Here we present the last of three installments of Oliver Miller’s rejected text intended for our upcoming print publication, The New Death Strip. To read the previous sections, and to find out more about this, our most exhaustive project to date, please read the preceding entries from January 8th and 15th, 2011. The New Death Strip is at the printer now and should be available both in hard copy and online by the end of the week.

-Ed.

The edifice was virtually dissolving before me as I became entranced in these spectral reflections, and looking back down at the rest of the campus’s landscaping and architecture it all appeared less solid than before.

The grass struck me as uncannily thick, vibrant and uniform in color and density, the brick cladding of the other buildings at the institute had the familiar look of the scanned texture map I’d noticed back on Brunnenstrasse. Preposterous fountains spurted upwards from greenish ponds that appeared unimaginably shallow.

Everything looked clean and new and in a certain sense no less reflective than the polished glass of the new building’s curtain walls. In a world of Photoshop effects, smoothing filters, color balancing and corrected saturation, it seems there’s an irresistable drive to create a world in the image of the image.

A there-but-not-there feeling overcame me, and I spent the next hour or so wandering more or less aimlessly around Hasso Plattner Institute. The pristine artificiality of the place, its sheer made-up-ness, had put me into a space of existential contemplation. I had quite simply ceased to feel like I was anywhere anymore.

People use the metaphor of a desert to describe a place -or a state- in which you feel empty or placeless, but my childhood in New Mexico gave me a sense for the richness of life to be found there. At HPI I felt a truer form of emptiness, and now I wonder why I became so transfixed by the polished reflections of the new learning and research center. They seemed to have a cathartic effect, somehow canceling the irritation I’d felt from sustained exposure to high levels of bogusness traversing the vicissitudes of The New Death Strip . To just look away entirely, straight into the sky or towards the rail line or a group of trees outside the campus’s border, seemed like the denial of something. But by gazing into the reflections I could somehow look at the architecture without flinching. I found a way to suspend judgment on an architecture that I’d initially found to be plainly deterrent, and the act seemed to have implications for the rest of my survey in general. The NDS can be seen as a panoply of disassociated visions, each one highly specific in the minds of those who were responsible for turning them into something more real. Because it exists in a space lacking cultural legacy, anything seems possible on the NDS. But for whatever reason, whether economic, sociological, historic or psychological, there’s not much along the line of the old Wall that’s exuberant or experimental. It may just be down to the fact that it’s much easier to have a vision than to be visionary. The entire ensemble at HPI, and along the New Death Strip as a whole, is a mirage. It is the production of so many irregular conditions that float within a cultural vacuum, a cross section of refracted and disassociated allusions to the culture of its makers. Only by accident, it seems, has something taken seed there that can be seen to be legitimately either conservative or radical.

After the time spent at HPI the mirage feeling kept recurring. Following a much needed bucolic romp along the Stichkanal we came upon Europarc Dreilinden, a towering island of commercial real estate speculation built upon the former site of the largest border crossing between the old East and West, the place that was formerly Checkpoint Charlie’s lesser-known big brother, Bravo. Navigating our racing bikes over the bumpy terrain of the footpaths to its north, the back end of the some multinational HQ rose from the sandy forest like a volcano of capital from Brandenburg’s economic wastelands. It was totally covered in glass curtain walls, some shuttered a la HPI, and I immediately began trancing out on more of those puffy clouds being mirrored back to me. For a moment I looked deeper, behind the reflections, and was able to identify the building’s occupant without the need for any signage or cute logos.

The walls of the hallways had been color coded floor for floor in Ebay’s signature palette of red, blue, yellow and lime green. Beyond, two more office blocks gently imposed themselves upon the scene. The first was clad with polished black glass, the second in perfectly planed limestone tiling. If HPI were a talented pup showing industry and promise as it explores the new surroundings of its Prussian socio-cultural landscape, Europarc would be a hyperreal alpha male wolf, lurking silently but ready to pounce. The expanses of smooth façades drew my eye from one consummately ludicrous high rise to the next, until the biotope landscaping feature at the center of it all tempted me to supplant reveries born of glass and steel with the picturesque vision of their own reflections in the watery stillness of an artificial wetlands preserve. To the south, beyond the reeds and willows of the landscape feature, I saw the backwards letters of the two great “EUROPARC.de” billboards. They stood side by side above naturalistic ground cover, like twinned sentinels protecting this corporate fantasy from the forbidding threat of the A115 highway beyond.

I turned back and after a little while happened upon a cozy loop road doing its best to link up the motley cast of architectural characters that make up Europarc Dreilinden, each one the fragment of a collective dream that offers no rest. Amongst the such neighbors as the Porsche dealer, Ebay+Paypal and the Ibis hotel there stood a pristine, new, and un-demarcated building. Like the learning and research center at HPI, it was so fresh that it hadn’t been finished yet. Refuse from its construction littered the edges of a freshly asphalted parking lot, and the place felt calm as I continued to document the paths of clouds reflected in the structure’s expanses of glass.

Only a lone a window cleaner interrupted my meditations as he carefully wiped their panes clean; the mirage, I then understood, has to be diligently maintained.

The following is the second of three installments of Oliver Miller’s rejected text intended for our upcoming print publication, The New Death Strip. To read the first section of the text, and to find out more about this, our most exhaustive project to date, please read the preceding entry from January 8th, 2011. The New Death Strip is at the printer now and should be available both in hard copy and online by the end of the week.

-Ed.

Sitting on a pillow of newly laid sod, the brand new learning center at HPI is basically an asymmetrically curved block of plate glass window walls built around a steel frame, sheathed in metal shutters that can be opened or closed according to the needs and desires of its individual users and abusers.

Behind them I can imagine never-ending blinds-down project sessions glued to a Setu task chair, eyes glazed wide open before a 22” flat screen display, or the spontaneous expression of repressed desires by design team colleagues who have been engaging in furtive eye play for weeks on end. The finely ribbed pattern of the aluminum slats in their ‘down’ position was perhaps designed to shield glaring light from the outside, though it seems to me it would work just as well to confine an inner world, so earnest in its virtuality and secretiveness, to demarcate an existence held within strict boundaries.

But that is merely my own projections of the building’s inner life, and it was, needless to say, impossible for me to actually get in. This was due not simply to the fact that the doors were locked, but also because a reception desk and bored security guard were already in place well in advance of what I assumed would be an extravagant grand opening within the next few days. So all my more concrete impressions needed to be garnered from the outside, and from here the structure appeared remarkably smooth, due mostly to the exquisite flushness with which the outside surfaces has been rendered – a quality that’s only possible through the specification of the most high-end building systems.

The dimensions between the planes of the window walls, the frames holding the metal shutters, and the panels of glass or limestone fascia had been kept to an absolute minimum. All of the building’s details, if not its larger formal gestures, exude the well-mannered professionalism you would expect from someone with the pedigree of its architect, the late ex-Foster project leader Mark Braun. The results are in keeping with the long tradition of Modernist construction since the beginning of the last century. Nothing very new but something very now, a quality that I’d already discerned to be quintessential of the New Death Strip.

All of these ideas, impressions and fantasies coalesced into an inner vision of what it was all about, this single structure, this vapid corporate campus cum vocational college, this whole trip through a cultural wilderness we’d embarked upon. It was the ‘mirage’ metaphor specifically embodied in the stripes of glass fastened to the façade at the edge of the floor plates, between the upper and lower edges of the window walls. It’s these panels that articulate the muteness of the building specifically and the NDS in general. Serving absolutely no functional purpose whatsoever, they are familiar looking anti-ornaments intended on the one hand to aid the eye in reading the building’s form as unified and impenetrable, further flushifying the surface, and on the other to symbolically represent transparency. But the material’s capacity to transmit light and color; qualities that were so celebrated by those pioneers in forming the ancestral language from which this building’s vocabulary originates, e.g. Bruno Taut or Peter Behrens, not to mention their successors, is here sold short for another attribute with which glass is also identified, though not quite so highly revered: its reflectivity.

Having circled the building I gazed up at its southern façade, which directly faces a rail line and the asphalt corridor that had previously served the island enclave of the West embedded within the East: the ‘village’ (suburban community) of Berlin-Steinstücken. I was dazzled by glare from the summer sun being reflected not off one of the window walls, but from the glass fascia things. The aluminum shutters appeared to float in space and the material quality of the building began to evaporate. I was taken aback by the romantic quality of something that was paradoxically so restrained-verging-on-stone-cold in its planning and execution.

But the sun can always dazzle, and the play of clouds on this summer day was particularly lively: nice low altitude cotton-candy-cumuli morphing at the edge of light beams pouring down from the heavens. I found myself entranced by their movements, reflected first in the narrow strips of ornamental glazing, and then, further along the building’s façade, in the broader expanses of glass where the shutters had been left up.

To be continued…

In this excerpt from a rejected text intended for Slab’s first print publication, Oliver Miller gives us a taste of our soon to be published opus magnum, The New Death Strip. In it we investigate the contemporary state of a vast non-location, the old militarized zone that used to encircle West Berlin along with its famous wall. That border zone was dubbed by the Germans “der Todestreifen”. It was called the “death strip” because it was a place to die, and the New Death Strip is kind of a place to die, too, or if nothing else to experience the uncanny shallowness of contemporary building culture.

The New Death Strip will be published in the next couple of weeks by Arno Brandlhuber and Silvan Linden / a42.org / AdbK Nürnberg and will be available both at fine booksellers as well as in pdf form via www.a42.org . Just click on Publikationen > Schriftenreihe “Disko” in order to access a whole range of downloadable journals free of charge, they come highly recommended by the crew here at Slab.
-Ed.

The latest addition to the campus of the Hasso Plattner Institute is a glaringly coherent chunk of Germanic design professionalism plopped onto the far western edge of Potsdam-Babelsberg. Needless to say, I approached the complex of buildings where this learning and research center is sited without any previous knowledge of what I was about to get into, and from the first moment I set foot on its immaculate terrain I was taken aback by what I found. My colleague Daniel had in fact heard of HPI, which is a privately funded and independently administered academy kind-of belonging to the University of Potsdam, though he, too, was surprised to find it along the path of our survey of the NDS. Although it sits at the edge of the university’s western campus, HPI sports its own logo and nowhere on its grounds or website does that of its mother institution appear. HPI is named after its sole benefactor, who is one of the founding partners of SAP and consequently one of the richest men in Germany. According to information I found using Google, a popular search engine, the institute is supposed to be his philanthropic contribution to the greater good. It is purportedly a laboratory where ideas for the future, as well as their producers, are grown.

Although it’s by no means an extraordinary case, I find it curious to have named this philanthropic project after its benefactor. It just seems to taint the presumed selflessness of the altruistic act. Stranger still is that the main donor is also at the head of a multi-national corporation that without any doubt whatsoever directly benefits from the production not only of ideas at HPI, but also of IT “designers” who who are eminently hirable upon graduation. Further compounding this contradiction is the fact that the institute’s persistently stated ideals center themselves around the concept of teamwork and the denial of the author as a guiding force in design. This approach was pioneered, among other places, at the “d.school” of Stanford University, which is an institute whose main benefactor is, as it turns out, also Mr. Plattner. Its from there that HPI has borrowed not only its guiding principles of teamwork and the denial of authorship, but also the subtitle “School for Design Thinking” -a moniker it has self-consciously not bothered to translate into German.

The d.school, aka The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University, follows the American precedent of branding buildings, libraries or institutions with the names of their benefactors. So if we can just forget for a moment all the mumbo jumbo about collective intelligence it makes perfect sense, I guess, to stop subordinating the ego and start heroicizing the individual by continuing to name institutions after Mr. Plattner. The fact that this even seems weird within HPI’s local context is indicative of inherited German societal norms, within which the notion of gloating in one’s own name is not (yet) quite so accepted as in the US -and of how it’s possible for these norms to be contradicted on the NDS. This is a cultural as well as a physical tabula rasa, a forlorn non-location where there’s too much to forget, and not enough to remember, to prevent you from doing whatever the fuck you want to.

It was upon first seeing this branded structure that an overarching leitmotiv for my odyssey across the desolate plane of the NDS’s architectural no man’s land first made itself apparent. Sitting under a tree on the manicured grass of HPI’s parkscape I sketched a first draft of the above diagram, which I was to later refine back home on my computer. It’s a simple adaptation of the diagram used to explain inferior mirages. Like a prism through which a beam of light is refracted and dispersed, so it was that I here began to see a breaking down of the hitherto unrelenting bluntness of our entire project’s subject matter. Looking back, I suppose any single example of the contemporary architecture I was to encounter along the way could have provoked a similar reaction. It’s a matter of timing, and upon reaching HPI, the effective apogee of our trajectory around the old West Berlin, I was starting to feel both overloaded and exhausted. I had sweated the commercial developments in Falkensee and Glienicke, travelled the long stretches of terrain vague running from Stolpe to Potsdam, and witnessed everything from the daftness of big box car part stores to the insensitive siting of newly-minted dream homes constructed of perfectly formed bricks, serially produced window systems and blue ceramic roof tiles. My encounter with the building seems to have come at the critical moment where a deluge of perceptions and ideas needed to be more definitively made sense of.

To be continued…

At aged 14 I went through quite a serious ‘military aircraft phase’ which involved a subscription to a magazine devoted to the subject, hours spent pouring over photos in books, and even going so far as to join the Air Training Corp with a school friend. The ATC is part of the Air Cadet Organisation, and is a voluntary youth organisation supported by the UK’s Royal Air Force.

Mostly, the ATC involved lots of marching up and down a school playground in a horrid, scratchy uniform made of wire wool, and being barked at by the Warrant Officer. But it did have three exciting benefits: 1) older girls in tight uniforms; 2) running around muddy fields late at night in camoflage, pretending to carry out tactical missions, and 3) gliding lessons. I stuck it out at the ATC long enough to experience taking over the controls of a glider, but the scratchy blue uniform and the marching eventually got the better of me, and I left.

The Windsor flyover [Source: Flickr user synx508]

Another thing I stayed with the ATC long enough to experience was a peculiar rumor, or fact, uttered in the back of a white Ford Transit on the way to a muddy field late one night. Passing underneath the flyover bridge of the dual carriageway which leads from Windsor to Slough, a fellow Cadet mentioned that the bridge had been designed specifically to offer Harier Jump Jets parking space in the event of World War III breaking out.

How could it be, that a familiar and deeply civillian part of Windsor, a sleepy middle-class commuter enclave on the Thames and occasional home to the Queen – the place that I had grown up in – had been planned with a mind for its tactical role in WWIII? The thought was chilling, and a bit exciting, and the image has stuck with me to this day.

So this evening, just out of curiosity, I tried something out. And then I got that chilling feeling again:

Suburban contingency plan for Doomsday

Kifissia is a northern suburb of Athens nestling beneath the Penteli mountains. Named for the currently dried-up crag of a river which runs through it, the Cephissus, Kifissia had been a half Christian, and half Muslim village during Ottoman rule. Following independence and the later construction of a railway line in the late 1800s, it became a popular place for wealthy Athenians to build second homes away from the heat of the inner city (Kifissia is a couple of degrees centigrade cooler than downtown Athens). They built large villas amongst the farm houses which had dominated the landscape for hundreds of years.

Social ebb and flow

The area retained much of its village-like character until the 1970s. During the military junta, rampant building was allowed to transform the area into the current rabbit warren of boulevards and twisting alleyways lined with ostensibly charmless boxes. But even with the arrival of so much concrete, some of Kifissia’s heterogenic mix of richer and poorer has remained, a situation partly explained by long standing land ownership. So it’s not uncommon to walk down a street lined with exclusive designer boutiques and hotels, then turn a corner and come across what looks like a tiny hundred-year-old farm house.

Boutique urbanism

Whilst much of what has gone up in recent times might be deemed architecturally without merrit, it’s not uncommon to find some interesting examples of modernism and brutalism; or abandoned mansions; or a large, freshly built complex, possibly a health farm, weathering away in a state of deep sleep, waiting for some financial Prince Charming to kiss is back to life.

Brutalism: straight out of Fahrenheit 451

Modernist pile

And then there is the kind of all-out weirdness only attainable when large amounts of money collide with fantastic bad taste:

Post modern futurist hangover: straight out of Star Trek