The current head of the Russell family is Andrew Ian Henry Russell, the 15th Duke of Bedford. He is a regular in the top 200 richest people in Britain, with a fortune of around UK£500 million. In 2009, a small statuette, which he owned but had never paid attention to, turned out to be worth £2.5 million. He is also known as the 15th Marquess of Tavistock, the 19th Earl of Bedford, the 19th Baron Russell, the 17th Baron Russell of Thornhaugh and the 15th Baron Howland. You do not fuck with people like this.

On the other hand, the Brunei Gallery was funded with an £8.8 million gift from the Sultan of Brunei. The current Sultan is Hassanal Bolkiah, who is the head of state. He is also the Prime Minister, the Minister of Finance, Minister of Defence and Inspector General of the Royal Brunei Police Force. Forbes Magazine estimates his net worth to be $20 billion, which puts him easily in the top 50 wealthiest people in the world. You really do not fuck with people like this.

I’d say the Sultan is used to getting his way.

There was something peculiar about this stencil art that caught my eye. It wasn’t its artistic merit or that it had been the work of Banksy. It stood out like a sore thumb because of a context that, with its retractable bollards, surveillance cameras, and patrolling police folk, subliminally communicated the heroics and the balls required to apply anything subversive to the pristine surfaces of this recently renovated addition to Germany’s state department.

Yes, all this went through my head in milliseconds when I spotted it, just not in words like this, but in some other cognitive or semantic units. So there is something prior to words. Spelling out the stencil’s letters, my curiosity grew even more. I was in a rush to get to studio, but this now seemed of much bigger significance.

„Auswärtiges Amt – Kreuzstraße 1 >“

Represent! Even the bureaucrats are cool in this city, stenciling their Amt’s name on walls. In my mind I was slapping my thighs. As I got closer, the initial excitement subsided a little, as the stencil’s mystery was lifted. Extruded brass font applied to a curved surfaces created the anamorphic effect of stencil art, with its variations of text size and outline depending on fluctuations in the spaces between stencil and rough wall surface. Here, the boldness of fonts changed with one’s position. Still, I felt lucky I had stumbled upon this little gem. Much needed short post material for this online magazine.

We arrived at Union Station in downtown Los Angeles, an architectural gem of which I took no pictures. We had 24 hours in the city, with no car, so we stayed downtown for the whole time. It was a Saturday/Sunday. It is a business district, so it was almost totally empty.

Downtown is the only high-rise part of the city. This kind of skyline was not what we had expected from Los Angeles.

Admittedly, the style of some of the mid-sized, early 20th-century buildings was familiar from watching noir movies. But still, there was a lot here that I had not expected.

It was only on the taxi trip to the airport that we glimpsed the low-rise sprawl, the tall palms, the freeway ramps, the city-to-the-horizon that we had come to see.

A lot has been written about the strangeness, the shouldn’t-even-be-there-ness of Los Angeles, its mix of utopia and dystopia, of poverty and wealth, and its mind-blowing scale. Our brief visit confirmed all of this, but not in the way that we had expected.

A German friend once told me of a superstition that it is bad luck to take a workman’s tools, and it seems on this evidence that it applies in Ireland too. The question arises: why a workman’s tools and not anyone else’s? Why should there be no bad luck from taking a teacher’s book or an angler’s boots?

A corollary to this is the fact that violin makers used to encourage the misconception that violin strings were made of catgut (which they never were). The idea seems to have been that they were playing on the superstition that it is bad luck to kill a cat, thus giving pause to anyone thinking of getting in on their niche of the market.

Modern strings for electric basses are made of metal, sometimes with plastic coatings. They are thick and sturdy, able to withstand considerable stress, especially when ‘slapped’. One of the most popular practitioners of the ‘slapping’ style was bass-player Mark King, who is a member of the (re-formed) band Level 42. It would be perfect if he lived next door to this sign.

Something’s fishy here. Symeon (Simeon, Simon) lived in a town of fishermen, hence the name “Fischerinsel”. Their church was St. Peter’s, aka Simon “the Rock” Peter, first pope, apostle and patron saint of fishermen.

Pretty serious stuff, priests, bombs, foundations and archaeological digs. Spirits are immediately lifted from the weight of too much historical reminiscing by this frivolous inflatable, a fourth St. Petri. It’s the marketing campaign of a new online flatshare service, offering symbolic weddings in an inflatable church for Valentine’s Day. And somehow it seems entirely fitting. Now, as an increasing number of us use such services to pimp their artsy rental apartments to small town middle class visitors with mortgages to marvel at our spartan designer shelving and the bohemian lives they seem to support.

It could almost serve as a prototype for what is at this point the Stadtschloss’s only viable construction technology just down the alley. New Software enables amazing precision patterning for inflatables that also photograph well. Don’t rule it out. Inflatable Stadtschloss approved by Berlin Senate for 2013 tourist season.

Down there in the pit on track one, at the brushed-steel base of one of the station’s shiny panorama elevators, I felt a longing growing in me to escape the suffocating grip of this building. I gazed up shiney glass shafts towards the clear autumn sky. I wished this station gone; wished it would disappear in a flash of blue-white light and the silent thump of an imploding light bulb. I wanted to find myself at the base of a conic void left by its implosion, surrounded by soft undulating dunes of Brandenburg’s Pleistocene sands.

I made it collapse into my cranium in millions of jittery, mechanical folds to metallic hisses and swooshes. Pheeacch, shwing, kssss. By pure thought, I had dematerialized this soulless mongrel in an act of pure desperation, into a single point of infinite mass. Unfortunately, it had lodged itself between the halves of my brain and made me feel not to so good. A prolonged stare into a halo of fluorescent light had bleached a patch of black on my retina, onto which an inner eye had cast these phantasmorgic projections. Fluerescent bulbs placed in recesses where the large concrete supports met slab, created the impression of daylight filtering down into the station’s lower levels. The architect had intended for this to be real daylight – capitals of daylight.

All around I felt cheated. Kyrill had exposed the station’s heroic tectonics as partial appliqué. My experience trying to get to trains after arsonist attacks had exposed the building’s dysfunctionality as a train station. The inefficiency of the circulation gelled the station’s free flowing spaces into a viscous space-time goo – the nectar of carnivorous plants – that I had to transcend in order to find my train. The building’s appearance and image denoted functionalism. It had lured me into an unsuspecting assumption of being in an efficient train station, when, in fact, I was trapped in an ingenious apparatus designed to maximize my exposure to its hideous merchandise and foods full of fillers.

This time, it had gone to far. I set off again on another day to test my hypothesis. I retraced my attempts to switch trains, timing how long it took to complete the journey from one mainline route to the other. I studied the departure tables. Mainline trains arrived on the lower level’s outermost tracks, at the largest possible distance from the east west mainline routes on the stations uppermost levels. These tracks were all served by a single elevator. The lower level’s central platforms are intended mostly for local trains, yet are served by four panorama elevators each. Travel time from track 7 (North-South route), section C, to track 12 (East-West), section D: 13.5 minutes. Changed elevators thrice.

By the sobre sans-serif of this elevator sign that connotes clarity, you might think that this elevator serves tracks 11-16, or the exit, but it doesn’t. It’s saying “change on UG1 to catch another elevator to the EG where the exit is, or, alternatively, change on UG1 to catch an elevator to OG1 to find a Panorama elevator to track 16″, for example. If you’re French or English-speaking you might wonder what the exclamations OG!, UG!, EG! mean.

I hope you’ve memorized the shorthand as this is what the buttons look like in the elevators:

It does get weirder. On the stations uppermost level on track 15, an elevator sign points upward into the sky to airborne tracks 5 and 6, which is perhaps where the Maglev was intended to depart:

The station conspicuously lacks a focal point. Let’s meet under the … Hm. Where? There are no large clocks, no arrivals or departure boards, nothing that could help structure space by giving it hierarchy, or that could facilitate navigation in the station’s particular space-time. This absence turns our attention on the tubular panorama elevators, the station’s crown jewels. Carriages rise and descend like vertical pendulums in strange chronological units. Their flashiness connotes efficient circulation to us, leaving you at a loss as to why the heck they seem so slow. It must be your subjective perception of time or your nervousness. Wait a minute? No clocks? (There are clocks, but they seems strangely subdued and few are illuminated.)

“

In many ways, train travel played a pivotal role in the rise of unified time. Trains were the first devices spanning various local time zones, each zone with their own approximation of time, initially based on sundials. This first unified time, necessitated by train schedules, was in fact called “railway time”.

“For example, Oxford Time was 5 minutes behind Greenwich Time, Leeds Time 6 minutes behind, Carnforth, 11 minutes behind, and Barrow almost 13 minutes behind. In India and North America these differences could be sixty minutes or more.”

The British film classic Brief Encounter tells the story of two people falling in love after meeting at a train station. The station’s clock calls time on their last meeting in the station’s cafe before he emigrates to South Africa with his family. Image-Google Brief Encounter and chances are you will see an abundance of images displaying the clock of Carnforth railway station.

So it may be said that the fundamental structuring agent of the train station is time, and time’s architectural expression is the clock. More than just a purely functional device, the clock was a perfect way to create a sense of place by denoting time and schedule and train station. And it’s so atmospheric. The clock is to the train station what the tower is to the church, or to the airport. Yet, at Berlin’s central station, you have to look hard to find one. Clocks along the shopping concourses are, we suspect, deliberately not illuminated, in order to not distract from the shopping signage and also to aid in the general sense of disorientation, both in time and in space.

The architecture of the mall and its bastard cousin, the terminal, is the architecture of disorientation and hence no clocks, or clocks without illumination, or disproportionately small clocks. Clocks, or any other orientation devices, would only dispel the sort of manifold junk space in which the consumer gets lost and where she falls back onto a fundamental comfort strategy of practicing something that feels familiar: in light of the alienation and disorientation, of hoarding, of shopping. This is a shopping center and the two mainline routes are its anchor shops. The north-south route’s the Macy’s and the east-west is the Sears.

The glassy physiognomy of modernist architecture – its transparency, its reflective, and refractive qualities – does not serve modernist ideals, e.g. transparent democratic processes, reason, legibility, etc. Instead, it seems to serve its opposites. The modernist materiality scatters commercial signage and lighting and space, throwing it all back at us in myriad, kaleidoscopic reflections that add to the sense of drowning in a flood of commercial semiotics.

The building’s other pièce de résistance is its vaulted glass and steel roof. It is strangely underlit at night, much to the benefit and legibility of the revenue-generating light displays by “Datev” and “Bombardier”. Along the concourses, lighting is carefully controlled to highlight shops and restaurants. Circulation signage is mute, while commercial signage is loud.

“They float on the landscapes like pyramids to the boom years all those Plazas, and Malls, and Esplanades” Jane Gidion, On the Mall

Circulation heals, soothes sore muscles, sanitizes the bedroom, flushes us with nutrients and minerals. Shops cluster around terminals like micro-organisms and crustaceans around an underwater volcano. A constant pulse of arrival and departures flushes the mall with fresh consumers and drains away the old. Graphs of sales figures rise and fall with scheduled arrivals and departures. Glass and steel Panorama escelators and elevators pierce the station’s numerous shopping levels like surgical equipment, flushing endless concourses of outlets and chain cafes with a steady supply of shoppers. Intake, compression, shop, exhaust.

At midnight on January 19, 2007, the isobar map for northern Germany looked like this, moments after Cyclone Kyrill’s furious winds has swept through Berlin.

Missing from the facade of Berlin’s central station was a two tonne steel I-beam and another one was hanging by its thread. In a single blow, Kyrill had knocked four tonnes of steel off value-engineered supports, and the lid off of most of our conceptions about this building, it’s modernist appearance, and the professions involved in its construction. Architect’s GMP were complicit in the pastiche modernist design, but DB had taken control of the building’s construction and someone had said “these little steel rails that keep the two tonne beams in place and cost us 67 Euros? We don’t need those.”

Fears for the building’s structural integrity were quickly dispelled. Kyrill’s distructive winds had only inflicted superficial damage. The two tonne I-Beam had had little to prop up besides itself and the image of a modernist facade. It had served as one of the massive, but purely decorative, horizontal transoms of the station’s externally expressed structure. St. Thomas, patron saint of architects, had unleashed his fury at this endless square footage of vacuous mediocrity – the latest missed opportunity to translate the promise and potential of early re-unified Berlin into built form – only days after its completion. It had sent Kyrill to expose the applique fig leaf modernism of Berlin’s central station. This publication smelled a rat ever since Kyrill plunged this dubious building into disrepute. They had promised us a “Stadtkrone”, instead we got this mall.

Years later, I found myself literally kicking the brushed steel facias of the nation’s and this station’s most prized glass elevators, down there in the pit of track 7, with girlfriend, child, stroller, and a mound of stuff that parenthood seems to always collect around you. I started to wonder if there was method to this buidling’s wretchedness. I beams that created the illusion of functionalism, crystalline elevators that didn’t live up to their aesthetic promise in terms of effectiveness, convoluted circulation whose sole purpose was to suck you deeper and deeper into the buildings auraless, cold, techno vacuity? I don’t recall ever feeling this much anger at an inanimate thing or building, in my life, not since I was eight. I wanted to kick it in the nuts, kick the life into it, and the shit out of its stoic, disaffected detachedness, fucking with me and succeeding.

I was trapped. After leftist terror attacks in October 2011, my train south had been canceled, and chasing one replacement connection after another, we had been sent on a tour de farce around the train station, experiencing the full brunt of what I was suspecting was a deliberate attempt to trap us in this Moloch of mammon for as long as, and by any means, possible. Eventually you will fold, and buy a croissant, a mini pizza, or some underwear. You might miss your train and have to buy a new ticket. On our fourth and final elevator trip, we felt we were drowning in this building – running, sweating, hope, defeat, not knowing up from down, etc.

“Your next connection is in 10 minutes from Track 12″, said the DB rep. Ok, that sounded good. “So that means you won’t make it”, he concluded. What? It takes 10 minutes to get from the main North South tracks to the main East-West tracks? How can that be, I thought, as this is what this building was sold to us on, that it linked up these two routes beautifully and functionally, as an expression of Germany’s new found unity.

could you move that sign? I can’t see my train

All this physical exertion had only brought us closer to our first family stint on the Tagesschau, but I had to pull my girlfriend away from the limelight, just as she was making her closing remarks, in a last ditch effort to miss our next connection on track six. “I swear they said track six” I said. Of course, there had only been a single PA anouncement , and a four minute notice, to make it to that train. The lone DB rep on the track shrugged her shoulders and shook her head, flapping a blond pony tail around, tied back under her red faux velvet DB cap. Her smart device was not smart anymore. It, too, had conceded to the terrorist’s arson, as had the LCDs, and all other displays, all the other fancy schmancy gadgetry. All they were doing was checking the internet for train schedules, anyway. She could not help me, was like me, just with a hat and uniform, just didn’t have to catch a train. This brief feeling of sympathy couldn’t stop the inevitable from happening. I unleashed a verbal attack that made me look pathetic and helpless. It didn’t seem to phase her one bit, but offered temporary relief from the swelling in my neck and throat I had eperienced, where the feeling of injustice resides. On a deeper level, I had already resigned long ago,when I saw Wolfgang Tiefensee (Germany’s former traffic minister and ironically also in charge when the station openend in 2007) walk up to a rep with smart phone and be turned away like anyone else. We had all become this Moloch’s children.

descent into Moloch in shiny elevators – a bit slow, but nice to look at

The building’s exterior looks engineered and functionalist, but is, in fact, a carefully crafted image that serves as a decoy. This might be called a train station but is only 20% train station and 80% percent shopping mall. There is really no reason for this to look any different than Alexa or any other Pomo shopping mall. The functionalist appearance here serves the purpose of fooling us into thinking we are confronted with a train station, the aesthetic of “the overall railway-station character of our existence”, to quote Ernst Bloch. Maybe it fooled some officials into thinking they were getting a train station. I suspect a study indicating that people are 30% more likely to shop in a mall if unaware of being in one.

From the perspective of a train station and a user, the functionalist appearance served to mask an architecture of deliberate dysfunctionality. From the perspective of a vertical mall and shopper, it may be a building that is very functional, but the common architecture of functioning malls is not that of the “railway-station character of our existence”.

the station's real self – X ray image through modernist fig leaf

Looking back, House fits precisely with the early 1990s postmodern (‘pomo’) Zeitgeist, where insides and outsides and the permeable, shifting liminal zones between them were in a flux of radical undecidability, even of alterity. Clearly, the period’s critical theory buzzwords still flow fluently. In 1993, I was a student of English literature, particularly taken with critical theory, and it shows. It also explains why House made its mark on me, or should I say, it accounts for the continuing inscription of the Zeitgeist‘s discourse onto the palimpsest of my (en)cultur(at)ed Weltanschauung. Still, it’s easy to sneer.

From Zeitgeist to Geistzeit. It was Halloween when I first noticed the moulding on this exterior wall of a basement in Dublin. Perhaps it was something to do with the way the drapes hang like a white-sheet ghost that drew my attention. The moribund plant container and the odd negative jail-cell bars on the frosted glass certainly played a role too. But I think it goes deeper than just association of ideas. Things that are inside-out can be disturbingly uncanny because they give solid form to what is not normally solid. That is not to say that inside-out buildings are always uncanny – the exposed entrails of the Centre Georges Pompidou or of the Lloyds Building are merely interesting. But when a building or its surfaces bear the trace of something now missing, as in House, or when concrete bears the mark of the piece of wood that contained it (example here), we are faced with some kind of ghostly remnant (if this sounds like Derrida, it is because it occurs to me that his Specters of Marx also dates from 1993).

On a cold winter’s day in Paris, when you notice the marks where, months before, the kickstands of parked motorbikes have sunk into the softened tar, the ghostly heat of that summer’s day brushes your cheek.

In Derry, are these micro-sculptures meant to be emerging from beneath the pavement, or have they fallen from above? Either way, they are imprints of the missing oak wood – Derry comes from ‘Doire’, which means oak wood – that once occupied this spot. The name of the city is contested – officially it is Londonderry, the colonial name, but the great majority of its residents call it simply Derry. The micro-sculptures are evidence that the ghost of the original wood has not forgotten, and will not forget, that this is an undead doire. It’s a good example of how the nationalist population of that city have won the cultural war, spending UK-exchequer money on deconstruction-influenced sculpture that proclaims the passing nature of the centuries-long British occupation.

The grisly curtains in Dublin make me wonder, with a quickening of my pulse, if the original curtains are still in there, undead and entombed inside the plaster? Whiteread’s scultpure always did have something of the sarcophagus about it, as if some ghastly entombment had happened there. Years after House was demolished, I lived in London and for a long while passed the spot regularly without knowing what had stood there. What I always thought of as I passed that spot was how 200 people were made homeless and 6 were killed there in 1944 by the first successful German V-1 ‘flying bomb’. There’s no trace of that.

What better way to begin a new year than with a fresh reminder from Slab Magazine that the “Berliner Republik” is crumbling! Yes! It is falling apart at the seams!

Cast your mind back to April 2011 (or open another tab, if you wish), and you might recall a similar case in this series, where the anchoring pins of a sandstone panel had become painfully visible. I claimed that the phenomena was not uncommon, so feel duty-bound to reveal another example of façade-failure, this time affecting the generically named “Bürohaus Neue Grünstraße 22”.

Whilst listed in the Senate Department’s database of post-1990 architecture (here), the office building seems to have been disowned by its architects: “no data available”. Even the client is anonymous, and the Senate has no record of when building work begun or was completed. It is a textbook example of the “Planwerk Innenstadt” building typology: six stone-clad floors of misery punctured by a monotonous cooky-cutter grid of windows.

Ah yes. Stone cladding. It’s not as though Berlin isn’t short of a good example: Emil Fahrenkamp’s Shell-Haus of 1932, is masterful proof that the technique isn’t evil per se. But Hans Stimmann’s berkish insistence that the future of Berlin should be a freeze-dried Imperial Era travesty sealed stone cladding’s fate as a sort of cheap, heavy, foundation cream. It was slathered on by mediocre architects, and probably greeted by investors keen on quick ROI with little Senate-side friction.

A quick fix, then, for battered Berlin. And repair will be the reigning paradigm for decades to come when dealing with Stimmann’s crumbling inheritance, as these pictures show. One assumes that those yellowed globules are the coagulated residuum from the flubbed patch-job to the crack on the right. Maybe the gaps between panels (don’t tell me these gaping crevices are expansion joints) are just being used to store putty for the next round of repairs.

→ Modern Façades Today, Now

Regent’s Park, London. Late 20th Century.

Dansey Place, in all probability, behind a Chinese restaurant

I remember being interested in quietness, and of wanting to avoid clichés of the ‘pulsating, chaotic city’ kind. I’d come across the photography of Paul Barkshire, whose black and white photos of London were unpeopled, meditative and strangely timeless. He made the early 1980′s look like the early 1880’s, and seemed to have a knack of coaxing the inner village out of the metropolis. I wanted something similar. Super-8 cartridges contained 15 meters of film, and at 18 frames per second were good for three minutes of film. This was to be my defining restriction. The film I wanted to make wouldn’t be cut, it would just be grafted togther. This could just as easily be attributed to a prediliction for Andy Warhol as it could to sheer laziness.

The author (left), and his sister drink 60p cups of tea

My sister and I went to London together to make the film. I had four sites in mind, conjoined by the idea of descent, or diminishing space: Regent’s Park, an alleyway in Chinatown, the inside of a cafe, and the Tube. I held the camera, my sister the tapedeck.

Having converted the film I was touched to discover younger versions of us both in the now defunct and sorely-missed New Picadilly Café on Denman Street, occasionally looking somewhat self-conscious in front of the camera. If I’d known that the film was to become a historical document I’d have pointed the camera into the cafe at the staff and the other patrons.

Going underground

The soundtrack seems to have been recorded asynchronously. I don’t recall why. It’s most noticeable in the cafe, and apparant too in the final underground scene where at least the closing-door-alarm seems to match roughly with the entrance and exit of some passengers.

Of course, Super-8 film was already an anachronism when I shot the film. VHS was still de rigueur, but Apple’s Quicktime software was already in its second version, signalling things to come. Digitized, streamed and embedded, the film seems not just doubly aged, but almost decrepit; of another epoch. The grainysmear patina of real film with all its fluff, underexposure and colour-bleed is now just a cosmetic option in some app, lending the digital the aura of the authentic, of the crafted. Ironically, the beauty of Super-8 was that you didn’t really need to know what you were doing either. But just look at those black tones! No idea how that happend.

Anyway, take a look at the film. Absolutely nothing happens. I urge you to watch all of it anyway, and if it helps make things more interesting I can reveal that there is an odd moment of audio-creep about three-quarters of the way in, where a French voice can be heard intruding upon the soundtrack. Probably some casette deck balls-up. As you may recall, they didn’t have an ‘undo’ function.