It has come to our attention that John Hejduk’s remarkable Kreuzberg Tower and Wings building (covered here by Karen Eliot in 2007) is currently undergoing a ham-fisted “rennovation” job.

This afternoon Jim Hudson of Architecture in Berlin, who has covered the building in some depth as part of his ongoing IBA odyssey, forwarded me a mail sent to him by none other than Renata Hejduk, daughter of the late John Hejduk. A friend of hers in Berlin had sent her the photos shown here, noting sadly “they cut the eyebrows away”. The façade is being painted white. The original balconies and awnings are already scrap and will be replaced by new orange constructions.

Rennovation: cretin style [Photo: Aida]

Renata Hejduk herself writes that the group of buildings are being “defaced and destroyed by a development company that bought them in foreclosure”. She added: “I tried everything I could to get them to stop and to at least consult with the Estate and other architects who were interested in helping to preserve them. They were completely uninterested and felt their facade changes would be much better than the original. Devastating.”

The development company in question is the Berlinhaus Verwaltung GmbH, of whom this journal currently knows nothing. We strongly suggest all appreciators of architecture question them on this matter, and request open dialog. Today I contacted our esteemed colleague Kolja Reichert of the Tagesspiegel about the story, as well our our friends at Baunetz. We await reply.

Can it really be that this city, which prides itself as being a culture capital, is not only happy to fill itself with the vacuous turds of property developers, but is also content to let the few genuinely interesting examples of (post/late)modern architecture that it has be disfigured in this manner by the same handful of philistines?

To paraphrase Jim, who has so elegantly put it: if you also feel that architecture has more value than just real estate, then pass on the news and get people talking.

Updates pending.

An entirely rewritten version of my piece Trash Compactor is Blingin’ can be found in the current issue of Article Magazine, a print and web-based publication hailing from Sheffield in England.

Describing itself as a “guide to the space you’re in”, the current issue of Article deals with the pressing issue of waste. Flick through the online version above, or visit the site here. A raised frothing tankard to Alasdair Hiscock for his interest, and for getting us involved.

Also included is a humorous quotation, the songtext of a famous pop combo, and an incredibly tedious analysis of the editor’s tie collection.

I initially felt some reassurance by the recent BLDGBLG entry on a record breaking artificial tornado created in the Mercedes Benz museum in Stuttgart.  Only to then find out that the motivation behind this vortex was not semiotic or representative at all, but the result of a pretty amazing fire strategy that allowed for an open floor design completely free of fire doors.

From Autoblog, via BLDGBLG:

“The twister takes around seven minutes to materialize and is generated by 144 jets and 28 tons of air. The low pressure area at the center of the tornado works to create a jet stream that draws smoke out of the building’s corridors and funnels it upwards and out an exhaust vent on the roof.”

The tornado fire strategy seems intrinsically linked to the morphological concept of the museum: an ascending double helix (The Mercedes DNA) spins and ramps the museum program continuously around the central atrium space, which is now revealed to us as the focus not only of of the building’s representative program and circulation, but also of it’s more utilitarian fire strategy. As so often the case,  this unintentional utilitarian detail, afterthought or interpretation provides an aspect of a building (the helix as a system of ordering) that is at least as interesting as the original and intentional design.

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.

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.

Was reading a fascinating interview with the artist Cyprien Gaillard last night, in issue 7 of Pin-Up Magazine. I really dig what this guy is doing with architecture: recycling brutalist housing into stone gravel-ways (La grande allée du Château de Oiron), transplanting monuments from site to site (Le canard de Beaugrenelle), reflecting on spring break tourists puking on Mayan ruins. See his portfolio here.