The Fellini Residences

Compared to the Choriner Höfe, the marketing of the Fellini Residences represents a more coherent attempt to integrate a building-style which takes its cues from local historical architectural movements, with the kind of prophetic lifestyle engineering we’ve seen before. However, where the new development is obviously not historical (because it is contemporary), but historicized, (because it mimicks the local architecture of the late 1700s) the marketing machinery is required to function as a kind of verbal putty, filling the intellectual gaps unavoidably left open by architectural mimicry.

And so we read on the Residence’s website:

Welcome to the Italian quarter of Berlin! … All the inhabitants have just one thing in common: they love life and have used perhaps the last opportunity to acquire an apartment in the direct proximity of the Gendarmenmarkt (7 minutes by foot) … Whoever lives here does not have to do without anything. The subway stations Hausvogteiplatz and Spittelmarkt are a few minutes away.

Three things are happening here. The first is that Berlin has no Italian quarter. A quick search for «Italian quarter» at Berlin’s official website berlin.de returns zero results. A similar search at Lonely Planet turns up results for San Francisco and Dublin, but not Berlin. So having established that Berlin, in all probability, has no Italian quarter, it can be safely assumed that the Fellini Residence’s image makers have just invented it. And further more, the Fellini Residences aren’t in the Italian quarter, they are the Italian quarter. Quite a claim for a single building.

La Dolce Vita. Soon in Berlin.

The second thing going on in the quote above, is the fashioning of a strong affiliation with the Gendarmenmarkt. The Gendarmenmarkt is a square in central Berlin where the Konzerthaus stands, as well as the German and French cathedrals. A statue of Schiller also stands here. The Konzerthaus was built in 1821 by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, who was German. The French cathedral was built by the Hugenots – who were French – between 1701 and 1705. The German cathedral was designed by Martin Grünberg – another German – and built by Giovanni Simonetti, who was Swiss, but probably completed his stone masonry apprenticeship in Italy.

Gendarmenmarkt: Italian flair, apparently. Not German flair.

This is not to say, however, that German architecture of the 19th Century wasn’t influenced by Italy, because it was. But the tenuous association the Fellini Residences are making between themselves and the Italian influence on the buildings of Gendarmenmarkt is laughable. Separate the Italian from the Gendarmenmarkt and the picture becomes clearer: the Italian connection being made here is a simple, romanticised northern European notion of Italian flair, temperament and lifestyle, which the Fellini Residences hope to evoke through name alone. The Gendarmenmarkt connection, meanwhile, has nothing to do with the history of architecture, but has everything to do with the fact that the square is surrounded by some of the most luxurious shopping possibilities the world has to offer. Indeed, elsewhere, the Fellini Residence website gets right to business:

Want to go shopping? How about Gucci, Moschino or Cerutti. You could also pay a visit to Ferrari and Bugatti. Or you could dine exquisitely at Bocca di Bacco, at Borchardt or at Sale e Tabacchi.

The third thing going on in the above quote is the deliberate glamorisation of location through an extremely selective information policy. The cliché goes that property is about three things: location, location, and location. But even here the Fellini Residences are on shaky ground, despite what they claim. The map and key below attempt to explain why:

1. The Fellini Residences
2. Gendarmenmarkt
3. Hausvogteiplatz and underground station
4. Spittelmarkt and underground station
5. Moritzplatz and underground station

What the map above reveals is that whilst the Fellini Residences (1) are happy to associate themselves with the glamour of Gendarmenmarkt (2) and the practicality of Hausvogteiplatz underground station (3), they are situated just as close to Moritzplatz (5) in neighboring Kreuzberg, which is decidedly lacking in flair having never really recovered from allied bombing during WWII.

Moritzplatz: German flair, apparently. Not Italian flair. [Photo: Herr Popp]

The skewed lens through which the developers are keen for prospective customers to gaze through is almost endearingly whimsical. Whilst not quite as abrasively cretinous as the manure pile devised by the Choriner Höfe, there is still a danager at the center of all this spin. It is the danger of isolation.

In all its cockeyed preoccupation with itself, the Fellini Residences are currently, in their unbuilt form, only happy to engage with the parts of Berlin it already sees reflected in itself. It has little time for anything which doesn’t fit into this scheme of things. How else then to explain the complete lack of interest it shows in anything just footsteps away: the Berlin wall for example, which ran not five meters from the antique fountain planned for the center of the Residence’s «jewel garden» is not mentioned once. And when one considers the 171 people who were killed or died trying to cross the wall the following words are particularly distasteful:

You do not have to die to arrive in paradise. You have it right on your doorstep.

Despite its historic ambitions, real history is an insignificance compared with the heavenly delights on offer within the compound. And lost on the Fellini Residences too is any sense of historic irony, a sense of transience and incongruity, which could have instilled the development with a modicum of genuine dignity beyond its fetishisation of form and material.

In honor of Lacoste’s 75th birthday, KaDeWe (Berlin’s answer to Harrods) invited the fashion label to celebrate in its department store. Then, under the title «12.12 Gallery», Lacoste invited eleven artists living in Berlin to decorate the shop windows with original works of art which were then to be auctioned off for a good cause. One of these artists was Brad Downey, who, like his ten other colleagues, submitted a written proposal in which he made it quite clear that «something outside will turn green». So far so good.

So on the 22nd May, Downy loaded up a fire-extinguisher with Lacoste-green children’s finger paint, approached the store front, and proceeded to give it a good dowsing. Shortly afterwards KaDeWe and Lacoste suffered from a sudden, synchronous sense-of-humour-failure. First the paint was removed as quickly as possible, and then Downey’s name dissapeared from the banner out front promoting the artistic intervention.

True to his word: «Something outside will turn green». [Photo: Richard Schwarz]

There’s something deliciously embarrasing about Lacoste and KaDeWe’s behaviour in the aftermath of this event; something almost endearingly timid about their failure to distinguish between the artwork they commissioned and an act of stray vandalism. As a public relations excersize it pretty much capsized, and whilst Downey can claim innocently to have fulfilled his commission, it’s interesting to note where and how clearly the line has been drawn between the mainstream and the subversive. Bluntly said: put something daft behind a window and you’re okay; put something daft onto the window and you’re not. And this is a simple question of territory: of encroachment and of assimilation.

In order to jog your weary, blog-worn memory, here is our original screen grab of the «culture» section of their website made on 10th April, complete with the senseless inclusion Norman Foster’s philology library in Dahlem:

And here is today’s screen grab for comparison:

The charming young belle with her finger stuck in her ear is still present, as is her angst-ridden dreadlocked buddy, but lo!, what doth we find in the background? A rendering of the Choriner Höfe back yard, perchance?

The change of visuals is the most visible modification, but other points we ridiculed – such as the lisiting of cafés and restuarants in a completely different neighborhood – have now been swapped in their entirity for an extended list including, surprise, surprise, Gorki Park and a host of other establishments to be found less than 300m away from the property development in question.

Apart from these reasonable changes, the website is still a brimming crock of putird effluent. The only real fresh dissapointment is that SLAB Magazine hasn’t made it to the «Press» section as has the Berliner Morgenpost daily newspaper.

Two of Windsor’s Psittacula krameri

The next day I took a walk into the center of town, and there they were again, shooting overhead, their long tails trailing behind. A day later I took a walk into Windsor’s great park, a 20 square kilometer Norman hunting ground and the Queen’s modest back garden. On the way, the now familiar chattering overhead signalled their presence once again. Now I was convinced they were following me, and once in the park itself I managed to catch them taking a breather on the high branch of a dead tree.

(left) Ring-necked parakeet distribution in the UK, (right) a parakeet awaiting distribution [Sources: RSPB]

According to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, Britain’s parakeets are decendents of pets which either escaped, or were released deliberately. Despite being tropical birds, they’ve been able to withstand cold winters and started to breed in 1969 in the county of Kent, south of London. Peculiar though are British laws concerning the bird: it is illegal to release them deliberately, but they are protected under the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act.

The RSPB estimates that there could be as many as 50,000 of the birds in London alone by the year 2010. It’s particularly odd that their numbers are increasing when one considers the rapid decline of the sparrow population in urban areas. Indeed, sparrows have made it onto the RSPB’s red list of globally threatened species.

Searching for UK parakeet sightings on the BBC website, I came across the following two relatively recent articles:

How do parakeets survive in the UK? – find out here
In pictures: suburban parakeets – better photos than mine of some pretty thuggish looking examples

A couple more links:
The RSPB website
A Windsor Information website

Thanks to Thomas who sent us this photo of a pretty novel looking power transformation substation in Tel Aviv. SLAB is heartily amused by the super-redundancy of the columns, the decorative security fence and the beautiful integration of faked ceramic insulators as doric capitals.

This pile of stones is so damned satisfying, that I would have to have one too, if only I had a garden.

There’s something very touching about amateur art. Maybe it has to do with the degree of effort which goes into it, and the fact that this effort is often so distressingly visible in the final result. In this example, found on a flea market, you can see how much love and time went into the details of the Old National Gallery’s façade, the building at the center of the composition. There is a depth to the shadows behind the columns not found in the rendering of the tree, or the Old Museum shown to the left.

And then there is the one whacking great curious detail which anyone who knows Berlin a little will immediately stumble upon: Berlin’s TV tower is definately not visible from this angle. In fact, you’d have spin clockwise on your heel by at least 120°, and then levitate a good 90m or so in order to get a glimpse of the East German concrete cocktail swirler. It’s a deliberate mistake, I’m sure. As though the anonymous artist had wanted to get as much of Berlin into one picture as possible. But the faintness of the TV tower looks less like a stab at atmospheric perspective, and more like hesitance in the face of artistic license.

But the «Alexa» mall still looks like this, as I checked today:

Yes it’s pink and it’s got a completely different facade. Are the investors themselves ashamed of what they did?