A pet relationship is essentially about belonging. Pets are also faithful derivatives. The signage on the imbiss is a recognizable graphic iteration of the GSW’s famed meat-pixeled rose-pixeled windows hovering above it. It is a tiny copy, a pocket version of a great novel, “paperback” architecture.

Structurally it is a prop, a simple decorated shed. And, as such, a billboard of sorts, albeit one that does not advertise currywurst. No loud drawings depicting smiling sausages attempting to eat their own kind, no giant 3-D wurst toothpicked onto the roof. While the GSW sells you insurance, this imbiss sells you the GSW. In place of mystery pork, it flogs architecture. This shack has staked out an optimal perspective for viewing the building, and invites you to look up, admire, and while you’re there, enjoy a currywurst. Maybe a coffee.

Pets say a lot about their owners. One can evaluate the merits of the building by investigating its tiny copy. And, standing there, I have to ask myself what makes the GSW so special. Special enough that a currywurst seller invokes it to sell sausages.

It is in fact a structurally gymnastic building. The original rectilinear tower from the 1950s not only still stands, but acts as a sort of stiffening spine for the wing-shaped addition. The wing is essentially tied back to the tower, and each junction between platform and wing and tower is beautifully, cleanly detailed. Shadows obediently follow built lines, the framing is delicate but not fragile.

As with many SH buildings, a colourful facade smiles upon the city, and it is perhaps this gesture that Berliners, as well as the little imbiss, rarely see are drawn to. Within the complexities of built endeavors: contracts, codes, budgets, intricate air management systems, it is the procurement of a soft device: the fabric window shade that garners the GSW’s celebrity in Berlin. Amongst an infinite set of built parts, the window shades, in ca. 8-10 colors, become the building’s most obvious architectural gesture.

A passive heat gain strategy is responsible for the positioning of the massive glazed elevation, and this, as the building’s driving design principle, made it a winner with the clients, for sure.

But for the rest of us, it has more to do with its west-facing facade and the sun. Standing on Rudi-Dutschke-Strasse at Friedrichstrasse at various times of the day, you will encounter constant references to the cosmos. At noon, the facade is lit up in sunset oranges, reds and pinks, shades drawn against the sun, and later, in the evening light, shades open, the glazing reflects the real thing. Perhaps it is the quiet, intuitive performances of buildings that really communicate with us – on a frequency below glass domes, gurkens and pregnant oysters.

The first time I came across the imbiss was in March 2010, at which point it was blooming with GSW pride: red-orange pixel window ornament on 3 sides. It has since been “modernised”, namely in its reduction of colourful pixel-rectangles to one applied sticker on a newly painted cream metal box. Yet, in the end the little imbiss remains loyal to its owner, keeping the last panel, the last semblance of its pet relationship, on its west-facing facade.

Had some friends in town, a German-Nigerian couple from Tel Aviv, who had met in Lagos. He’s doing alright running a factory producing custom transformers for the West Bank and Gaza, so they’d asked me which city I’d recommend out of Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Singapore for their trip over last New Year’s. I had quickly picked Hong Kong. I hadn’t been to any of them, but I try to mask my terrible indecisiveness with split second decision making, post-rationalizing and a poker face. They didn’t like Hong Kong. They said it was sterile and bland. What about the 3D character, the elevated free-ways, the escalators soaring past skyscrapers, the hive like shanties full of country folk trying to make it in the big city, I said. Nope, boring, they said, like any other city the world over, today. The shanties are gone, swiftly developed away to ever further fringes by the usual in-your-face brand architectures and architectures of convenience rapidly replacing anything with character and a little bit of dignity, certainly any shanty towns or anything else harboring the unexpected, the uncontrollable, in short, all the stuff the well adjusted consumer abhors and exactly what big cities were once about, organic, creative messiness replaced by retail junk with obsolescence built into it, I snarked into my ridiculously inflated Burgundy bulb.

Humbox at correct resolution

“Everything today is built for the image. Cities are reduced to locations, for tourists, for tourism ads, and commodity as image. It’s like all these design hotels and culture outlets popping up, all the Foster, MAD or BIG or whatever acronymed OMA franchise or knock-off buildings. Once you walk up to these buildings, it feels like several layers of details and intricacy are missing and all that seeming sophistication from a distance falls apart in an instance. The detail is now in the image, forged in GPUs with multiple pixel shader pipelines, workstations with twin socket quadruple core CPUs and 128 Gigs of RAM, ever faster render engines, with print technology and abseilers that graft terapixels of imagery onto megaposters. Who looks at buildings from close up anymore? You stand in front of the Humboldt Box to look at the Altes Museum, at the Altes Museum to look at the Funkturm, on the Funkturm to look back at the Humboldt Box. You’re not supposed to look at buildings from up close. Surfaces strive for smoothness, nothing’s there to obstruct the flow from location to location and into the souvenir shops. Everything’s being set up for street view or Flickr or Picasa or augmented imagery. The image contains more information than the building. It’s the age of hi-res imagery and low-res buildings!!!”

So I went down to the Humboldt box the next day to test my point and took some macro photos and close-ups. One of the project initiators had recently used the Anglicism “Top-Location” outlining his project’s impending success in a German press release. How great then to still experience the wonderland of analog continuity with plain eye and macro lens and delve in the nitty-gritty of the in-betweens of the discontinuous image raster. Let’s see how it panned out…

humbox alucobond

CMYK construction

back-off: the image bolted together starts falling apart

further signs of megaposter progeny

macro humbox bolt

The building which previously served as a prop for hairspray, bikinis, and sandals now advertises so-called high culture, or the absence thereof, the Humboldt Forum, in a classic case of low-high-middle-brow confusion often found in the  cultural logic of late capitalism. The Humboldt Box is essentially a folded megaposter, parading a similarly flat message of representation and merely evoking the 3D. In that sense it is not fully three-dimensional, but a sort of relief or pop-up image building with some slapped on applied facing to conceal the detailing that it shares with its true progenitor, the megaposter. Imagery parading as building.

hi-res hairspray iconography – st.diane and st.laetitia

This non-humanist, or post-humanist, worldview yields some interesting results for those of us who are interested in the built environment. Clearly, the built environment is a human product, but this does not mean that it cannot produce its own consequences, independent of human intention or even knowledge. Doors require opening and closing. Who is to do this work, and what kinds of social practices develop as a result?

This elaborate carved door to an ordinary-looking apartment building in Paris draws our attention. It is the first line of defence for the security of those who live in the building, and clearly there seems to be a problem with how well it is doing its job. How do we know this? Because the following notice is affixed to the inside of the door:

Please excuse the photography. The notice may be translated as follows:

Why has nobody attached a hydraulic door-closing arm to this door? Possibly because the door is too valuable an antique to desecrate in this way. Or possibly because it is cheaper to put up this plaque. Why not just put in a modern door? Probably because the door is cherished for its aesthetic properties. What is happening is that the door is enlisting our help because it cannot perform its task properly. Its beauty and its age are not its greatest assets, as it would have us believe, rather they are its weakness. The mode of address, from the door to its user, is interesting too. The door needs to remind us how to operate it, that is, how to behave in relation to it. Design usually aims to perform functions on our behalf, instead of us, to save us the trouble; but then it relies on us to operate it properly, or to know how to act in its presence. Revolving doors require a very specific mode of behaviour, for instance. Hinged doors, such as this one, need to open and, especially when our security is at stake, to close when we need them to.

It may be objected that the message is not actually from the door, it is a statement by a human that has been affixed to the door. This is true, and Latour would concur, as his call to pay attention to the social lives of objects is not so naive as to anthropomorphize them. He does not propose that the door addresses us. Rather, he proposes that the social world is mediated through designed, technological objects, and this door is one of them. The particular features of this door results in a particular kind of social relation and mode of address – humorous, admonishing, friendly, self-deprecating, apologetic, and so on. The problem that people have not been closing this door properly in the past is a problem for the social life of a particular set of humans, and so the door has become the medium through which one group communicates its frustration with another group. The door and its functionality, or non-functionality, are part of the glue that holds this microcosm of the social together in a particular network of relations.

And I bet you thought I would talk about the trompe-l’oeil carving.

More conventional urban treasure hunting is to be found in picking through boxes of cut-price books. This is of course a popular pastime in Paris, particularly along the Seine. This neat shopfront design playfully tempts the passerby to delve into the shop’s innards. The loss leaders in the boxes draw us in.

This untidy French shopfront certainly does not draw us in, at least not anymore. But the decaying lettering has left us with the decrepit painting business of ‘M. Badin’, which translates as ‘Mister Playful’. Serendipity or joke?

I’ve come to lament the prevailing mediocrity of my re-adopted country, the Bundesrepublik Durchschnitt, where the news seems to only deal with fractional changes in percentage points up or down from a compromise or an average. This averageness has made steady inroads into PB, where I still live, somehow finding expression in a surge in Geox shoes as the hallmark of practical averageness. I am hoping that at some point the gentrifcation carousel will catch up with itself and place me back at the cutting edge, marked by a good mixture of migrant workers and the next version of the flat white, though I hope Cafe CK will stick around, that bastion of excellence and decadence.

Which is why I am so proud of our relatively recently upgraded Kaisers as a place to spend your additional 5 EUR social security per month, because it certainly isn’t average, more Running Man goes shopping. First, they didn’t fall into the glaringly obvious trap of removing the old GDR Kaufhalle aluminum modules that adorned all Kaufhallen around here, communicating “Kaufhalle” to everyone in a nice example of meaningful ornament. Thank you Kaiser, for the sensitivity of sparing us another mindless act of effacing any historical trace of the class enemy with the ephemera of globalized consumer culture. Second, the shit they pulled off inside is absolutely first rate, absolutely daring, something beyond the wildest imagination of anyone daydreaming the future into a void of Tempobohnen (parboiled, freeze dried “speed” beans) in this former Kaufhalle 25 years ago.

Kaufhalle ornament

An array of ceiling mounted, rotating gobo lights and computer controlled strip lighting daube the aisles in pulsating hews from chartreuse to mauve. A weird Ballardianate mare, shopping unsuccessully for arrow root amidst a pop-up border patrol carneval in the flood light zone of the death strip. Background music: The Great Escape, whistled, muffled only by the slightly crude humming of the rotating gobo lights. And in the end, the cashier’s recurring question, a bold pretense of normality: “Sammeln Sie die Herzen?” (”do you collect hearts?” – Kaisers’ reward program). I think they should add the sound of helicopters and the odd bomb whistle. I can see the next stage. Shoppers are handed laser price scanners and shoot down bar codes of sales prices that pop up randomly around the market. If you make it to the cashier without stepping into one of the rotating gobo light cones, you receive double the amount of Herzen. After a few attempts, advanced shoppers master the parcours on Segways and peyote in just under two days.

And it really has an effect, though I’m not sure it’s the intended one. I’ve spotted Incidents of open displays of schizophrenia, a suspiciously skinny, scruffy man in very short red shorts giving his best rendition of an opera overture in the snack aisle, seemingly mislead by this environment to open displays of madness. In the evenings, after the few remaining nice old ladies in PB have cleared the aisles, the show starts, the gloves come off and the most frenzied, primordial shopping experience this side of spear hunting a mamooth begins, for organic avocados, biodegradeable tensides and increasingly, Sternburg Export.

(The clips were shot just after the show starts at 19:00 every day. It picks up after, when hungry shoppers abound. It’s a bit long, but I was really trying to get the sound of the lights rotating.)

Back in the day

I was not around in the 1960s or 1970s to see the buildings of the South Bank Centre in London, so I don’t know what the signage was like in those days. But I do know that the big colourful signs that are tacked all over the complex now betray a certain lack of love for their architectural heritage on the part of the people who run these buildings. 1960s brutalism, as exemplified by the Hayward and the Queen Elizabeth Hall, both pictured here, can indeed be hard to love. That is, it can be hard to love if what you love is flat, multi-coloured, letters-as-cartoons.

These flaky masks deny all the qualities (volume, substance, materiality, roughness, depth, anchoredness) that the buildings stand for. The original design is so uncompromising, however, that the undeniable, unconquerable volumes win out, and the contemporary signage looks like so many price-stickers that one day will be faded, curled and outdated as they cling to a forgotten tin in the back of your cupboard.

On the evidence of the sign pictured here, the control of chewing gum seems to be a pressing concern, too. Discarded chewing gum on the ground may be undesirable, but it seems that the drive to avoid it in Kingston has lost sight of the fact that used chewing gum is possibly even more disgusting when displayed at eye level. The sober tones of alcohol control are replaced here with jaunty, children’s-TV humour. This is social control achieved with the carrot, not the stick. It is friendly, light-hearted, playful, just like the celebrity culture it exploits. The waterfront is saved from disfigurement, but not these women’s faces. It is fine to disfigure them. Nothing like a little symbolic sexual violence to keep the place looking neat. Nothing like smearing famously assertive women with ejaculation residue in order to keep Britain tidy.

This gravestone is next to Farahy Church near the village of Kildorrery, County Cork, Ireland. It is one of the small number of older graves in the churchyard which seem to have been retouched in the last couple of decades. The groove of the original calligraphic carving has been cleaned and reinscribed with black pigment. The result is this striking combination of a weathered slab with the crisp new lines of recent re-etching. The facelift draws attention to the fact that the slab would itself have originally been a pristine near-white, and so the writing would have been even more impressive in 1799.

Strange to our eyes are the haphazard-seeming abbreviations, particularly on the right margin. Given the quality of the lettering, surely the stonemason could have foreseen the lack of space for the final letters of some words? In fact there is sufficient space for the letters in question, it just has not been used. Two explanations for these abbreviations come to mind: 1. the mason was charging a per-letter rate and the client saved some money and still got the vital information on the slab, or 2. they simply did not see these abbreviations as anomalous in the way that we might now.

Over 120 years later, the Kelly family erected another headstone alongside, this time in the Celtic Romanesque revival style that had taken hold in the 19th century. This type of gravestone is in imitation of the surviving Irish monastic high crosses, which date from as early as the 7th century. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, resurgent Catholicism and nationalism cherished the early monastic tradition as a key source of indigenous (pre-English colonization) Irish iconography. Stonemasonry had clearly undergone some changes in the intervening years, as the newer grave seems to have been mechanically lettered in a standard font and with a modern respect for left and right margins, and for consistent abbreviation. It is also worth noting that only the lower section of the newer grave has been tailored to the Kellys’ needs, the small connecting part and the cross itself being generic. A further change is in the kind of information that is conveyed and emphasized. Whereas the more recent grave simply lists the names and death dates of the dearly departed (the most recent member of the family was buried here in 1994), all of the flash-bang lettering of the older grave is used to record the name of the person who paid for the grave (Dan Kelly), and not for the poor old dead father.

7 October 1969. High above the representational void at the heart of the bombed city, the Telecafe at the top of the TV tower is set in rotational motion. This celebratory carousel of solo entertainer with organ and some selected guests draws out first circles around the representational center of a fledgling republic in honor of its 20th anniversary.

It is the architectural equivalent of the refrain as a strategy of place making: “A refrain…is like a song that creates the beginning of order in chaos – as in a child singing in the dark…the beginning of the refrain is fragile. Next, a refrain creates a territory, an organization of a limited space with a circle drawn around it.” 1

Centripetal forces of the first refrain soon draw others – circular follies as markers of places and commerce: the C&A sign, the Weltzeituhr, the Berliner Verlag, a spinning display of rare Döner meat, the rings of Saturn, the spiraling logo of Media Markt.

If the surveying tool of Cartesian town planning is the groma, the strategy of place making by refrain is best represented by the dreidel:

More dreidel with Ira from Jesse Morros on Vimeo.

I remember this conversation I overheard once in an architecture office in London.  This was when I learned of the profession of party wall surveyor for the first time. It made me think of a gaunt private detective type with trench coat and hat. I couldn’t think of a more kafkaesque, sad facet of the building industry. Did he put it there? Anyway, it’s really mind boggling when representation occurs so close to what’s represented, when the signifier actually contains the signified. A bit like imagining a monk clapping with one hand, I think, before these thoughts fade in hectic traffic on Leipziger.