SLAB Magazine

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.

SLAB Magazine referred to it before and now it happened again. The strangely pink shopping mall at Berlin’s Alexanderplatz «Alexa» is still presented in the media (www.tagespiegel.de 18.04.2008) like this:

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?

Think about the spacial settings of computer games (labyrinths, factories, castles, dungeons) and you could maybe, tentatively, argue that they’ve always, at their core, been about our relationship to architecture. This reading suits SLAB just fine of course, but Valve Software’s title Portal, is undoubtably fantastic encounter with the architecture of the imagination.

What makes Portal so completely mind-boggling is the way its developers have combined natural physical laws (such as gravity), with the stuff of science-fiction (wormholes) in a relatively familiar gaming surrounding (a sinister science facility).

Familiar territory, unfamiliar strategy

Portal rethinks space by rethinking weaponry. Instead of a gun, you are given a tool with which you can punch wormholes into walls, floors or ceilings. A kind of temporary, sub-atomic interaction with the architecture is the result. The principle is simple but the consequences are spectacular. Shoot with one hand and you make an orange hole, shoot with the other hand and you make a blue hole. The holes are connected, allowing you to enter one and exit from the other. A great way of crossing unsurmountable obstacles: don’t jump them, suggests the game, bend space/time around them.

Mirror effect: looking at yourself through a portal in the ceiling

The player can also combine the wormhole principle with the effects of gravity: crossing a hole too large to jump can be achieved by shooting a hole in the wall behind you, then jumping into the hole and shooting a second hole directly into the floor below you as you approach it. Momentum then propels you over the top of the hole you just jumped down.

The portals also radically subvert the the first-person-shooter (FPS) game-genre by enabling the player to inspect their alter-ego as in a mirror by using two adjacent wormholes. In doing this Portal also exploits the inherent coyness of the FPS-typical camera viewpoint, exposing the fact that you are actually playing a female character, still a rarity in this type of game despite Lara Croft.

Joe McNeilly, senior editor of the online gaming journal Games Radar, has in fact written a lucent feminist reading of Portal in which he offers a Freudian reading of the portals whcih are «metaphorical birth canal through which the protagonist is constantly being born into new trials». Where Lara Croft blasts her way through Tomb Rader with a rich arsenal of weapons, Portal’s protagonist, Chell, makes subtle architectural changes to see her through. I urge you to read McNeilly’s article, and consider why such intelligent writing about computer games doesn’t appear in the mainstream architectural press.

Chell confronts herself

The disturbed geometries of the architecture are matched by the equally disturbed psychology of the gameplay. A malfunctioning computer (with a female voice) called GlaDOS taunts you from the off, offering dubious advice, and alternating between insult and praise for your actions. One recalls the dramatisation of Arthur C. Clarke’s HAL9000 in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, but also more recent films such as the disturbing but not quite so satisying Cube, in which a group of people wake up in a nightmarish architectural puzzle with no recallection of how they got there.

I’m no expert in gaming, and I don’t own a games console even though Portal is as good a reason as any to do so. But I’d like to know if there are any more games out there treating architecture not just as a dumb backdrop, but as an integral part of game dramatology. As I’ve coming to understand it, Portal’s makers, Valve, are responsible for the game Half-Life 2 in which a «gravity gun» comes in to play. This is what I’m after, physics-busting, architecture-warping, wormhole-pimped fractal geometry in a gaming environment inspired by M.C.Escher.

Know where you’re at

My first real taste of business travel has taken me 5995 kilometers from home in Berlin to Montreal in Canada. Not that I can tell that I’m there, however, since my entire stay here has been confined to a Novotel hotel room, a small windowless conference room in the second floor of a factory, and the cars and vans which shuttled me between both locations. They say that Montreal’s a nice place, but the sweet irony of my packed working schedule has been that I’ve seen «nothing» of the country I’m in. Just the «nowhere» of the industrial trading estate where I’ve been working.

Welcome to Montreal, business traveller

So what is that «nothing» exactly, and what constitutes the «nowhere»? The nothing is probably the lack of identifying features which might already been known to me before my arrival. A tourist who travels to Paris visits the Eiffel Tower, and expects to find it there before leaving home. Seeing it, and being photographed in front of it as evidence of having been there, is a strong identifying moment.

I have had no such identifying moments here, just a steady, subtle stream of reports that I am some place «other»: these include large trucks, wide streets, local accents, narrower newspaper formats, massive chrome plumbing, 24 hour air conditioning, generic-vernacular architecture, sturdy old fashioned light switches, reinforced electrical cabling, lack of pavements, a glut of processed food …

Editor currently travelling. Articles pending.

Public park benches in Münster (Westphalia).

Last week SLAB reported on the pending building developments on a plot of land between Choriner Straße and Zehdenicker Straße in Berlin’s Mitte district. The so-called Choriner Höfe are to be built here.

Choriner Höfe, so very stylish, to be built in 2008

The word «Höfe» is the plural form of «Hof», which means yard, and is a reference to the typical building style around the time of the industrial revolution. Houses were built deep into the center of street blocks around dark inner yards, connected to each other by archways. Sometimes these hive-like structures had five back-yards, and were also a mirror image of society with the upper-classes living at the front and the working class packed further back in the murky depths. Seen historically, Höfe had less to do with quality of life, and more to do with cramped mixed-use space: domestic housing butting up against hospitals and heavy industry.

Meyers Hof, not at all stylish, blown up in 1972

Since the late 1990s though, the word «Hof» in Berlin has become associated with tourist attractions such as the Hackesche Höfe, whose synonymity with a long-gone alternative art scene has fueled its image for nearly two decades. So it’s interesting to see how the word «Hof» is still being appropriated in real estate marketing.

The website for the Choriner Höfe is a bloated bag of unspeakable turds. Shortly after the site opens in your browser window, and expands to fill your entire screen, American sitcom compatible jazz music pipes up, and after a few bars morphs into a Kruder & Dorfmeistery low-fat, decaffeinated electro-jazz shuffle.

The site is dominated by pic-and-mix photographic associations, which have been chosen more for their lifestyleyness than they have for an accurate representation of the neighbourhood. A photo of the café Gorki Park on Weinbergsweg, less than 300 meters away from the Choriner Höfe, is the backdrop for the peculiarly name page «History Living», but is not mentioned on the page «Finest Places» where three restaurants are listed, two of which are to be found on Kollwitplatz a kilometer further north in a completely different neighborhood.

[Screen grab from www.chorinerhoefe.com]

More absurd still is the page «Culture» (shown above), which, next to the girl with her finger in her ear, shows a photo of the interior of Lord Norman Foster’s philology library at the Free University in Dahlem; which, the last time I checked, lies 16km to the south west of the Choriner Höfe.

Mitte’s finest: paternal John Travolta type with very young Latin belle inspect their new Beatsteaks CD [screen grab from www.chorinerhoefe.com]

The scattershot use of photographic material is comparable to that disquieting feeling one has when watching a film which has been shot in a city you know very well, and where none of the cuts in outdoor scenes match up with local geography. Your happily suspended disbelief is shattered, and the nuts and bolts of the movie are brutally exposed. In property marketing, a little fiction is not carelessness, it’s dramatic license.

Texts on the Choriner Hof website though are almost psychotic in their hyperbolic insistency. They read like the work of a fervent property evangelist, willing the future into existence by repeating the same demented mantra over and over. For instance, we learn that the Choriner Höfe are already …

… a hotspot for people who have made the decision to lead a self-determined life. For people who not only buy but make brands; who want to be there when it happens.

Elsewhere we read that these idealised, «self-determined» tennants are people who …

… work and produce on balconies, roof terraces, hidden gardens or in cafés while listening to the Kaiserchiefs, the Beatsteaks or Bloc Party on their iPods.

Further more …

… everybody can be a star! Perhaps this is the reason why people would never stop and star [sic] while Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt amble through the alternative boutiques of the Kastanienallee.

This marketing prose is obviously insane: a potpourri of celebrity name-dropping, quack cool-codex, iPod playlist and engineered clairvoyancy. The wish-list of future tennants, as individual and independent as they are said to be, are sadly pre-prototyped readymades, easily identified entries in a database, plug-and-play units no more than a matching accessory to the beige sofa or the oak floorboards.

In a city as grubbily organic as Berlin — famed for its constant improvisation, its restlessly shifting countercultures, its grassroots democratic sense of scandal and its enduring delusion that it’ll one day, really really soon, be ready — it’s utterly fascinating to observe how a small group of property developers are stoicly paddling upstream, utterly convinced that the maelstrom of frothing water bearing down against them is a mild brook flowing placidly in the same direction.

Berlin’s love affair with fake sandstone bows to private interests

As uttered here a while back, Berlin’s Mitte district can be mindnumbingly predictable, but SLAB Magazine wasn’t quite prepared to see another prophecy come true as quickly as this. The beige box at Hackescher Markt number 1, soon to be home to Muji, has indeed traded its sandstone cladding on the ground floor for anthracite coloured blocks.