SLAB Magazine

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.

The journalist’s best friend

Keen readers will notice a further minor change to the masthead, this time in homage to Kolja Reichert, freelance journalist to the Berlin daily newspaper Der Tagesspiegel, who recently, and we hasten to note, inadvertently, referred to “SLUB Magazine” in said paper.

Mr Reichert has been a real dude about things by writing a suitably groveling apology in the comments section of Slubbing It With The Dailies, where he expresses some pride in having caused such frothing consternation in an esteemed journal such as this. Joshing aside though, his concern that he might have misrepresented the output of Elegant Embellishments, is bona fide.

But what does Mr Reichert reveal in his comment by referring to the typo as a “Saturday morning vowel shift”? One imagines here the 10am deadline, a furrowed brow, drawn curtains, and the cuff of a dressing gown soaking up milk from an unfinished bowl of muesli whilst the last few paragraphs are hacked into a laptop. Can this be the reality of legitimate, for-cash freelance journalism? If so, it differs precious little from the blogging experience.

Whatever case, two world’s have collided, and I’m keen to find out more about the changing shape of professional and amateur journalism. Answers shall be sought with gin and peanuts, and published here. Or over there.

[Photo by Flickr user shordzi]

Dublin underwent an intense building boom during the ten years or so until early 2008. Under Ireland’s neoliberal economic policies, the emphasis was (and continues to be) very strongly on private enterprise as the key force in transforming the built environment. Government, local and national, was dominated by parties that believe in small government and a minimum of interference in the delicate balance of the market. This meant that there was virtually no social content in most of what was built in that period – no transport infrastructure, no educational insfrastructure, no energy efficiency, no green spaces, inadequate living space, insufficient drainage, poor materials and poor aesthetics.

This box on Cork Street, which presumably contains a local telecommunications switch, is a product of its times. It once stood flush with the line of the buildings on the street, but the new structure behind it has a recessed entrance with a broad swathe of pavement in front of it. I suppose the broad pavement was designed with a view to creating a dynamism to the entrance to the glass-fronted atrium. However, whether by design or by default or by mistake, the box and its contents were never shifted back to the new wall line. And so it stands, ruining the pavement-to-atrium effect (lame though it would have been) and creating a pointless blockage on the public way.

The problem here is not just lazy design and planning, it is a result of a toothless local government and planning regime, run by people who, when they are not being witless in their monitoring of how this entirely rebuilt street functions, are spineless in their attitudes towards builders, developers and property investors. It is a box of neoliberalism.

The Gratuitous Genre Film Collection

Downtown Oakland [Click to enlarge]

Google, a large technology company, has quietly added some new features to its popular “Maps” site. Selected areas of the globe are now viewable as a collage of areal photos - presumably shot from low-flying light aircraft. The effect is to render towns and cities in a SimCity near-isometric view. Currently the feature is restricted to a few parts of California, which is great because it allows us to spin one of those flippant, hyperbolic correlations which you all come here for. The imagery has been heavily processed to reduce noise, so rooftops, pools, streets, and just about any expanse of uniform tonality have that pastey, pancaked-look which badly Photoshopped fashion models often suffer from. The effect is enhanced further by some pretty brutal JPEG compression, giving the Californian ’burbscape the lifted, botoxed-look of an ageing celebrity.

That’ll be Europe [Click to enlarge]

Also of note is the map rotation feature which allows you to turn everything on its head. This is a great step, and brings the idea of context-changing alternative mapping to the masses. What I’d like to see next are Buckminster Fuller’s dymaxion map projections, or Jack van Wijk’s award winning Myriahedral projections:

Vague-scape: on Georgenstraße in Berlin [Click to enlarge]

Is this dead space ‘dead space’ because its function is over generalised, or because its function is over specialised?

I might say the latter, but its function isn’t clear. It seems to be the entrance to a hotel, but the brightly lit overhang speaks more of warehouse loading bay than a welcome mat for the weary traveller. It looks like somewhere service personnel might smoke.

However, if the space is dead because it is over generalised, then why is it so secretive and paranoid? The ramp is guarded by pot-plant sentries, the four possible entrances are unsignposted (with the main one taking on the form of a decelerating turnstile) and the windows conceal their contents with opaque foil.

One of the more obvious design flaws of the Sony Center on Potsdamer Platz – apart from the first three floors of façade, which is a windowless sheet of corrugated steel (a peculiar mistake to make) – are the metal plates used by the architects as floor panels in the central ‘plaza’.

Tight æsthetic concept [Photo: Flickr user RobotSkirts]

The Sony Center is conceived as an ensemble of buildings surrounding an inner courtyard, and are topped by a roof which mimicks the profile of Mount Fuji. This is an impressive fabric construction, rather like a set of sails which radiate down from the summit like the spokes of a bicycle wheel. Although completely kitch in its approach (it’s dramatised at night with slow-mo disco floodlighting), it does mean that the elements gets in; snow, rain, wind and all. At night in wet weather, if you squint hard, it’s a bit like being in a Syd Mead rendering, which does lend the Center a smattering of grittyness. But let’s get back to those floor panels.

Caution! Danger of slippage on metal plates despite winter maintenance. [Click to enlarge]

Metal floor panels in a plaza? Excuse the parlance, but what in shit-fuckery were Murphy/Jahn Architects thinking? Here’s a little hint from your friends at SLAB, free of charge: metal is slippery when wet. That’s sound advice, write it down. Even in summer you have to watch how you go here with a pair of tread-worn sneakers on your feet, but in winter, after almost two months of snow and freezing weather, this is trecherous madness.

As a work-around, signs have been put up. Unfortunately they fall just short of blaming the architects directly for their misjudgement, stressing instead that extra care should be excersized, despite winter maintenance. Whether or not this constitutes a legal waiver remains to be seen, and as much as I find a litigious society loathsome, it might take a lawsuit or two before improvements are made.

Precariousness abounds. [Click to enlarge]

But I doubt that improvements will be made, because, like it or ot, the metal plates belong to a tight æsthetic concept which is obviously of more importance than Grandma’s shattered hip bone. Notice, then, the blue neon strips flush-fitted into the floor. They contribute much to the mysterious doctrine of low-friction surfacing, but also serve to dazzle the visitor from below. This is an important device since it directs attention upward towards the surrounding commercial propositions of beer, bratwurst and block-buster. Other important details include the steel-cage seating, the reflective black surface of the central fountain, the use of glass in exterior fittings and the red paneling on the courtyard façade of one of the buildings. It’s the æsthetic of the pre-pubescent boy’s bedroom translated into architecture: pimply proto-adult taste articulated through the careful hanging of a Ferrari Testarossa poster in a black varnished frame from IKEA.

This article ends as suddenly as the new Coen brothers film, which I saw in the Sony Center.