, that the building was designed automatically by some wretched piece of software which extrapolates a ‘logical answer’ from a data-set of building directives and profit forecasts. Judging by the current need for façade rennovation some ten years after completion, it is clear that the building also represents a rejection of craftsmanship in favour of the lowest bidder.

It’s not the first time I’ve seen major rennovation work being carried out on the façades of newly built structures. The rennovation of freshly rennovated buildings is also not an uncommon sight in Berlin’s new Mitte.

* A reference to the following quip in the New York Times from 2006:

Mr. Stimmann “couldn’t imagine that a street could look like this,” said the architecture critic Niklas Maak, grabbing a pen and pad in a Berlin cafe to sketch a streetscape with buildings of varying heights and widths. He followed with another sketch, in which all the buildings were the same size: “Like this the street looks like a file cabinet,” he said. “That’s what Berlin looks like right now.” [link]

Dateline: Berlin, March 3rd, 2009.

This picture is of the backside of another one of those urban gated lifestyle communities in Berlin a la Choriner Höfe or the Fellini Residences or Belle Kolle. See for example IW’s exhaustive series Property Marketing Balls from last year. I’m quite sorry that I don’t actually the name of this one, but the street address for the main entrance is located at approximately Am Friedrcihshain 28. The picture itself was shot from the used car lot on its soft underbelly, Sherin Autohandel at Greifswalderstr. 7.

Blingin’ it.

I’m privy to the fact that a couple of members of the wildly successful Stuttgarter rap crew Die Fantastische Vier have hung up their shingles here. I guess this type of architecture is considered bling in Berlin. Grey and bling and fascho, the latter of which being a trend that’s undergoing quite a surprising revival around here right now…just a half step away from that perennial German favorite, the Bland Box. I’ll spare you the formal ananlysis of why this facade looks fascistic; I don’t feel I really need to because it just does.

SLAB’s curiosity was stilled this Thursday morning as it became apparent that the large jutty-out things on the disastrously rennovated Wertheim building, are indeed supporting structures for some sort of signage. Obviously, the insurance fund AOK weren’t going to hide away in anonyminity.

The two workmen pictured above seemed to be struggling somewhat with the aluminium cladding, and the sound of handheld circular saws echoed down Rosenthaler Straße. By evening, the metal boxes had disappeared.

The cladding, a kind of city-wide eczema implemented to suggest ‘authenticity’ in the new, has been used here to conceal genuine authenticity in the old. At street level there seem to be embarrased admissions that something unforgivable has taken place: figurative stone masonry has been laid bare in what looks like a dithering reversal of intent. The effect is brutish rather than curatorial; an admission of sloppy amateurism carried out with breathtaking clumsiness.

Making matters worse, the entrance to the building has been adorned with inexplicable steel grates. The structures looks temporary or unfinished and defy obvious explanation. They are too strongly built to be anchors for sheets of glass, which would extend shelter from the rain out over the pavement. And to call them sun-shades would be preposterous: they are too slatted to be effective, and are superfluous since they have been mounted above an entance which is already recessed, and is on the west-facing frontage of a building which looks out over a narrow street. Sun will not be a problem on the ground floor.

The view above shows the criminal absurdity of the whole endevour: the building looks as though it has been forced to wear a Halloween mask, since everything beyond the main road has actually been reverted to back to the way it was before the building was «cleansed of style» in GDR times. Real substance has been obscured by a shoddy veneer of plastics and fakery.

This is not business as usual: this is a truely exceptional case of ineptitude.

Here’s a Berliner Morgenpost article from March 2006. Udo Barske, spokesman for the building’s new tennants, the AOK insurance fund, is quoted as saying: “Because the building is listed, the natural stone façades will be kept in their original state.” This poor guy must still be chewing away on those bitter, bitter words.

The final irony must be that the AOK is a fund which provides health insurance. They are now doing this from one of Berlin’s sickest buildings.

The Wertheim Kaufhof, around 1906. Most of the original façade was stripped away in the 1950s, but the substance remained. [Photo culled from here]

Kochstraße 27–31 (also Lindenstraße)
Architect: HDS Hans D. Strauch, Associates; Berlin, München

This is a building whose only single æsthetic attribute its is complete lack of any æsthetic attributes. Whilst it is demonstrably possible to build discretely and elegantly with understated structures and repetative motifs, this building is simply a lackluster brute.

Let’s play ‘Hunt the door’

Anthropomorphized, this building is that plainly dressed fellow standing on their own in the corner of a party, who you introduce yourself to out of sympathy. However, after just three minutes it has become perfectly clear that you are conversing with a self-centered, philistine bore that everybody has been studiously avoiding.

The Lindenstraße wing of this complex (shown above) doesn’t want to be engaged with anyway. It has been pushed away from the street to make room for parking spaces and bushes. Doors at ground level are indistinguishable from windows, and rectilinear cavities which resemble industrial loading bays serve as entranceways.

The five-hundred or so narrow windows which comprise the façade speak more of closure than of accessibility. Filled with slatted sun-blinds, they are mere slits; grudgingly hewn concessions to daylight. If the front already looks like the rear, then rear looks like the rear of the rear.

HDS Architects, who admittedly are more used to building post-modern retail horror in the United States (check out their Natick Design Center project), open their website with the following promise:

“We’re more than architects. We’re advocates. For your vision. For ideas you haven’t thought of yet. For dreams you never knew you had. For possibilities you haven’t even imagined.”

Kochstraße 27–31 – once some nebulous dream its contractor didn’t even know it had – was realised with an investment of 180 million Euros. Hurrah.

Kollwitzstraße 17 — Architect: unknown

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 ground floor houses an organic supermarket where the rag-rolled paint job has been slathered across the interior walls as well. Maybe the entire building was rag-rolled with vanilla joghurt. Go give it a lick and find out.

Spittelmarkt 11, 12, 13 — Architect: Claus Neumann; Berlin

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.