SLAB Magazine — The Heuristic Journal for Gonzo Blurbanism

“If we look closely enough we shall have no difficulty in convincing ourselves that no one art of any greatness has ever been “reborn”.

“Every single art form, the Chinese landscape, Egyptian sculpture or the Gothic counterpoint, exists only once, never to return again in its soul and symbolism.”

Oswald Spengler – Decline of the West

Word! This art form is certainly staying put, left to steep in its own atmosphere of 80s transpirations. Well, most of it must have escaped through the array of vent holes on the left by now. Rarely has Spengler’s point been stressed as succinct and as well as with this redundantly framed description of an art work at Spichernstraße underground stop on Berlin’s U9 line, as if trying to heighten the distance in soul and symbolism one might already feel looking at the space invaders era art work by Gabriele Stirl, which looks like Atari but is much more cerebral.

My suspicion is that sometime in the 90s, they realized that that flimsy ’86 frame, though crafted with much care, would hardly suffice to shield its content from the vicious edding dildo attacks by alienated urban yoots with some time to spare that ripped through Germany’s metropolitan landscapes in the 90s.

So there it lies, encased in the past and behind two layers of glas and somewhat defused, as a kind of encrypted Schneewittchen code, the art form of the 80s, irrevocably lost to us in context, in soul, in symbolism, leaving us with the strong desire to delve into the thick smokey atmosphere of a 1986 West Berlin bar, if only for a moment, and eavesdrop on some banter by the perpetrators of this lost art form over a glas of afri cola, perhaps. Shit, I’m late for my appointment with my accountant in Friedenau.

On 18 September, Berlin votes for a new government. A comparison of the campaign brochures produced by the five parties currently in parliament reveals few themes where real differences can be found, particularly in matters of urban policy. The political colour spectrum merges into a single unified colour. This colour can be defined. Mixing the signature colours of the five political parties – SPD, Grüne, CDU, Linke and FDP – results in a shade of brown (RGB 65/96/36, CMYK 14/40/80/20).

→ rgb1659636.net

There’s some kind of idea of Italy here, or rather the idea of the idea of Italy, as opposed to the idea itself. Eclecticism, pastiche, ersatz culture, whatever; designing a protestant church in Berlin a hundred or so years ago was when an architect got to let it all hang out, design a few towers. Each one could be more whimsical than the one that came before, as long as they were all made out of those red bricks.

Campanile, campanilo, campanilotto -as the Wikipedia entry on Italian diminutives states, “there are no limits to suffixation, which could continue”.

Thanks again to Victor Brigola for his photographic offerings to this humble channel of architectural conjecture.

You buy something in a pharmacy in Dublin. The person at the counter puts it into a paper bag, with this image printed on one side.

You look around: here in the present, the modern lines, the hygienic atmosphere, the concealment of every item inside packaging, the medicalizing approach to the body and the reams of instructions, warnings and disclaimers, all seem to be undercut by the bag’s nostalgia for an Old Curiosity Shop consumer experience. Not a pharmacy, nor a chemist, rather an apothecary. We all know the scene: musty bottles, glass-fronted oak cabinets, banks of identical drawers labeled with yellowing paper, weird specimens, pestles and mortars, crude surgical tools, cursive fonts.

You go to France, where the pharmacy is a key component of every streetscape, even in the tiniest village. In its famously good healthcare system, the French state reaches into the life of every street in the form of the pharmacie, often located at a key crossroads, a place of social significance, marked by the simple, ancient symbol of the cross.

This is the manifestation of what Foucault described as the biopolitical state. The state takes on the responsibility for the health of the nation and in the process disciplines its citizens, obliging them to live full and healthy lives.

You are in the French countryside. You go into the woods. You pick some mushrooms. You’re unsure about how safe they are, so you ask around: who knows this stuff? The answer: the pharmacist, one of whose official functions is to identify wild mushrooms.

And the apparent contrast between the modern medical pharmacy and the olde worlde magickery of the apothecary suddenly diminishes. This is the same institution, playing more or less the same role as that of folklore, folk medicine, superstition, religion and prayer. In fact, the apothecary’s shop is the beginning of the shift that took medicine out of its immediate locales, out of the forests, and out of the hands of the local quacks and witches and into the world of mass society, consumer experience, scientific knowledge and into the sanitized hands of the pharmacist and doctor. In the older system, there is an awareness that the danger and the cure for the danger came from the same place (i.e. the natural world, the forest floor, your own body). Poison and cure are two aspects of the same thing. In modern medicine, this paradox is captured in a discourse of ‘dosages’.

The authority that went with the local healer transfers in the modern era into the hands of the beneficent state. But the old associations run deep. Here, at the foot of the Rue Mouffetard, one of Paris’s oldest streets, stands this modern pharmacy, like thousands of others across France. The slabs of marble that join at the corner are nicely done. Look again, though. The wolf of the old forests stares out at you.

We are in Berlin, not Spain, and don’t need sun louvers above our windows.

There’s been talk for years within the Slab camp about launching a full-scale investigation of this particular detail, so well loved by frustrated German architects. With this article I hope to formally initiate such an action, prompting my colleagues to dig up their own pictures of this particular architectural absurdity. Inspired by sun-drenched holidays in southern Europe, louvers of this kind have been implemented in a most reckless fashion. Berlin and large parts of Germany are generally overcast, as it indeed is at the time of this writing.

The example presented here is adorns a community sports and recreation center on Winstraße, and the state of its as-built condition should have anyway taught its designers a lesson. The east-facing louvers serve no other function than to provide delinquent youths with a firm scaffolding upon which to stand whilst spraying their degenerate tags. If the quality of the graffiti in Berlin were better, one could perhaps show more understanding for such an architectural vagary. As it is, such louvers are worse than useless. They are an aesthetic and environmental abhorrence that has been desperately applied in order to distract us from the sober truth that is represented by these boxes of architectural boredom.

One more for the collection of photographer Victor Brigola‘s edition of images produced for Slab.

Perhaps the ‘jects surrounding this baby are more reminiscent of Beograd, or its suburbs, than the church itself -at least on the outside. It’s apparently a classic retrofit, indicating demographic shifts in the working class district of Berlin-Wedding. Or could the church have been purpose built? Indeed there is some arcane romance in both the design of the crenelations, as well as of the steppy triangle things over the tripartite entrance way. There’s no real info on the edifice itself on the parish homepage, though a nice synopsis of the order is presented. Lots of strife, of course. All the agonizing multiculturalism seems to have started with the physical location of the Serbian homeland being stuck between its two major Christian influences, Constantinople and Rome.

Still, I remain convinced that the surroundings look more yugo than the church itself.

a building at incorrect resolution

Had some friends in town, a German-Nigerian couple from Tel Aviv, who had met in Lagos. He’s doing alright running a factory producing custom transformers for the West Bank and Gaza, so they’d asked me which city I’d recommend out of Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Singapore for their trip over last New Year’s. I had quickly picked Hong Kong. I hadn’t been to any of them, but I try to mask my terrible indecisiveness with split second decision making, post-rationalizing and a poker face. They didn’t like Hong Kong. They said it was sterile and bland. What about the 3D character, the elevated free-ways, the escalators soaring past skyscrapers, the hive like shanties full of country folk trying to make it in the big city, I said. Nope, boring, they said, like any other city the world over, today. The shanties are gone, swiftly developed away to ever further fringes by the usual in-your-face brand architectures and architectures of convenience rapidly replacing anything with character and a little bit of dignity, certainly any shanty towns or anything else harboring the unexpected, the uncontrollable, in short, all the stuff the well adjusted consumer abhors and exactly what big cities were once about, organic, creative messiness replaced by retail junk with obsolescence built into it, I snarked into my ridiculously inflated Burgundy bulb.

Humbox at correct resolution

“Everything today is built for the image. Cities are reduced to locations, for tourists, for tourism ads, and commodity as image. It’s like all these design hotels and culture outlets popping up, all the Foster, MAD or BIG or whatever acronymed OMA franchise or knock-off buildings. Once you walk up to these buildings, it feels like several layers of details and intricacy are missing and all that seeming sophistication from a distance falls apart in an instance. The detail is now in the image, forged in GPUs with multiple pixel shader pipelines, workstations with twin socket quadruple core CPUs and 128 Gigs of RAM, ever faster render engines, with print technology and abseilers that graft terapixels of imagery onto megaposters. Who looks at buildings from close up anymore? You stand in front of the Humboldt Box to look at the Altes Museum, at the Altes Museum to look at the Funkturm, on the Funkturm to look back at the Humboldt Box. You’re not supposed to look at buildings from up close. Surfaces strive for smoothness, nothing’s there to obstruct the flow from location to location and into the souvenir shops. Everything’s being set up for street view or Flickr or Picasa or augmented imagery. The image contains more information than the building. It’s the age of hi-res imagery and low-res buildings!!!”

So I went down to the Humboldt box the next day to test my point and took some macro photos and close-ups. One of the project initiators had recently used the Anglicism “Top-Location” outlining his project’s impending success in a German press release. How great then to still experience the wonderland of analog continuity with plain eye and macro lens and delve in the nitty-gritty of the in-betweens of the discontinuous image raster. Let’s see how it panned out…

humbox alucobond

CMYK construction

back-off: the image bolted together starts falling apart

further signs of megaposter progeny

macro humbox bolt

The building which previously served as a prop for hairspray, bikinis, and sandals now advertises so-called high culture, or the absence thereof, the Humboldt Forum, in a classic case of low-high-middle-brow confusion often found in the  cultural logic of late capitalism. The Humboldt Box is essentially a folded megaposter, parading a similarly flat message of representation and merely evoking the 3D. In that sense it is not fully three-dimensional, but a sort of relief or pop-up image building with some slapped on applied facing to conceal the detailing that it shares with its true progenitor, the megaposter. Imagery parading as building.

hi-res hairspray iconography – st.diane and st.laetitia

A Liter of Light