Shape is part of the meaning

BVG. Image by haikus

Every Berliner faces them hundreds of times a day, every day... Signboards are part of a city's identity, and in the most fortunate cases they reach the status of collective monuments, like the blue-white-red underground sign in London. Why is it so easy in Berlin to find your way when you travel with public transport? Who is in charge of designing a sing like this one below to show you the right direction? Well, check it out in the following video, where German typographer and designer Erik Spiekermann, who recently won the Lifetime Achievement Award from the German Design Council, comments some of his work for BVG (Berlin's public transport company) and Die Bahn.

Mtro Potsdamer Platz. Image by Antoon's Footbar

Insulation I

Tropical Islands. Image by cocoate.com.

I took inspiration for a small series of posts from some of Peter Sloterdijk's concepts, namely insulation and encapsulation, included in his comprehensive theory of Spherology: in the beginning of a recent interview, Mr. Sloterdijk says:

"We have to speak of space because humans are themselves an effect of the space they create. Human evolution can only be understood if we also bear in mind the mystery of insulation/island-making [Insulierungsgeheimnis] that so defines the emergence of humans: Humans are pets that have domesticated themselves in the incubators of early cultures. All the generations before us were aware that you never camp outside in nature. The camps of man’s ancestors, dating back over a million years, already indicated that they were distancing themselves from their surroundings."

Tropical Island on the left and the closest village on the right. Image from googlemaps.

 
So, let's go with the first insulation from the surrounding: Tropical Islands is a wellness resort in Brandenburg, 60 km south from Berlin, housed in a former airship hangar. The airship that it was supposed to be host there was never built, the company went bankrupt in 2002 and the structure was bought by a Malaysian Company which turned it into an amusement park, opened in December 2004.
It can contain up to 6000 people in a day and it is the largest hall without supporting pillars in the world. Through a special plastic membrane it is possible to sunbathe inside (UV-proof), swim and spend some days in a tropical forest at 26 degrees (needless to say that the energetic balance of this building is a disaster...).

So far, so good; let's have a look inside...



And the Brandenburger area outside (from a friend of mine, the filmmaker Alessandro Cassigoli)...

Blankenfelde-Mahlow: the butterfly effect

BBI airport as east European gate.

I post a recent two-weeks-long joint project between TU Berlin, Tsinghua University Beijing and BUCEA University Beijing: together with my colleagues Ella Aminaldin, ZHAO  Hǎi  Xiǎng, Wáng  Wén and Enric Carol Suades, we tackled the problem of noise pollution in Blankenfelde-Mahlow, a small town south from Berlin, which will have to face the close-by expansion of the new BBI airport.

B-M distances to Berlin, Potsdam and BBI airport.

The concept
The so-called "butterfly effect" (i.e. in a complex system, initial small interventions cause relevant effects as time unfolds) was taken as a motto to define our proposal.

Analysis of site
Noise patterns and existing physical and social infrastructure were a starting point: we focused on noise pollution, walking distance to train stations and improvement of public/business services. Growth expectations (10.000 new inhabitants in the near future) and the peculiar suburban life-style framed our work: reevaluating the natural environment would be a good opportunity both for living and experiencing the countryside. There is a potential near the river to enhance the waterside access; the Rangsdorfer forest could be integrated with a new future development, emphasizing thus its relationship with the countryside.

Noise patterns from plane-routes: the darker, the more affected (>60 dB).

Walking distant to train stations: 5 to 15 min.

Inputs
We have to respond to two problems: what to do with the existing buildings under noise threat? Where and how to design new expansions? We propose a strategy in five steps that turns problems into a potential.

Diagram of successive steps.

Proposal
1. Noise protection of existing households via winter-gardens might offer new space, neither interior nor exterior, from the level of single houses to shared winter-gardens for (sub)urban agriculture and leisure, a retrofitting of the dispersed town’s fabric.

Grouping medium-compactness.

Communal winter-garden for low-compactness.

Existing situation.

Renovation proposal.

2. As a consequence to this new situation we transform a former military site into a covered farmer’s market, integrating an elderly house and new businesses dedicated to sport and leisure, since the site lays close to Rangsdorfer lake and forest.

An abandoned military area is converted to elderly houses and farmer's covered market.

3. Reacting to these new functions, a redesign and improvement of the green paths leading to the lake-shore is needed, building a new bridge and resolving the crossing under the A10 highway.

The green "heart".

4. The town is now ready for expansion: we concentrated on the south part of the town, less affected by noise pollution and close to an S-Bahn station, to the new covered-market and lake. Compact typologies assure enough critical mass to have commercial/public services at ground floor: we designed both winter-gardens on the roofs and shared-protected courtyards.

Masterplan 1:2000.

General view.

First typology.

Second typology: gardens on the roof.

5. With enough inhabitants and businesses the town could cover the railway lines, reconnecting its four split parts, and build a station to link directly with BBI airport: a mixture of functions could host hotels and services relating to the airport’s function.

Linear park.

Vision
In conclusion, these strategies aim not only at protecting the current and future inhabitants from noise, but also at improving daily life and providing opportunities for economic growth.

Some high-quality pictures here.

Plattenbaumuseum

Renovated Plattenbauten: extra metal-frame balconies in light-blue, existing ones with new blue glass-bricks.

If you can stand a bit of Ostalgie and have a Sunday off, the Plattenbaumuseum in Berlin Hellersdorf is worth the visit: in Hellersdorf, part of GDR, between 1976 and 1986 were built roughly 42.000 prefabricated concrete-slab apartments (Plattenbau), the majority of which consisting of WBS-70 typology. This type was characterized by a modular raster or 6 x 6 mt., a depth of 12 mt., floor height of 2.80 mt. usually rising till the 5th, 6th or 11th floor. A building with 30 apartments could be built in 4 weeks, 18 hours per apartment. In a WBS-70 could live a couple with one or two children, or a couple with no children who needed an extra working-room.

General WBS-70 plan.

Kitchen: note the all-present wallpaper.

Bedroom.

The company in charge of the renovation wanted to show how the original situation was, compared to the "new" apartments: in fact you can also visit the very next renovated apartment and see the difference. Getting rid of a partition wall and of wallpaper, reducing the rooms from three to two, adding an extra balcony, external insulation and increased care of the green spaces are quite easy moves. What unfortunately is harder to change is the absence of mixes functions in the neighborhood, and the relative distance from the city center (at least the perceived one) and from the Ring that runs across Berlin. One has anyhow to say that an underground station lies quite close to the blocks.

Two apartments at ground floor share the garden.

Ongoing renovation: note the external insulation being "attached" and the effort with colors.

New entrance with shed. Again the color-attempt.

An example of Plattenbau-description that escapes (n)ostalgia is "Platte mit Aussicht", a film-documentary on the Dresden-Gorbitz quartier.

Gorbitz - MyVideo

More and high-quality pics here.

Olympisches Dorf, Berlin, 1936

In the Sporthalle, Olympisches Dorf

A couple of weeks ago I went with some friends to the Olympic Village of Berlin, from the Nazi 1936 Olympic Games, the ones in which Hitler had to stand the "outrage" of seeing a black athlete, Jesse Owens, winning four gold medals in track and field.

Forgive me a bit of historical contextualization: Werner and Walter March (the former designing also the Olympiastadion, actually with some "suggestions" by Albert Speer, since Hitler did not like the original design of concrete and glass - a glass-cage) designed and built the Olympic Village between 1934 and 1936 for the Summer Games held in Berlin; the Nazis wanted to show the world their power and magnificience. The selected area layed around 10km from the city, in Dallgow-Döberitz, now Elstal: the project consisted of 140 one-storey, 5 two-storey buildings, the Hindemburg House, Kommandanten House, a sport-hall, a swimming-pool, sauna, hospital and restaurant - the House of Nations - plus kitchens. After the games in the buildings were installed a school and a militar hospital, while after the war the Soviet Army took control of the area; the Village in summer looks like a vacation-residence in Tuscany, with a number of little houses surronded by maritime pines. In fact the ground was heavily modified to create two different levels and an artificial lake was created, also bringing here some animals from the Berliner Zoo.

I found myself making comparisons with the recent Chinese Games, concerned as well on the symbiosis between power and the ways to express it through architecture: the Olympic Village of Berlin covers roughly an area of 54 hectares, while the Beijing one 66 only, if we think that the former was supposed to host 4.000 athletes, while the latter 16.000, consisting of 22 six-floor buildings and 20 nine-floor buildings, as well as a clinic, restaurants, a library, a recreation centre, gyms, swimming pools, tennis courts, basketball courts and jogging tracks.

Beijing Olympic Village, model. Photo by Remko Tanis

Here some pictures of the abandoned Village.

On Hitler, Hadrian, bunkers and bananas

Brandenburger Tor and at the Reichstag:you will get the scale of the domed-hall behind

Just in front of the "Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe" it is possible to visit the exhibition ]Mythos Germania[, whose main attraction is a big model of the North-South Axis designed by Albert Speer for Berlin, the supposed-to-be capital of Hitler’s Empire, Germania: I saw before a video-rendering and some images of the master plan, and honestly (considering the function of extreme monumentality) seemed to me not that bad, after all it was a boulevard connecting the stations Südkreuz and Nordbahnohf, culminating in a big domed hall; when I had a look at the model I understood I was completely wrong.
Robert Hughes titled his good documentary about Speer “Scale matters”, and this is exactly the point: apart from the “bombarding” quantity and display of architectural elements suggesting classical architecture, domination, power, from columns to eagles of stone on the rooftops, in a mixture no less than pornographic, if one looks at the Brandenburger Tor or the Reichstag, it is easy to understand why Speer’s father told him that the project completely insane. All this reminded me a passage of Richard Sennett’s marvelous book “Flesh and Stone” about the Roman Empire and Emperors’ power:

Nero bequeathed to Hadrian a cautionary tale about rulers who nakedly display their power, yet “the emperor was what the emperor did”, in the words of the historian Ferguson Millar. Making daunting, impressive buildings was among the most important of these acts, for the emperor’s own prestige and for the Empire; through their buildings, the emperors literally constructed their legitimacy in the eyes of their subjects.

Hadrian was able to built impressively but nicely, he built the Pantheon: if Hitler was able to realize Germania I suspect that he would have followed Nero’s fate, who, after building his Domus Aurea gained just the hatred and voluntary oblivion of the Romans.

Boros bunker. Photo by World-3

Near Friedrichstrasse there is one of the most famous and visible bunkers of Berlin: built in 1943, used by the DDR as deposit for bananas, since the temperature and humidity were perfect for the fruit to become ripe (I can already imagine the advertisement of the “Bunker Banana”), turned in a Club known (not so originally but effective) as “The Bunker”, with even more darkrooms than the Berghain. Because it was built so late, on the facade there are many decorative elements, in case it would be kept for further use, as actually happened. In 2003 the building was bought by Christian Boros, who appointed "Realarchitektur" to renovate and transform the building, with the idea of hosting there his private collection of contemporary art. Booking some 3 months in advance it is possible with 10 euros to visit the collection and the building with a guide, in groups of 10 people: if the works of art are not masterpieces the bunker-experience is really worth. Originally there were five floors, each 2,30 m. high, so the architect had to cut the slabs to create double heights and spaces more apt to host works of art and to mitigate the suffocating and oppressing feeling of such low ceilings. The construction of the bunker in 1943 took one year, 7 months of which were spent only to build the roof, a 3 m. thick armed-concrete slab; the transformation of the building was obviously longer and more complicated lasting something like 4 years. Another curiosity: the stairs are doubled, following a principle developed by Leonardo and employed in the Chambord Castle, in order to provide access to the double of users.

Praising heterogeneity of goals

I already introduced what I would call recreational urbanism, so now it’s time to go a bit deeper and try to explain what I really mean: a crucial question for the Situationists was whether the practice of urbanism is a collective matter or a discipline which needs to be regulated by a few specialists, professionals, who have the training (and the power) to decide for the community. Of course nearly everyone, trying to be a little politically-correct would answer that, yeah, this is a collective matter, at least should be; anyhow avoiding this naïveté is a big deal of honesty, since (from architects’ experience) an urban planner, an architect can quite easily justify his own work with the usual magic words like democratic, open, flexible etc. but we know that words have a very subtle power, and are often employed to justify one-self's work, to convince the client or to sell an idea to some politician in order to get him interested in the project. By the way words can somewhen be helpful to make people understand some needed and critical project for the place in which they live, to avoid easy nimbyism or to make them conscious of how to improve the conditions of their city or village. Like for politicians a few lines earlier, a way to get them involved in the process.

But still there is the question, why recreational? Recalling our latin classes at high-school, this word is composed of the adjective for creation and the prefix re-, which, just in case you forgot, means that an action is repeated several times; so a continuous creation, expression that with time assumed a character of ludicity (not lucidity!); for an interesting and professional analysis of the two terms have a look here. In fact, again for the Situationists, a key expression was “ludic city”, a fertile ground for situations to happen; I would say that a healthy urbanism is recreational in a way that permits spontaneous happenings, likely to change over time, actions which are not programmed and are outside range of strict control, sometimes on the border of legality, informal (another magic word, this time let me use it). And complex: I cannot imagine anything spontaneous between the blocks of the Ville Radieuse, where everything seems already programmed and decided once and for all; I rather can imagine plenty of actions in a middle-age city, in the squares but also in the narrow alleys and streets, with plenty of nooks and crannies. And if the Ville Radieuse seems clean, hygienic, safe, a medieval city carries a degree of riskand uncertainty: within limits of vivibility of course I would say that a recreational, complex urbanism cannot do without a percentage of risk: if you want to keep your door open you have to deal with the fact that also somebody whom you don’t want to meet could go through...

La Ville Radieuse

"A battle of giants? No! The miracle of trees and parks reaffirms the human scale." (from "Vers une Architecture" by Le Corbusier). Robert Hughes spoke of Le Corbusier's city planning in his series "The Shock of the New":

"...the car would abolish the human street, and possibly the human foot. Some people would have airplanes too. The one thing no one would have is a place to bump into each other, walk the dog, strut, one of the hundred random things that people do ... being random was loathed by Le Corbusier ... its inhabitants surrender their freedom of movement to the omnipresent architect."

Not many people around the Ville, isn't it? Density matters after all...

Here we go with some examples:

In Kreuzberg, images by Marco Capitanio

1st of May in Kreuzberg, now the most vivid of Berlin’s quarters, and its historical turkish community feel the Worker’s Day stronger than others: in a leftist stronghold a whole day and night of parades, speeches, music, typical food sold on the streets; a community makes itself visible to the other people, and was not uncommon to hear this year, during the rap improvisations, many singers referring proudly to their own quarter, which was able to develop maturely its identity. Identity and visibility applied to people rather than buildings (as we saw in the first part of the writing speaking about the Spreebogen), in a form of self-organization, already gaining the historical dimension, as many berliners wait every year to enjoy the 1st of May in Kreuzberg.

Thai Park: down the subway U7 we find a park (whose real name is actually Preussenpark but nobody knows that!) which has been “colonized” by the thai community, selling, when the good season comes, ready-made traditional food with ingredients prepared at home and brought to the park: if it is anyhow better to go there with some thai friend, everyone can buy his meal there, basically every day, in a kind of collective pic-nick. Thais can therefore gather and simultaneously show themselves off.

What is interesting is that this activity is (luckily) informally approved by the city, as far as selling food on public ground is theoretically illegal without a proper license; rather than the duality legal/illegal, we face allowed/not allowed, category much more sensible, able to decline the legal/illegal in response to different contexts and goals; a much more human(e) criterion. It is also interesting to note that the middle-English verb “to allow” comes probably from Latin allaudare (to praise), reinforced by the medieval Latin allocare (to place), as well a derivative (ad + locare) from the key-word locus (place): in a way, something which is allowed seems to be beneficial for a particular place, (I add) depending on the situation.

Just to finish with a détournement: if the Situationists saw this guy sleeping in Unter den Linden in front of the Russian Embassy, they would have loved him...

Related posts:

Praising heterogeneity of goals (PART 1)

Praising heterogeneity of goals

“... The architect today has to constantly prove that things can and should be done differently, by different people, with different goals.”

Vanstiphout and Provoost, Facts on the Ground: From Dutch to Ditch Urbanism

Here follows a rather inorganic piece, mainly a walk through Berlin concentrated in the new political-administrative area of the Spreebogen, followed by a short trip to the quarter of Kreuzberg, during the last 1st of May-worker-celebrations. I tried to focus on specific themes, most of all symbolism, the architectural notion of transparency and on what I would call and explain better later recreational urbanism. I chose this two places since the represent to me some crucial urban battlefields in Berlin and I see one as a great urban value achieved thanks to time and population’s vitality (Kreuzberg), the other as potential that could be displayed in a brand-new and highly representative city quarter (Spreebogen).

Image via Wikipedia. By Lienhard Schulz

In the area of the Spreebogen (arch of the Spree, the main river of the city), in northern Berlin, we can find today the administrative complex called “Das Band des Bundes”, a 900 meters-long structure, composed of three main buildings, the Bundeskanzleramt, the Paul-Löbe Haus and the Marie-Elisabeth Lüders Haus, crossing the Spree two times on the east-west axis: the idea of the project was established in 1992 by the architects Axel Schultes and Charlotte Frank, later with the collaboration of the architect Stephan Braunfels. Construction began in 1997 and finished in 2003. Close to the area are the Reichstag (house of the Parliament) and the Hauptbahnhof (central station), both highly representative project deeply connected with the Spreebogen. After the fall of the Wall a huge architectural complex was needed first to provide essential services to the Parliament, and secondly to try to regenerate or recreate a new symbolic effect connected with german recent political history and its capital city.

The intention to build along the E-W axis comes basically from a couple of reasons: to react against Albert Speer’s nazi project of a grand North-South axis, and also because the Wall dividing East and West Berlin run exactly through the Spreebogen. Thus the symbolic choice of “reunification”. From Wikipedia:

"Hitler ordered Speer to make plans to rebuild Berlin. The plans centered around a three-mile long grand boulevard running from north to south, which Speer called the Prachtstrasse, or Street of Magnificence; he also referred to it as the "North-South Axis". At the north end of the boulevard, Speer planned to build the Volkshalle, a huge assembly hall with a dome which would have been over 700 feet (210 m) high, with floor space for 180,000 people. At the southern end of the avenue would be a huge triumphal arch; it would be almost 400 feet (120 m) high, and able to fit the Arc De Triomphe inside its opening. The outbreak of World War II in 1939 led to the postponement, and eventual abandonment, of these plans. Part of the land for the boulevard was to be obtained by consolidating Berlin's railway system. Speer hired Wolters as part of his design team, with special responsibility for the Prachtstrasse. When Speer's father saw the model for the new Berlin, he said to his son, "You've all gone completely insane."

Image via Wikipedia. By BArchBot

Hauptbahnhof today rests alone right in front of the Spreebogen: the project was drawn by the Hamburg’s firm GMP, and the main concept, stated quite clearly, is that of transparency: apart from the technical issues, the station holds a strong symbolic meaning, since it proposes itself as the main railway hub of the city and is collocated in such a decisive position. Anyhow now all the area around still needs to be developed and constructed, and Hauptbahnhof seems a bit afraid of being alone, especially at night, when she needs to turn on all the lights she has, an apotropaic action, giving the impression of a little girl in the wood. When one is inside the station it is possible to see as far as Potsdamer Platz, and obviously also the Reischtag and the Band des Bundes.

Here we face for the first time a concept that permeates all the surrounding political and administrative buildings: why transparency is so crucial? I will try to give some simple reasons. I would go back first of all to Haussmann’s 19th century parisian boulevards: it is renown that the Baron’s urbanism moved toward a safer, more hygienic, controllable “modern” city. Traffic-flow and shopping facilities together with housing concerns were taken into account in planning; last but not least, large boulevards were necessary to prevent rebels and rioters to build barricades in the streets, blocking the police: was therefor easier to reach different parts of the city from the centre and immediately stop riots. Transparency as a way to strip everybody naked, easily recognizable, identifiable and after all harmless. A kind of extended panopticon, where the guard can see everything and everybody, and it is impossible to hide. I would call also this, with a big degree of simplification, homogeneity of goals, when there is no space (intended as opportunity, possibility, situation) to differ from the specific use and intention of a determined place. (A shopping-mall for instance is such an example since the main goal by far is selling as much as possible and gaining as much money as possible). The opposite is obviously a heterogeneity of goals, in which is possible to have at the same time and the same place many different activities, aiming at different, often unpredictable and informal results. Mixture in the same spatio-temporality. Exactly because of this reason the Situationists harshly criticized Haussmann, targeting his urbanism as repressive, a state and capitalist science.

Now have a look at this: Salome, the idealized female dangerousness through erotic power takes form in the shape of some white containers and tent-like structures overlooked by a bunch of “arabic” golden domes. It is really a circus lying under a branch of the Hauptbahnhof, on a sandy Spree’s shore; I see it a kind of heroic trial to inject some heterogeneity of goals, demonstrating and showing a possible way to a different urbanism, putting together a very representative with a rather informal and nomadic architecture. I would here call helping me Constant and in general the Situationists, who, in my opinion, reached the most interesting results in term of urban thinking in the last century.

I quote Tom McDonough in Metastructure: Experimental Utopia And Traumatic Memory In Constant’s New Babylon:

“...Constant’s work on New Babylon was already presaged by an earlier project, which set in place the terms of the particular relation to nomadism articulated in the later work. It was in Alba, in the Italian Pedemont, that he visited the artist Pinot Gallizio, who had welcomed onto his lands Romany people who had been driven off the surrounding countryside; for them, Constant invented the Project for a Gypsy Camp (1956-58). [...] His Gypsy Camp was no simple provision of emergency shelter, nor was it a means to fix this mobile population to a definite point. [...] It was a punctual refusal of the underlying assumptions of this regime of postwar rebuilding: at the very moment where bureaucratic planners were concerned with a housing crisis, Constant would insist that the stakes lay elsewhere. [...] (It) did not propose a “housing” solution, but a means of simultaneously fulfilling and superseding the function of dwelling."

I find really extra-ordinary this kind of “happening” or better, situation, combining two elements which are so distant, in terms of durability, scale, value etc. We are at least surprised, creating free space for a poetic of the détournement. To me a symptom of healthiness. Even a “lido”, full of people informally sunbathing, drinking beer and resting, just on the Spree shores, in-between the Hauptbahnof and the Band des Bundes goes in my opinion in such a direction: one starts to see that people is gaining some interest in these places, for the moment still too much orphans of use, activities. Neither to say that time plays the protagonist in such a process.

But let us go towards the buildings I introduced earlier: in the Spreebogen the concept of transparency seems reversed at the first sight; one could think that all this glass, as effectively does, reveals what is happening inside, suggesting the idea (in some degree naive) that people can control politics and what politicians do, as in a democracy should be. I cannot say that this is not true, but it is also interesting to see which kind of implications a design like this one generates on the outer space: since the area is so vast, since the space is so huge, since there are not real streets, police can come and act quickly, helicopters can land with ease, every riot-attempt is automatically neutralized. Where to begin a possible revolt? Some anchor point is obviously lacking... A vast, flat space is automatically transparent. If we add the constant and spread illumination, security devices etc. we see that our heterogeneity of goals is more and more reduced, since one cannot for instance lay relaxed on the grass with his girlfriend, or eat a kebab, since there is no place to find one around. I am not anyhow just because of that implying that the esplanade in front of the Reichstag has to be an informal place, but even the original project for the Band des Bundes proposed, between the Paul-Löbe Haus and the Bundeskanzleramt a public “forum” with facilities for the people, supposed to give architectural expression to the demos, but for many reasons this idea has been abandoned.

Now let’s go in detail with some (rather curious) examples. The Swiss Embassy is the only historical building here around: in fact the general impression that one has is that of closure, no extra glass, no spectacular architectonical solutions... Also the new construction attached later speaks in the same language.

The Paul-Löbe Haus, a massive glass facade which seems strangely only penetrable with the eyes (but note the reflection of the Swiss Embassy at the bottom of the picture!). Along its sides there are many courtyards in series, which are at level -1, so that one can see them from a balustrade, but are inaccessible from the outside.

We all now the glass dome of the Reichstag by Norman Foster: I don’t know why but the huge “park” in front of the building is closed with a metal fence... Interesting at least: from the Parliament are departing some underground corridors connecting to surrounding buildings, just like this one we can see from above (the glass strip on the pavement).

Marie-Elisabeth Lüders Haus: the bridge above is for the employees, politicians etc. The one below for all the rest.

To summarize, here are some intuitions on a kind of adolescent place, very delicate since it involves issues like visibility/invisibility, transparency, symbolism: will it be possible, necessary, useless, to inject some “deviations” in what is supposed to be homogeneous and non-contradictory? In the following part I will put on the table some loose thoughts, mainly about the quarter of Kreuzberg and on what I will call recreational urbanism.

(Go to PART 2)