Render-bender

The mechanism is characterised by two key features: first, the romanticisation and fragmentation of the surrounding neighborhood through a celebration of its inherent authenticity; and second, the weaving together of these fragments into a patchwork to conceal the inherent phoneyness of the property itself.

The mechanism is colonial because it judges and appropriates the surroundings in self-defined terms, offering a self-serving, narrow reading of its host. And I’m calling it vampiristic, because the act of subsumation results in the eventual collapse of the host. The real estate project essentially has nothing unique to offer, other than location, and it is from this which it feeds to keep it alive.

Real deal

FRIEDASchanze was sold with the picture of a harmonious intercultural neighborhood in which carefree Italian pizza bakers with the songs of the Adria on their lips could be found, and where quaint obliging Arabs fried falafel in the nooks between home-grown fashion boutiques. So a few weeks back I was in Hamburg and dropped by Schanzenstraße to see how the picture shaped up against reality, and to see if the condos were as boldly crimson as the architect’s rendering suggested.

Manic organic

Sadly they weren’t. Instead, the façade had been toned down to a hue somewhere between egg plant and burgundy. It reminded me of a quip made by German graphic designer Erik Spiekerman where he refers to the colour beige as being a kind of “yellow for civil servants”. Something similar seems to have happened here: one imagines a neighborhood committee doggedly pressuring the building contractor to rethink the shocking red in a last ditch attempt at excersizing a semblance of grass-roots influence on the doings of property developers. If so, they’ve flogged a turd for no good reason. If you’re going to live with a turd, better have one with a colourful little flag stuck in it. But red by committee it is.

Speaking of egg plants and burgundy, the whole ground floor is already home to an organic supermarket – natch boogie. Once upon a time organic grocery stores were the pokey little vanguards of the green movement, but here they’ve arrived, no longer brandishing whole-earth manifestos, but corporate design manuals. It’s a thoroughly agreeble place to shop in: well lit, roomy, imaginatively stocked, and, advantageously, largely void of customers at this hour. Wherever they might be on a Friday morning, they’ve left a trail of evidence behind them: cork notice boards behind the checkouts are festooned with flyers for ayurvedic cookery courses and hand-written classified ads trading vintage sports cars for Bugaboos, or flogging aged IKEA sofas.

Flush puppy

Hum-drum

For the sake of dramatic convenience I’m going to assume a new tennant of FREIDASchanze themselves was responsible for the sofa ad, and was asserting their upward mobility with a confident couch upgrade. If so, you’d have to wonder why the same tennant had moved into an apartment which looks like a ‘Faktum’ IKEA kitchen. In a reversal of the theory put forward by D.S. on a low-resolution architecture made for photography, FRIEDASchanze looks shit¹ from a distance, but from up close reveals a complex surface grid of collateral fluting which would conceivably arrise if one were to violently combine seven Billy shelving units. Not an unintersting proposition. At the time of my visit, a guy in a mobile platform was fine tuning the cavity widths with a watchmaker’s vernier caliper. Anyroadup, this conglomeration of precision detailing combines to form a façade which, for all its whimsical surface depth modulation, is about as charismatic as a filing cabinate.

Gnarlyness

Some meters further down the road, the full contrast between the flush-fitted aluminium window profiles of FRIEDASchanze, and the grungy aggregate of century-old building materials which have coagulated to form the rest of the neighborhood becomes more immediately apparent. Is this the habitat the marketing-speak was referring to? By building something flush and clean, you automatically define everything else as lumpen and grungy. On my stroll down the Schanze I pass a cellar bar called Chance, where bottles of tequila and Malibu are displayed in the window at ankle-height beneath home-made chipboard cladding. The smeared windows of a Chinese bric-a-brac emporium are full of beckoning Maneko Nekos, rice cookers and fading polyurethane lotus blossoms. The Playtech Casino is a riot of self-adhesive foils, and the entrance nook between Falafel Factory and Schanzen Döner is slathered in a baroque filo-pastry crust of posters, flyers, daubings, stickers, Selotape² fragments and indelible tags.

Encrusted

The language of the street here is of adaptation, extension and improvisation. Everything is retro-fitted for a broken but still functioning future. This is the land into which spaceship FRIEDASchanze has decended. Its passengers are about to desembark: grunge tourists on an authenticity trip, nosey and charmed by the locale at first, but soon rubbing up against their own squeamishness and reservations. But for now at least, the mission is clear: revel in the grime, write postcards home, but lay subtle plans for a more orderly future.

Dirt

P.S.: Leaving the neighborhood I even catch sight of a poster encouraging us to Entdeck the Dreck – “Discover the Dirt”. Turns out that it’s a regular party in a club called Grüner Jäger. “Total trash and high-life in bags!” the club’s website proclaims; a “charming, Poptrash-Bad-Taste-Party”. It’s as if the underground was already gearing itself up for its own fragmentation and eventual metamorphosis into another, newer, altogether stranger bourgeoisie than can be found in the penthouse suites of FRIEDASchanze. For now it is content to frollic – for as long as it can’t afford its own mortgage – in a picturesque nightscape of pseudo-glamour, self-defined trash, and premeditated “good” bad-taste: a juvenil vampire already sucking life from its own environment …

—
¹ I can qualify “shit” if you so wish: read “banal”, “tedious” or “mundane”.
² US English: Scotch Tape; German: Tesafilm

Never mind the architecture: check out the prose!

Having already scoured the grim depths of property marketing phraseology, in which coherence is routinely substituted for an inventory of vagaries, I expected to be sufficiently desensitized so as to cope with anything that the FRIEDASchanze boosters might throw my way. But I was quite wrong. The following quotes are my own translations, and therefore subject to grotesque bias, but I have tried to be as authentic as possible:

“After breathing in the neighborhood air, and a walk through the heads of the people that call this part of the city their home, the modern, striking design for the Frieda’Schanze project was born.”

Striking is that the building cunningly resembles five metro trains parked on top of each other. The model interiors, however, belong firmly to that completely interchangeable genre of effete lifestyle porn which seems to give property developers the hots.

Just wait till they start frying liver and onions in the kitchen

With the apartment’s inspirational moment of conception swiftly dealt with on one page, the Schanze neighborhood is described in some detail on another, setting the scene for prospective buyers.

“Little stores, Arabic falafel stands, Italian pizza bakers with songs of the Adria on their lips, bric-a-brac stores and record shops, rustic pubs like Omas Apotheke for the cultivated evening beer, beach clubs, cool bars for cool types like the Bar Rossi, the hippest clothes shops in the city and many small clubs with DJs in which the newest trends are created … all of this is the Schanze.“

There are striking parallels between this gushing, romanticised prose, and that of the nineteenth-century tourist/travel writer. Historian Mark Mazower illuminates the Victorian concept of the picturesque in his excellent book Salonica – City of Ghosts:

“Tourists, it is clear, were seeing very much what they had come to see. Their own culturally determined appetites demanded to be satisfied – how could they not be? – inspired by a romanticism which valued new landscapes for the states of mind they induced … The concrete realities and economic possibilities of the place no longer interested them … Instead the East was now an aesthetic construct.

In all the examples of real-estate marketing which have been scrutinised by this series, the same is true. A picture of a neighborhood is painted, and the potential buyer of a flat is then invited to identify themselves not with the neighborhood itself, but with the picture of the neighborhood being painted for them. With FRIEDASchanze it’s the aesthetic construct of a vibrant heterogeneous neighborhood, with Berlin’s Palais KolleBelle it’s the geographically displaced joie de vivre of bohemian Paris.

Adjectives anyone? “… trendy 2 to 5 room apartments, hip maisonettes, cool penthouses …”

So what is to distinguish the myth-making of property developers from any other kind of advertising, which also relies on inducing “states of mind”? Well for one, property marketing is prone to the observer’s paradox: the vibrant heterogeneous neighborhood which is FRIEDASchanze’s lifeblood will change as a result of its presence. High-priced apartments (average price € 350.000) have a habit of driving up the rent in the surrounding area: the classic symptom of gentrification. Homogenisation is invariably the result. Let’s hope those charming Arabs and Italians in their falafal stands and pizza parlours can still afford their rent in 2011.

The FRIEDASchanze website: www.friedaschanze.de [German langauge]
Best enjoyed mangled by Google’s hysterical translation machine here.

Act I. Scene III.
Interior. An architect’s office. Late at night.
-
Famous Architect: We need to consider location, when thinking about materials.
Associate: Indeed.
FA: And we’ve already commited ourselves to light green curtains.
A: A tricky one. Remind me, where will this hotel stand?
FA: On the site of the old Bavarian brewery, in the St. Pauli district of Hamburg.
A: I see.
FA: The brewing of beer, and the drinking of beer …
A: … and urinating afterwards.
FA: Very good! Keep it there! Let’s stay with urine … You piss up a corner on the way home from the pub and … Oxidization!
A: Oxidized bronze!
FA: Better yet: glass-bronze – it sounds fancier.
A: Fuck yeah!
FA: The glass-bronze cladding gets urinated upon by boozed-up students and left-wingers in protest against gentrification …
A: … it oxidizes, turns green …
FA: … and then matches the curtains in the cocktail lounge.
A: Perfect.
FA: I’m not shit-hot and famous for nothing, you know.

The Empire Riverside Hotel, Hamburg.
David Chipperfield Architects.

This physical threshold is further amplified by two other characteristics which markedly change once the transition has been made: the humidity, which soars to tropical jungle levels, and door handle ergonomics, the standard of which plummets.

1. Fine. It’s a door handle.

2. Viewed from eye level: where did the lock go? Why do I have to bend at the hip or knees so as to see where to stick the key?

3. There’s no room for a human hand to turn a modest bundle of keys once I’ve located the lock. The door frame is laquered steel, so the ensuing fumbling tends to sound like a day at the scrap yard.

What am I trying to say? It’s poor design. And it’s a bit irritating. That’s all.