SLAB Magazine

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. [...]

Pride is the seventh deadly sin. In the Divine Comedy Dante describes how sinners carried giant stones on their backs on the First Terrace of Purgatory to learn that pride is a heavy burden upon the soul.
Now let’s replace pride with its close neighbour Vanity, and since this is an architectural journal let’s replace the [...]

Berlin’s mega-building-site du-jour has to be the 28,500 sq/m plot of land just south-east of Alexander Platz where a shopping and leisure complex called ‘Alexa’ is heaving itself up out of the ground. The name is a hatchet-job foreignisation of ‘Alex’; the prosthetic ‘a’ at the end of the name is probably a shortcut to [...]

What could be worse than Plus on a Friday evening? Simple: Plus on a Tuesday morning.
A trip out to purchase a bag of leading brand dried cat food turned into a three-shop-trek in the snow this morning since Plus obviously haven’t restocked since at least Saturday, when there was no cat food on sale either.
I [...]

This is Kaiser’s on Zossener Straße in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district, where a similar scene of night-time debauchery has been sprayed onto the shop’s front. Notice how the dancing figures are shadowed by the vague grey forms of an entire mob of demon fruit and sausage.

Thug fruit

Germany’s Kaiser’s chain of supermarkets have an interesting policy concerning Berlin’s graffiti problem: they deface their shops themselves before the sprayers can get to them, thereby guaranteeing a uniform degree of ugliness.

Possibility of witchcraft
Kaiser’s have opted for worrying motifs of demon-like vegetables and condiments cavorting in moonlit city-scapes. In the photo above – showing part [...]