Down there in the pit on track one, at the brushed-steel base of one of the station’s shiny panorama elevators, I felt a longing growing in me to escape the suffocating grip of this building. I gazed up shiney glass shafts towards the clear autumn sky. I wished this station gone; wished it would disappear in a flash of blue-white light and the silent thump of an imploding light bulb. I wanted to find myself at the base of a conic void left by its implosion, surrounded by soft undulating dunes of Brandenburg’s Pleistocene sands.

I made it collapse into my cranium in millions of jittery, mechanical folds to metallic hisses and swooshes. Pheeacch, shwing, kssss. By pure thought, I had dematerialized this soulless mongrel in an act of pure desperation, into a single point of infinite mass. Unfortunately, it had lodged itself between the halves of my brain and made me feel not to so good. A prolonged stare into a halo of fluorescent light had bleached a patch of black on my retina, onto which an inner eye had cast these phantasmorgic projections. Fluerescent bulbs placed in recesses where the large concrete supports met slab, created the impression of daylight filtering down into the station’s lower levels. The architect had intended for this to be real daylight – capitals of daylight.

All around I felt cheated. Kyrill had exposed the station’s heroic tectonics as partial appliqué. My experience trying to get to trains after arsonist attacks had exposed the building’s dysfunctionality as a train station. The inefficiency of the circulation gelled the station’s free flowing spaces into a viscous space-time goo – the nectar of carnivorous plants – that I had to transcend in order to find my train. The building’s appearance and image denoted functionalism. It had lured me into an unsuspecting assumption of being in an efficient train station, when, in fact, I was trapped in an ingenious apparatus designed to maximize my exposure to its hideous merchandise and foods full of fillers.

This time, it had gone to far. I set off again on another day to test my hypothesis. I retraced my attempts to switch trains, timing how long it took to complete the journey from one mainline route to the other. I studied the departure tables. Mainline trains arrived on the lower level’s outermost tracks, at the largest possible distance from the east west mainline routes on the stations uppermost levels. These tracks were all served by a single elevator. The lower level’s central platforms are intended mostly for local trains, yet are served by four panorama elevators each. Travel time from track 7 (North-South route), section C, to track 12 (East-West), section D: 13.5 minutes. Changed elevators thrice.

By the sobre sans-serif of this elevator sign that connotes clarity, you might think that this elevator serves tracks 11-16, or the exit, but it doesn’t. It’s saying “change on UG1 to catch another elevator to the EG where the exit is, or, alternatively, change on UG1 to catch an elevator to OG1 to find a Panorama elevator to track 16″, for example. If you’re French or English-speaking you might wonder what the exclamations OG!, UG!, EG! mean.

I hope you’ve memorized the shorthand as this is what the buttons look like in the elevators:

It does get weirder. On the stations uppermost level on track 15, an elevator sign points upward into the sky to airborne tracks 5 and 6, which is perhaps where the Maglev was intended to depart:

The station conspicuously lacks a focal point. Let’s meet under the … Hm. Where? There are no large clocks, no arrivals or departure boards, nothing that could help structure space by giving it hierarchy, or that could facilitate navigation in the station’s particular space-time. This absence turns our attention on the tubular panorama elevators, the station’s crown jewels. Carriages rise and descend like vertical pendulums in strange chronological units. Their flashiness connotes efficient circulation to us, leaving you at a loss as to why the heck they seem so slow. It must be your subjective perception of time or your nervousness. Wait a minute? No clocks? (There are clocks, but they seems strangely subdued and few are illuminated.)

“

In many ways, train travel played a pivotal role in the rise of unified time. Trains were the first devices spanning various local time zones, each zone with their own approximation of time, initially based on sundials. This first unified time, necessitated by train schedules, was in fact called “railway time”.

“For example, Oxford Time was 5 minutes behind Greenwich Time, Leeds Time 6 minutes behind, Carnforth, 11 minutes behind, and Barrow almost 13 minutes behind. In India and North America these differences could be sixty minutes or more.”

The British film classic Brief Encounter tells the story of two people falling in love after meeting at a train station. The station’s clock calls time on their last meeting in the station’s cafe before he emigrates to South Africa with his family. Image-Google Brief Encounter and chances are you will see an abundance of images displaying the clock of Carnforth railway station.

So it may be said that the fundamental structuring agent of the train station is time, and time’s architectural expression is the clock. More than just a purely functional device, the clock was a perfect way to create a sense of place by denoting time and schedule and train station. And it’s so atmospheric. The clock is to the train station what the tower is to the church, or to the airport. Yet, at Berlin’s central station, you have to look hard to find one. Clocks along the shopping concourses are, we suspect, deliberately not illuminated, in order to not distract from the shopping signage and also to aid in the general sense of disorientation, both in time and in space.

The architecture of the mall and its bastard cousin, the terminal, is the architecture of disorientation and hence no clocks, or clocks without illumination, or disproportionately small clocks. Clocks, or any other orientation devices, would only dispel the sort of manifold junk space in which the consumer gets lost and where she falls back onto a fundamental comfort strategy of practicing something that feels familiar: in light of the alienation and disorientation, of hoarding, of shopping. This is a shopping center and the two mainline routes are its anchor shops. The north-south route’s the Macy’s and the east-west is the Sears.

The glassy physiognomy of modernist architecture – its transparency, its reflective, and refractive qualities – does not serve modernist ideals, e.g. transparent democratic processes, reason, legibility, etc. Instead, it seems to serve its opposites. The modernist materiality scatters commercial signage and lighting and space, throwing it all back at us in myriad, kaleidoscopic reflections that add to the sense of drowning in a flood of commercial semiotics.

The building’s other pièce de résistance is its vaulted glass and steel roof. It is strangely underlit at night, much to the benefit and legibility of the revenue-generating light displays by “Datev” and “Bombardier”. Along the concourses, lighting is carefully controlled to highlight shops and restaurants. Circulation signage is mute, while commercial signage is loud.

“They float on the landscapes like pyramids to the boom years all those Plazas, and Malls, and Esplanades” Jane Gidion, On the Mall

Circulation heals, soothes sore muscles, sanitizes the bedroom, flushes us with nutrients and minerals. Shops cluster around terminals like micro-organisms and crustaceans around an underwater volcano. A constant pulse of arrival and departures flushes the mall with fresh consumers and drains away the old. Graphs of sales figures rise and fall with scheduled arrivals and departures. Glass and steel Panorama escelators and elevators pierce the station’s numerous shopping levels like surgical equipment, flushing endless concourses of outlets and chain cafes with a steady supply of shoppers. Intake, compression, shop, exhaust.

At midnight on January 19, 2007, the isobar map for northern Germany looked like this, moments after Cyclone Kyrill’s furious winds has swept through Berlin.

Missing from the facade of Berlin’s central station was a two tonne steel I-beam and another one was hanging by its thread. In a single blow, Kyrill had knocked four tonnes of steel off value-engineered supports, and the lid off of most of our conceptions about this building, it’s modernist appearance, and the professions involved in its construction. Architect’s GMP were complicit in the pastiche modernist design, but DB had taken control of the building’s construction and someone had said “these little steel rails that keep the two tonne beams in place and cost us 67 Euros? We don’t need those.”

Fears for the building’s structural integrity were quickly dispelled. Kyrill’s distructive winds had only inflicted superficial damage. The two tonne I-Beam had had little to prop up besides itself and the image of a modernist facade. It had served as one of the massive, but purely decorative, horizontal transoms of the station’s externally expressed structure. St. Thomas, patron saint of architects, had unleashed his fury at this endless square footage of vacuous mediocrity – the latest missed opportunity to translate the promise and potential of early re-unified Berlin into built form – only days after its completion. It had sent Kyrill to expose the applique fig leaf modernism of Berlin’s central station. This publication smelled a rat ever since Kyrill plunged this dubious building into disrepute. They had promised us a “Stadtkrone”, instead we got this mall.

Years later, I found myself literally kicking the brushed steel facias of the nation’s and this station’s most prized glass elevators, down there in the pit of track 7, with girlfriend, child, stroller, and a mound of stuff that parenthood seems to always collect around you. I started to wonder if there was method to this buidling’s wretchedness. I beams that created the illusion of functionalism, crystalline elevators that didn’t live up to their aesthetic promise in terms of effectiveness, convoluted circulation whose sole purpose was to suck you deeper and deeper into the buildings auraless, cold, techno vacuity? I don’t recall ever feeling this much anger at an inanimate thing or building, in my life, not since I was eight. I wanted to kick it in the nuts, kick the life into it, and the shit out of its stoic, disaffected detachedness, fucking with me and succeeding.

I was trapped. After leftist terror attacks in October 2011, my train south had been canceled, and chasing one replacement connection after another, we had been sent on a tour de farce around the train station, experiencing the full brunt of what I was suspecting was a deliberate attempt to trap us in this Moloch of mammon for as long as, and by any means, possible. Eventually you will fold, and buy a croissant, a mini pizza, or some underwear. You might miss your train and have to buy a new ticket. On our fourth and final elevator trip, we felt we were drowning in this building – running, sweating, hope, defeat, not knowing up from down, etc.

“Your next connection is in 10 minutes from Track 12″, said the DB rep. Ok, that sounded good. “So that means you won’t make it”, he concluded. What? It takes 10 minutes to get from the main North South tracks to the main East-West tracks? How can that be, I thought, as this is what this building was sold to us on, that it linked up these two routes beautifully and functionally, as an expression of Germany’s new found unity.

could you move that sign? I can’t see my train

All this physical exertion had only brought us closer to our first family stint on the Tagesschau, but I had to pull my girlfriend away from the limelight, just as she was making her closing remarks, in a last ditch effort to miss our next connection on track six. “I swear they said track six” I said. Of course, there had only been a single PA anouncement , and a four minute notice, to make it to that train. The lone DB rep on the track shrugged her shoulders and shook her head, flapping a blond pony tail around, tied back under her red faux velvet DB cap. Her smart device was not smart anymore. It, too, had conceded to the terrorist’s arson, as had the LCDs, and all other displays, all the other fancy schmancy gadgetry. All they were doing was checking the internet for train schedules, anyway. She could not help me, was like me, just with a hat and uniform, just didn’t have to catch a train. This brief feeling of sympathy couldn’t stop the inevitable from happening. I unleashed a verbal attack that made me look pathetic and helpless. It didn’t seem to phase her one bit, but offered temporary relief from the swelling in my neck and throat I had eperienced, where the feeling of injustice resides. On a deeper level, I had already resigned long ago,when I saw Wolfgang Tiefensee (Germany’s former traffic minister and ironically also in charge when the station openend in 2007) walk up to a rep with smart phone and be turned away like anyone else. We had all become this Moloch’s children.

descent into Moloch in shiny elevators – a bit slow, but nice to look at

The building’s exterior looks engineered and functionalist, but is, in fact, a carefully crafted image that serves as a decoy. This might be called a train station but is only 20% train station and 80% percent shopping mall. There is really no reason for this to look any different than Alexa or any other Pomo shopping mall. The functionalist appearance here serves the purpose of fooling us into thinking we are confronted with a train station, the aesthetic of “the overall railway-station character of our existence”, to quote Ernst Bloch. Maybe it fooled some officials into thinking they were getting a train station. I suspect a study indicating that people are 30% more likely to shop in a mall if unaware of being in one.

From the perspective of a train station and a user, the functionalist appearance served to mask an architecture of deliberate dysfunctionality. From the perspective of a vertical mall and shopper, it may be a building that is very functional, but the common architecture of functioning malls is not that of the “railway-station character of our existence”.

the station's real self – X ray image through modernist fig leaf

What better way to begin a new year than with a fresh reminder from Slab Magazine that the “Berliner Republik” is crumbling! Yes! It is falling apart at the seams!

Cast your mind back to April 2011 (or open another tab, if you wish), and you might recall a similar case in this series, where the anchoring pins of a sandstone panel had become painfully visible. I claimed that the phenomena was not uncommon, so feel duty-bound to reveal another example of façade-failure, this time affecting the generically named “Bürohaus Neue Grünstraße 22”.

Whilst listed in the Senate Department’s database of post-1990 architecture (here), the office building seems to have been disowned by its architects: “no data available”. Even the client is anonymous, and the Senate has no record of when building work begun or was completed. It is a textbook example of the “Planwerk Innenstadt” building typology: six stone-clad floors of misery punctured by a monotonous cooky-cutter grid of windows.

Ah yes. Stone cladding. It’s not as though Berlin isn’t short of a good example: Emil Fahrenkamp’s Shell-Haus of 1932, is masterful proof that the technique isn’t evil per se. But Hans Stimmann’s berkish insistence that the future of Berlin should be a freeze-dried Imperial Era travesty sealed stone cladding’s fate as a sort of cheap, heavy, foundation cream. It was slathered on by mediocre architects, and probably greeted by investors keen on quick ROI with little Senate-side friction.

A quick fix, then, for battered Berlin. And repair will be the reigning paradigm for decades to come when dealing with Stimmann’s crumbling inheritance, as these pictures show. One assumes that those yellowed globules are the coagulated residuum from the flubbed patch-job to the crack on the right. Maybe the gaps between panels (don’t tell me these gaping crevices are expansion joints) are just being used to store putty for the next round of repairs.

→ Modern Façades Today, Now

According to the developer’s website we have a real good vintage of a building here, with all the potential of an instant classic. Though I’m not sure that the EIFS polystyrene will be around when that happens one day. Some maggots or a woodpecker thinking of a maggot lunch might take a bite out of it. Careful and unbiased research, using a popular search engine, into failures of EIFS led to this insight. On occasion, I repeat this research when I feel I’ve leaned out the window too far proclaiming that fact with too much emphasis and glee. The evidence I spotted on the building itself left me first incredulous and then somewhat elated and hopeful. May I draw your attention to the dark blotch at the top left corner of this image of a townhouse entrance:

Close-up, the cluster of reddish-black globules on the entrance’s ceiling revealed itself as Prenzlauer Bogen’s first residents: an infestation of ladybugs that had already started to crap all over the acrylic render, perhaps drawn to its relatively mild surface temperature or hooked on its evaporations, a veritable ladybug crack house.

Now, a key to preventing vermin infestations in exterior insulation is to ensure that the facade is properly sealed. Here, I found plenty of access points for insects to a warm, moist, hydrocarbon foam feast.

But how did I get here, poking my 10x zoom at a lost hole in the acrylic render facade of this uninhabited building’s darkest recesses on a cold and dreary afternoon? I was immediately drawn to it when I first saw it. I was overcome by a reminiscence of the buildings of East Berlin, maybe ten, 20 years ago – paired down belle epoch buildings finished in uniform crude grey stucco that bore their fate with honesty and candor, stripped of all their ornament, either because the Commies thought of it as bourgeois or because they were too skint to repair what hadn’t been shot off in the war, or both. This building looks like that to me, like the former buildings of East Berlin, before they were subjected to the vandalism of sponge effects and pastel hues. It, too, seemed to have lost its ornament through a tragic event in history – only prior to its construction – a financial crisis, or the advent of some sustainability standard.

I was intrigued and studied architect Tobias Nöfer’s concept on the project website, but didn’t like what I read. Normally, developments of this kind aspire to places seemingly higher up the pecking order of cosmopolitan desirability, such as Rome, New York, or Paris. This example of “highest building art” (developer’s usual modest marketing blah) is taking things down a notch. The reference is of pulsating, cosmopolitan, Bath, England. Apparently, what we have here is a fine example of “Old English Crescent” (!?) an architecture style I had never come across prior to studying the project’s website, and of which there had hitherto existed but a single proponent, John Wood’s Royal Crescent in Bath, and now also, the Prenzlauer Bogen. If you find yourself trapped in the city of Berlin, but yearn for the quaint, slow-paced town life of a place like Bath and are a fan of “Old English Crescent”, this is for you.

The historicist facade stripped of ornament invokes former buildings of East Berlin. Could this be an unintentional proponent of the critical regionalism in the Kenneth Frampton style? But why Bath? Why England? Don’t we have our very own Berlin crescent housing? Nah, that’s a horseshoe. This is a crescent, I mean a sickle, no, an arc (see the development’s concept). Yet, the stripped down historicist style lends this radial structure a penal appearance. By god, it’s a panopticon! At least if must feel that way playing in that sandbox and I wouldn’t worry about having your bike stolen.

Looking at the facade so unwillingly, my eye is drawn to the strange house-like monument that stands before it. Its primitive form, coated with the dregs of neon-colored billpostings, exudes a raw, spontaneous energy that’s in stark contrast to the church’s insipid architectural contrivances.

With this image we hereby draw to a close the publication of Victor Brigola’s wonderful series of photographs of rowhouse churches. It is, I think, a fitting way to end. Ever since the project began, this image has been the can being kicked down the road, an ugly truth that I wanted to ignore. But in the end it has served as an inspiration, a testament to the fact that a beautiful picture can be taken of something that isn’t.

It’s kind of a weird thing to do, relative to the other activities that fill our days. A bit like meditating, an unavoidable question seems to be: “what the hell am I doing here?”. This problem becomes especially acute due to (a) the deterrent pretension that crackles through the air at so many gallery openings and (b) the esoteric, self-referential bubble that the actual work seems to be trapped within. Add to that gooney art scenesters checklisting your scruffy appearance and practicing an eastern religion starts to look a lot more self-explanatory.

Looking at architecture is something that’s comparatively simple, if only because it’s a lot easier to make a statement about it without sounding stupid. It seems a given that we’re all entitled to an opinion about the buildings we live in and around -a basic tenet of this very publication’s existence. Architects and their works are somehow easier targets than artists and theirs, primarily because we think we know what the hell it is they’re doing, often times better than they do. There’s a legitimacy, even a moral obligation, in making a very base, or even obscene, criticism about an edifice with a corresponding appearance. And the work of architects seems to have some kind of effect on every moment of our lives, while art must first seduce us or offend us to be noticed in the first place.

“Take A Slow, Deep Breath! Elastic Impressions”

The title of Hella Gerlach’s show up at Studio commands and seduces us in equal measure, and in doing so initiates a necessary rupture from the profanity of everyday life and all the messiness of its architecture, physical and otherwise. This chunk of language is weird and at the same time totally(?) accessible, a kind of textual gateway that might give cause to investigate something that sounds kind of fun. On the other side of an exhalation and a sheet of plate glass is an offering that coaxes a closer look and, following the directive of the title, an emphatically meditative attitude. All of the elements and objects inside are both autonomous and at the same time the constituent parts of a bizarre phenomenal aggregate. The red cabinet, perfectly level, is actually balancing on its spindly legs as precariously as it appears to be…so be careful breathing out!

An untitled ceramic ball that was mistaken for a tomato, sits on the floor just to the right of the entrance.

Element I and Element II (Studiolo) are hung from the gridded substructure of the gallery’s semi-dismantled acoustic tile ceiling.

The semi-transparent ramie and viscose fiber walls of the three Element pieces have pockets in which objects were placed.

At the invitation of the gallerist, I dug the work Stab out from a pocket on one of the fabric walls. Also made of ceramic, it was uncannily heavy; it felt like a bone until I took it from its sleeve. “Stab” translates to “rod” in English, which is what I first thought the title was supposed to mean. Yet the shape of this thing could definitely be used to put someone into a world of pain.

Teil für Zwei (Piece for Two)

Further into the gallery are three more of those ceramic balls, one of which has been smashed. It was actually here that I first realized the ball in the front wasn’t a tomato. It all has something to do with a Greek housewarming ritual, I was told. The attempt was made to smash the balls all around the gallery just before the show opened, but they were fired to such a high strength that three of them survived.

Handstück (Hand Piece)

and

Schulterstück (Shoulder Piece)

were both cast from the artist’s body. But the visitor is free to try them on as well. These, I take it, are the “elastic impressions” mentioned in the title of the show.

This inconclusive set of objects, spaces and associations is like an architecture of the subconscious. That makes it difficult to talk about in any rational way, but I see the work as operating on the fuzzy line between art and architecture. Like a building, the show doesn’t presume anything of the viewer/occupant; it seems to be actually unable to. A pre-knowledge of what the work is about would if anything preclude understanding it for what it is, I think. As such, the work operates at a very base level, in spite of its elegance. Something down there, back there, at the beginning of architecture, seems to be making its presence known.

Take A Slow, Deep Breath! Elastic Impressions is on view at Studio, Adalbertstr.96, 10999 Berlin, until November 26th.

Aesthetically, the former church seems a likely candidate to have been abandoned by its congregation. To be honest, it’s really just a clumsy hodgepodge of disparate elements slapped together with little sensitivity or grace, the highlight of which is the little towerette on the right hand side, crammed cozily against the wall of the neighboring apartment house.

Many thanks again to Victor Brigola for this, the penultimate photograph to be featured in this series. All of the pictures are on view in the show “Feeling the Void” at the Vero Linzmeier Galerie until November 17th.

This Catholic job on Dänenstrasse appears incredibly secure in its standing, having little need for the kind of overwrought historical pastiche of its protestant brethren featured elsewhere in this collection. Its appearance has something more to do with an ideal than the contingencies of history, I would argue, and references to previous styles have been sublimated by a vision so reduced that it seems to be simultaneously both primitive and futuristic. A little dab of razzle dazzle hasn’t been forgotten, though: the guilded cross provides a not-so-subtle reminder of who’s got the money and isn’t afraid to show it.

As you may have seen by clicking onto the photographer’s link above, Mr. Brigola will be showing works from this series from Thursday, Oct. 27 in the show entitled “Feeling the Void” at the Vero Linzmeier Galerie. The opening party will be from 6:00-9:00pm on Thursday, I hope to see you there!

(The Pretense of Craft in Contemporary Construction, Part 1)

Decosterd and Rahm have a great reference to Nietzsche and his concept of a phsyiological art as part of the introduction to their book Physiological Architecture. Unfortunately, I don’t remember exactly what it is except that it was really hard to read (white print on white paper) and awesome, but trying to be more a blogger than an online magazine writer, I’m too lazy to look it up. Maybe you can look it up. Something about how an aesthetic experience can have a physiological effect on people. So perhaps for the only time in history, Decosterd and Rahm and Marc Kocher (Palais Kolorectalbelle, and the building below, etc.)  in one text. Carpe dieminis, or whatever.

I don’t want to end up a bitter man all alone, walking around with the eccentric shuffle of an orthodox Jew, whose bent frame and flapping arms serve the sole purpose of taxiing his brain from A to B, lamenting the decline of a once exciting city full of architectural potential. So I check my initial reaction, try an open mind. Yeah, maybe this is not so bad, he’s trying to loosen the strict Prussian window bands of Gründerzeit urban blocks. I want to have positive reactions to Berlin’s new buildings one is often too quick to bash.  But I can no longer ignore the feeling of nausea spreading to my limbs from my gut, and I know this wobbly building is doing it to me. I mean, if this is origami (the architect’s project inspiration according to his website), then this pile of orange polyester construction netting might as well be Macramé. If I were mean, I might speculate that the origami spiel conveniently masks the fact that the developer one day value engineered any Italianate and expensive to build curves away with the highest arc segmentation setting in FunCad when the financial crisis hit. I want to sneeze, or cry, or puke, just flush it out, this physiological effect of an architecture that my entire aesthetic apparatus wants to reject and eject and purge.

I have to check myself. I must be getting carried away, here. But it’s there, undeniably, a visceral reaction, a feeling of having ingested something bad with my eyes, a dead oyster, some shady street food, too much cake, the fumes of a burning tire.

By God, what are these drops on the underside of the window’s top molding? (excuse the phoney pics, but if you look closely) Are they a 21^st century aberration of Guttae?  Towards the window’s bottom, the unfinished application of acrylic render reveals blocks of extruded polystyrene. You’ve got to be kidding. If I remember correctly, guttae are stylistic vestiges of a time when Greek temples were still built of wood thousands of years ago. Guttae originally were wooden nails that fixed the timber roof to the wooden architrave. It’s amazing that this little, millennia-old tectonic detail that pertains to craft, to things made by skilled hands as an expression of an architecture of assembly, has found its way onto a building made of goo, poured, spackled and sprayed together of concrete and polymers, and entirely not assembled, let alone by craft.

How did it all get so muddled? The Greeks started it, I guess, emulating wooden nails in stone, but that’s ok, they did it for tradition, and I assume they knew that they once were wood. Not sure what happened in between then and now. But here we have it, a renaissance of the wooden nail, on thermoplastic buildings, a haphazard stylistic reference to something whose meaning is entirely lost, the architectural equivalent of an Arschfax (see below), Chinese characters haphazardly applied on someone’s lower back for looks. Guttae (Greek drops) articulated as droops seems a lot more appropriate for an architecture of pouring. Make them gooey drops next time, please, make me chuckle, a more pleaseant physiological reaction to architecture.

Arschfax (German ass facsimile,  often meaningless motifs applied as tattoo to someone’s lower back)

image courtesy: http://www.photofunblog.com/fashion/free-lower-back-tattoo-designs-for-women-2011-12/attachment/kanji-and-flower-free-lower-back-tattoo-collection/

In any event, you know that a design era is in a state of revival as soon as the source material that is its lifeblood starts to be destroyed. At the same time as it’s fashionable to crank out austere, eco-freindly machines for living, it’s all the rage to raze perfectly good glass and steel megastructures that are merely in need of a reliable asbestos abatement contractor. The classic example was the old Palast der Republik, the destruction of which was, of course, a travesty to the city planning/tourism boosting process. We all know about that, I assume, and what’s done is done, save the construction of the new Stadtpalast, which I swear will cause me to bail on Berlin if and when it ever gets built.

But now another example of the crystalline ’60s is about to be summarily executed, also for the sake of preposterous neo-historical drivel. Standing blindfolded and smoking its last cigarette is the 1968 Konsistorium located at Bachstr. 1-2, by Georg Heinrichs and Hans-Christian Müller.

Once it’s dead and buried the plan is to put up a courtyard house by one of Hans Stimmann’s minions from his glory days in the ’90s, Tobias Nöfer. There are seemingly no images of the new design available online, but of course it has to be called something predictably historicist and low-brow in equal measure: “Hansahof”. The name itself indicates what is at the heart of the backlash against both the old building’s destruction and the new building’s construction, which is that to build a traditional courtyard-style block in the Hansaviertel is in fact a desecration of the “urban fabric” -actually more a like an ex-urban constellation of functionalist objects floating in a sea of grass and trees- that has defined the area since the heady days of Interbau 1957. So the proponents of Modernist design are playing the same card as the New Urbanists did back in ’80s and ’90s, which is to advocate something that came before because (1) they like it and (2) it came before. And fair play to them for doing so.

But, in truth, there are practical alternatives to just using architecture up and throwing it away. The question on all the radical architects’ lips at the moment is why it’s not possible to do something productive with a structure such as this. An obvious example would be to adapt the building’s interior, as well as its sheathing, to suit the intended brief of the new project, which is for low-income housing, and then put in some perma-culture urban farming plots all around it, and on the roof, where the residents could grow food to supplement what they can buy with their meager Hartz-4 takings. It could, like, change everything! Just brain storming here, but whatever…it’s not the kind of thing that anyone involved in the new project’s construction has probably ever done, much less considered weighing up such alternatives against what they’re planning to do and then performing a cost benefit analysis. But no one ever said that stopping the juggernaut of mindless German conservatism was going to be easy.

That’s all there is to say about, really. Though the old Konsistorium looks beautiful as a post-apocalyptic ruin, it seems, in truth, to exist in a pre-apocalyptic state as regarding big “A” Architecture. There is a quixotic absurdity in trying to salvage a ’60s office building that’s stood empty beside a trafficy intersection for the last ten years, but why not? Maybe we can all get together and change the situation the same way as we did with the petition to save Hejduk’s tower in Kreutzberg.

Just sign here!

And please check out these German-language links for more on the story, if you’re so inclined:

http://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/angst-um-die-moderne/4407152.html

http://www.baunetz.de/meldungen/Meldungen-Buerohaus_in_Berlin_wird_abgerissen_1675795.html

Last, a shot of the building’s interior that was passed on to me by the kind folks at Büro für Konstruktivismus. Just imagine the potential…I mean, I totally want to live in there!!!