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.

The climax of strip architecture?

Located at the fringe of Salzburg, Austria, the Erotk Markt appears at first sight to be nothing more than a local iteration of the sort of strip architecture that we’re all familiar with. And it is. But the Austrians, as I learned on my recent travels to Salzburg and Carinthia, have an edge when it come to rendering the banal with an extra level of reflection, expense and stubborn hashing-out-of-the-details that can transmogrify the inane into the exotic. Down there I saw tons of overwrought expressions of consumerist fantasy that I now wish I’d stopped to photograph. I think I was just too taken aback by all the sleek detailing and computer modeled form to start breaking it down into something I could make sense of; I was in a daze, I guess, from having just driven by the local headquarters of Bausparkasse Wustenrot.

But at the Erotik Markt I found something both comprehensible and uncanny, something that for all its convention and economy had a much greater impact on me. What it was, really, that I felt had to be recorded, was the building’s corner detail.

Structure and Symbol

This mega strut, from which the roof is hung via steel rods, is jacked at an angle well above 45º. That’s something provocative in and of itself given the context. Topping it is an element filled with innuendo, wavering between conditions of structural necessity and frivolous suggestiveness: the triangular steel plate connecting flange / useless finial.

Learning the rules of hide and reveal from the pros

Driving the double entendre home without any doubt whatsoever, the window dressers have helpfully put a mannequin in what looks like a not-to-comfortable pose against the strut’s base inside the plate glass-enclosed shop interior. The shag carpet sleeve provides a frictive buffer between her and cold steel structure. Cue pink flourescent tube.

A rest-stop on Berlin’s 127th Street. Little in common with Harlem.

In approaching a publication like Disko a more intense quality of research is needed than might otherwise go into a typical article on this site. Recognising this, and the need to explore semiotically challenging terrain, the SLAB editorial team decided to conduct a two-day field trip along the length of the old Berlin Wall using a quad bike and a beach buggy. Seeing as the old Death Strip is now a cycle path and a richly varied biotope, any difficulties arrising from our choice of transportation would become dramatic devices, exploitable at a later date. It was also of upmost importance to make a hell of a lot of noise with a couple of two-stroke engines.

The ultimate cul-de-sac

We explored the ultimate cul-de-sac, the so-called “duck’s beak” which is a dead-end street that was surrounded by the Wall on three sides, resulting in a narrow East German enclave which jutted 530 meters into West Berlin. Here we discovered Helmut-Kohl-era BRD concrete villas with orange awnings, and the post-reunification ‘shateux’ of a retired footballer.

Camping on the former death strip

We camped out on a football pitch on the former death strip, and reflected upon the 3% of landmines still unaccounted for twenty years after demilitarisation. People walk their dogs here at 5am.

This is what you do field trips for

We struck architectural gold in our discovery of this el Cheapo Site style rip-off. This was in a light industrial estate specialising in discount denim products and roof tiles.

We set off with no coherent thesis, and returned with no consistent conclusion, but certainly with enough material to compile an engaging documentation. This article, then, should be seen as a kind of trailer for our issue of Disko, which will appear towards the end of the year, and will, doubtless, be touted by us doggedly up to and beyond publication date.

You can link to the gallery site at this address, but please be aware that a flash animation is embedded that may cause seizures to be suffered by people diagnosed with epilepsy:

http://www.kaihoelzner.de/

For those of you that don’t want to brave that test of speed reading in German, here is a tickling frame that was furnished to me in the press release for the show:

As our more steadfast readers already know, the Berlin townhouse is a subject that is both seductive and perplexing to us, going all the way back to Ian Warner’s piece from November 2006, ‘Upper-Middle-Class Homes for the “Classless” Society’, as well as Karen Elliot’s seminal follow-up from one year ago, ‘A Whiff of Density’.

So now let’s see where this conversation is going, should be an awesome thing to check out this weekend. From 7:00pm on Saturday, July 17th at Galerie Kai Hoelzner, Adalbertstr. 96, 10999 Berlin.

A more elaborate proposal, requiring special ordinances for the temporary use of pavement customarily used for the parking of automobiles.

A festive variation, found at a popular purveyor of Indian cuisine.

A more aggressive approach, fashioned with the assistance of a professional scaffolding contractor.

The diguises fall into two categories: cloaks and costumes, and with ‘cloak’ I mean the science fiction variety; an invisibility shield.

The doric order shithouse

The BVG, Berlin’s public transport network operator, have been busy building toilets for its bus and tram drivers across the city. Whilst taking the picture above, I got chatting to a tram driver seeking relief at a terminal stop at Nordbahnhof. He told me that all the BVG loos have been decorated differently. Which means we won’t need to put up with badly painted Roman temples, but a wide variety of shakey costume architectural parodies. Whilst I dig the idea, the execution leaves a lot to be desired. However, I must admit to being fascinated by the positioning of the two tell-tale, off-the-shelf vent coverings, which look as though they were added after the paint job.

Convenient canvas

Out in Fürstenberg, a small town 75km north of Berlin, some wag has produced a stunning portrait of SpongeBob Squarepants using a ubiquitous curb-side Grey Box as a conveniently shaped canvas.

The Lennon box

Another costume, produced, one assumes, by an anonymous pupil of the John Lenon Secondary School in Berlin’s Mitte district. For me, this marks an artistic zenith in the quiet conflict which has been waging for months between sprayers and Deutsche Telekom buffers. I’m hoping this piece of urban decoration will be lasting, but some other can-weilding cretin has already blemished the piece since the photo was taken.

The stealth cottage is visible enough not to be seen

I’m going to leave this meander with another example from the countryside: this time from Neuglobsow, a lakeside hamlet close to SpongeBob’s home town, and a great example of a ‘cloaked’ hut. It turned out to be an electrical substation, and obviously one of such aesthetic embarrasment to this history-conscious community that it was worth disguising as a timber frame cottage. Apart from the exaggerated perspective, and the peculiarly uninterrupted view of a distant lake, the effect is pretty convincing even from a distance of just two meters. So absorbing is this example, that the undisguied Grey Box to the right goes by unnoticed. Paradoxes abound.

For me this is all about a healthy erosion of the boundry between individuals and the civic infrastructure. Regardless of whether the decorattion of these non-descript structures is legal or illegal, it’s a way of reclaiming the streets and turning them into an extension of private domestic space. Customisation and reappropriation of that which is nominally out of bounds is a reaffirmation that the place you call home extends beyond the four walls of your dwelling.

The semi-circular terrace is the perfect shape for these buildings because it allows vistas only of the fronts of the buildings. The geometry of the semi-circle means that looking out the back of any of these buildings makes it impossible to see the rear facades of the neighbouring buildings. This is entirely in keeping with the clean and proportioned aesthetic of the fronts, which are possible only at the expense of the jumbled and irregular rears. Thus, the townhouses of Cartwright Gardens were designed so that the only thing that could be seen from the rear would be the gardens of the houses themselves, providing a buffer between the terrace and whatever the next building would have been around 1807.

This is the view from the rear of the Harlingford Hotel, on the south side of Cartwright Gardens. Whatever green space there was visible from here has been eaten up in the intervening years, and now the townhouses have no space out the back other than the closed-in courtyards which act as light- and air-wells. The pressure of space and the temptation of high land prices have taken their toll, and now the genteel terrace contemplates an array of warehouse roofs. The overall effect is that distinctively London look of eras upon eras, spaces upon spaces, blocks upon blocks, where the commercial imperative above all has created a jumble that ranges from captivating to distressing, depending on your mood and your pay level. There has been little to invite hotel guests to glance out the window of the return stairs between the third and fourth floors, from where this picture was taken. Until 2009/10, that is, when the colourful rear facade opposite suddenly appeared. What the children’s colourbook colour-scheme of the new building attempts to distract us from is the fact that the new structure has filled the only unoccupied gap on the entire block.

The new building appears in this satellite image as a grey rhomboid, backing on to the beige-roofed buildings on the north side of Tavistock Place. The warehouse roofs of the first picture shine white in the sunshine in the satellite image. The view from the window at the back of the Harlingford used to include the rear of Tavistock Place, but this is a fact I can assert not from memory but only from deduction. I have stayed in that hotel many times, and looked out that window many times, but I can no longer remember what the view used to be. Now that this new building has appeared, a gap in my memory has opened. Nobody knows the value of an empty site more than a building developer, except perhaps the people who spend the rest of their days gazing out at the object that has taken its place.

Thanks to esteemed colleague Mr Buhr, who kicks off this new SLAB Collection with the above photo he recently submitted. This series will probe the challenging aesthetic dimension of damage in modern façade design, and in doing so will debunk the authority of the surface in contemporary architecture. It will also be good for a whole bunch of laughs.

Let’s go at this one layer for layer. First there’s the smeggy, cream-cheese surface treatment; the exterior equivalent of anaglypta wallpaper and just as soul destroying. Below this a chalky crust of hardened powder has been adhered to a flimsy aluminium mesh, underneath which everything becomes rather obscene looking. I should imagine that the mud-encrusted anus of a Merino sheep is not dissimilar in appearence.

Judging by the subtle dent in the blue metal surface, this is probably a door frame which has been rear-ended by some motor vehicle or other. The resulting scar is a vulgar reminder of what is keeping modern homo-sapiens safe from the elements, and poses the quesiton of whether or not we are happy for our most visible of art forms to appear as if it has been congealed rather than composed.

→ The “Modern Façades Today Now” Collection

Uni dAfour, Geneva [Foto: Lorenzo Poglia]

If you’re looking for an intellectual parking spot, but without the cars, Uni Dufour is your next stop. Uni Dufour: a squared block of cement with regular apertures that stand in for windows. For most of dog-walkers in the neighborhood, it’s just a clash of cement among harmonious old stones. For the fetishist architects wearing over-designed eyewear, Uni Dufour is a typical post-Corbusian building conceived in 1974 by Werner Francesco, Gilbert Paux and Jacques Vicari. To me, this building just represents 6 years of administrative time wasting until I finally got my fucking PhD. Maybe as a biologist, I would have appreciated it much more if the project would have been realized according to original plan. Indeed, a vegetal blanket was supposed to have covered the concrete skeleton. Unfortunately, this architectural wet dream turned out to be a technical nightmare which left the building in the shame of its nudity. Since then, several competitions have been organized in order to restore the project to its original dignity.

The artist Tatsuo Miyajima, whose LED displays were recently tacked on to the building to improve its appearance, called Uni Dufour “the fortress of human science”. But I’ve forgotten to say that it’s also supposed to hold the large human-science lectures for first year suckers.

So of course the psychitects loved Miyajima’s idea of putting displays with numbers that stochastically change at a particular frequency that has been set by random individuals recruited into the project at its inception. Kind of bringing individuality in the middle of a global movement, as if to say, let’s lay the pedestrians on the psychoanalyst’s couch! During the day at least these displays give a shiny touch to the building, while at night the discrepancy between the frequency of each light’s switching from a number to an other lends the illusion of a lighter shaped building through their glittering effect.

The last trick used to modify the aesthetic perception of Uni Dufour is produced by two phrases. The first is “Inventer, c’est penser à côté” – “Inventing is thinking sideways” (Albert Einstein). A great way of suggesting the reader is entering a world of ideas and should forget about the building; as if to say “please, do not think around here, go further to get the answer”. A bit like asking someone to look left beyond the building so as to activate the right (creative) hemisphere.

The second phrase is by Simone de Beauvoir: “On ne naît pas femme, on le devient” – “One is not born woman, but becomes it”. Besides being a clear suggestion of feminine sensuality, these words introduce the notion that the character of the building isn’t a natural trait, but something that had to be acquired over time. Thirty years to turn into a grown up seems like a pretty long time …

General Dufour, who brought peace during the Swiss civilian war of 1847, has still a long run to gallop on his bronze horse covered in pigeon shit before bringing peace to Geneva’s architectural trauma.