The Tempest May Howl

RIBA Journal

2012-02-06T05:48:00.000-08:00

Piece by me and Jim Hudson (uncredited in final edit) in the Royal Institute of British Architects Journal on the two most exciting contemporary architecture practices in Berlin.

Warszawa

2012-01-11T14:42:00.000-08:00

Warsaw, January 2012. Murals in the conference centre of the former House of the Peasant, HQ of the Agrarian Representatives. 2012 = my hotel.

Lightswitches possibly original.

Now available for corporate conferences.

1930s skyscraper. Currently stripped of later 1950s Stalinist facade cladding.

The international language of Capitalist-Realist architecture.

Warszawa Powisle Metro Station. 1963.

Mural. Memory fails me.

Man. Bore. Somewhere central.

Kino Relax Kino. Now a discount clothes store.

Kino Tecza. Kino Tecza. Still working.

Bruno Taut-esque estate, southern Warsaw. 1930s.

Sign: Commune of the Journalists.
Grafitti: self-explanatory.

Warszawa Centralna, 0630. Possibly Europe's finest 1970s capital station. Rome?

Crystal Palace National Sports Centre

2011-12-26T22:45:00.000-08:00

1964, London County Council architects' department. All photos taken Christmas Day, so no interior shots, but, as ever, RIBA pix has contemporary views of the diving board, seating, concrete ribbing, more concrete ribbing, the "refreshment centre", signage, and more of that beautiful concrete ribbing.

Sign dates from 2011, and GLL's alleged 1m pound "refurbishment". In 1964, it was known as the Crystal Palace National Recreation Centre. At some point, it became the Crystal Palace National Sports Centre.

Brutalist seating. Useful when you want to sit with your back to someone.

All overlooked by a sphinx (and her friend) who survived the November 1936 fire of Crystal Palace - watched by 100,000 Londoners.

Berlin: Wessie-stalgie

2011-12-10T02:14:00.001-08:00

Clock, Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt

Signage, Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt


Uniform shop, Karl-Marx Strasse

Kant Cafe, Kantstr

Wig shop, Karl-Marx Strasse

DDR murals, Potsdam (date unknown)

2011-12-09T02:46:00.001-08:00

Cafe Minsk, Potsdam, DDR (1979)

2011-12-08T08:32:00.001-08:00

June 1979 (photo via the Maerkische Allgemeine).

And December 2011.

Karstadt, Hermannplatz (1929/1951/1976)

2011-12-05T23:16:00.001-08:00

Hermannplatz in 2011 is a drab transport intersection, chocked by 16-lanes of traffic and patrolled by the homeless, alcoholics and smackheads. Wasn't always so.

On June 6, 1929 the Karstadt department store opened, to serve what was then the prosperous Neukoelln east end of Berlin. Built in veritiginous Gothic-Expressionist style, it stood six-storey's tall, with a rooftop restaurant, and two 71-metre high towers, topped with glass illumination. (The photograph at the start of this post is a model reconstruction, now housed on the top-floor of the rebuilt Karstadt.)

Below ground, an entire yellow-tiled U-bahn station was constructed with direct access to the department store, which still survives today.

Original images of the interior, with bakery, ticket office, automated coffee machines, and carefree Weimar shoppers here.

If you look carefully at this film (and ignore the name of the uploader) of Berlin in 1936, between 4'13" and 5'16", the rooftop restaurant, with carefree citizens (no longer Weimar ones, but subjects of the Third Reich) eating and dancing, matches the skyline, layout and decor of the Karstadt restaurant.

The opening of Karstadt was a big enough deal for Joseph (The Radetsky March) Roth to write about it in his September 8, 1929 piece "The Very Large Department Store" for the Muenchner Neueste Nachrichten. Of the rooftop revellers, Roth writes:

In complete torpor they are regaled with the sounds of an excellent orchestra. Their eyes take in distant steeples, gasholders, and horizons. Rare delicacies are offered in such profusion and with such insistence that their rarity is lost. And just as, within, the merchandise and the shoppers became modest, so too the delicacies on the roof become modest. Everything is within reach of anyone. Everyone may aspire to anything.

(Joseph Roth, What I Saw, W. W. Norton 2004, p.122)

In May 1945, as the Red Army entered Berlin from the east (egged on by Stalin to take the city in time for the commemoration of Lenin's birthday), fighting street by street (largely up what is now Karl-Marx Strasse) towards the landmark Karstadt.

From that morning [April 21] until 2 May, they [the Red Army] were to fire 1.8 million shells in the assault on the city. The casualties among women especially were heavy as they still queued in the drizzling rain, hoping for their 'crisis rations'. Mangled bodies were flung across Hermannplatz in south-east Berlin as people queued outside the Karstadt department store...

There has been a dramatic account of the looting of the Karstadt department store in Hermannplatz, where queuing shoppers had been blown to pieces during the first artillery bombardment on 21 April. According to this story, SS troops allowed civilians to take what they wanted before they blew the place up. The explosion was said to have killed many over-eager looters. But in fact when the SS Nordland Division took over the store several days later, they did not want to blow it up. They needed Karstadt's twin towers as observation posts to watch the Soviet advance on Neukoelln and the Templehof aerodrome.

(Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945, Penguin 2002, p.262 & p.282)

Karstadt was rebuilt, first in 1951, and then in 1976.

This is the one remaining original wing, on the south-west corner.

The Weimar Republic Multistorey Car Park

2011-11-20T07:28:00.001-08:00

Scurrying to my German class in Savignyplatz, I almost missed this. It's at 126 Kant Strasse, (West) Berlin. For a second, I assumed it was from the 1960s, and derelict.

In fact, it’s a Weimar Republic-era multistorey car park, designed by Richard Paulick and Hermann Zwiegentnes in 1929-30, holding 300 cars over six floors. It includes DNA spiral-style twin up-and-down circular ramps.
I like to imagine Emil and the Detectives could have had a lot of fun chasing villains up and down it.

Royal Commonwealth Pool, Edinburgh (1967)

2011-11-10T03:24:00.000-08:00

Begun in 1967, in time for the July 1970 Royal Commonwealth Games to be held in the Scottish capital, Robert Matthew Johnson-Marshall & Partners' late Modernist swimming pool is extremely hard to photograph, namely because it is (a) extremely broad and low, and (b) currently surrounded by hoardings for what is likely to be a disastrous and delayed "upgrade". I expect funslides, wave machines and none of that nasty 50-metre pool-serious-swimming malarky. But I'll be happy to be proved wrong.

Better photos, from the ever-interesting RIBAPIX archive, here and here. There's even one of the Games in action (note cameraman bottom left.)

And here is the sauna suite (will that survive the refurb?), and diving boards (doubtless now out-of-bounds to the current generation of Edinburgh children, as this Guardian piece makes clear...)

The 1970 Commonwealth Games were the first at which metric, rather than imperial, units of distance were used.

Know locally as "the Commie", it was also the unlikely venue where chain-smoking alcoholic detective Inspector Rebus often chose to go for an afternoon swim.

In this photo, the two lumps visible behind the building are not a sleeping camel, but the extinct volcano of Arthur's Seat.

For even better architectural volcanic-contextualisation, how about these (unidentified) nearby office buildings?

Tecton's "6 Pillars"

2011-10-20T01:27:00.000-07:00

Deep in a wood, above an abandoned train line on the Dulwich Estate, stands Tecton's 1934 "6 Pillars".

It was built for the headmaster of Dulwich preparatory school, the Rev JH Leakey (sic).

Observant readers will spot - despite the poor photographs (better ones here ) - the resemblance to Erno Goldfinger's private home in Hampstead, 2 Willow Road (which only has "4 Pillars".)

Tecton was led by Berthold Lubetkin, king penguin of the Penguin Pool at London Zoo, although I thrill more to his Finsbury Health Centre - having eaten my packed lunch outside it from 2001 to 2007 whilst working for The Guardian.

However, according to the sellers, the lead architect on the project was a young architect named Valentine Harding. Harding was killed in World War Two, during the 1940 Dunkirk retreat. He was 35.

Naturally, such suspect continental Modernism ruffled the feathers of the Dulwich estate, and only the incorporation of London brick into the facade assuaged their fears.

Even now, the Dulwich Estate adds this mysterious qualification to their description of the building:

"the unusual plan, effectively two separate sleeping suites, was a direct response to the Leakey's particular marital arrangements."

For sale, priced 1.75 million pounds sterling (2,003,296.30 euros).

Inside the Berliner Zeitung

2011-10-14T14:38:00.000-07:00

A reporter friend who works at Berliner Zeitung invited me (okay, I invited myself) inside this vertical citadel of journalism. The Berliner Zeitung's editorial offices are on the 12th to 15 floors. The canteen is on the 8th floor. Access to the roof is no longer allowed.

Born in 1945, the former Ossie paper (actually my favourite German newspaper) went through some gruelling changes after Die Wende - not least being owned by Robert "Man Overboard" Maxwell and David "Rommel" Montgomery.

(I worked briefly under Montgomery at Mirror Group newspapers, and, even more briefly, once shared a Canary Wharf lift with him. Amanda Platell compliment him obsequiously on his recent skiing holiday as the three of headed up to the 22nd floor.)

The monastic cell of a typical German journalist. British and German newsrooms, I've found, are a study in contrasts.The former loud, open-plan, noisy and messy. The latter, corridors of sealed offices, with the atmosphere of a library.

The building apparently dates from the 1980s (it looks 1960s/70s, but so do a lot of DDR building that then turn out to be from the 1980s - there was a jetlag getting over the Wall).

In DDR times, the Goldfinger-esque segregated stairwell would not have been defaced with advertising placards.

Denys Lasdun's Institute of Education

2011-10-13T01:42:00.000-07:00

If this is my favourite Berlin building, then Lasdun's 1965 complex for the University of London, comprising the Institute for Education, School of Oriental and African Studies, and the University College London psychology and geography departments is probably my peverse pick as London favourite.

Peverse because Lasdun's Royal College of Physicians and National Theatre are cleaner, better known, possibly just better. But there's heroicism in tearing down a row of Georgian terraces to build this mega-structure, which still has the grace to match its surviving neighbours in proportion and rhythm. But those concrete roofline flying buttresses are monumentally mysterious.

It's almost as if some gargantuan monster had picked up Candilis, Josik and Woods Freie Universitaet in its concrete jaws.

Besides, I bought some ridiculously strong LSD off a maths undergraduate there in 1994. But still managed to graduate, in the same building, in 1996.

RIP KB Hallen

2011-09-29T02:21:00.000-07:00

This blog was originally meant to take in a little Bob Dylan (the name The Tempest May Howl is not an egotistical cry-for-help, by the way, but actually taken from this hymn, sung by Dylan in 1993), to leaven the architecture.

However, yesterday the KB-Hallen in Copenhagen burnt down. This was the venue for the Danish gig of Dylan's famous/infamous/so-famous-it's-boring "Judas" electric tour. He played here May 1st, 1966.

I went on a pilgrimage there in August 2000, whilst on a cycling tour of Denmark (much to the excitement of my non-Dylan fan cycling mate, Dave.)

It's quite a way out of central Copenhagen, and surrounded by tennis courts and suburbia. But the KB itself was a highly original modernist 1938 sports hall (pictures here), and given listed status only this year.

Strangely, listing often seems to be a death sentence to suicide-by-fire for buildings.

The initials "KB" are stencilled into the facade, with Corbusian wings breaking the parabola roof. The eggshell blue colour is original (I think.)

Other venues played by Dylan on the 1966 tour have since been destroyed, including the Newcastle Odeon.

The KB caught fire during a Sex Fair.

I'll leave the symbolism to others.

Luftwaffe Bunker

2011-09-21T02:56:00.000-07:00

Stumbled upon this entirely by accident. It's just behind, and up the hill from, the Haus am Wansee - for me, the most haunting of all the Third Reich memorial sites in Berlin.

It's now used as storage by the blood bank of the German Red Cross. Eeriely, its in the grounds of a hospital and sanatorium complex, which has now been completely abandoned and left to nature.

A small sign announces the bunker as being for the officer class of the Luftwaffe - presumably those based at nearby Gatow airfield.

Charles Lindberg Strasse

2011-09-21T02:55:00.000-07:00

Considering how sensitive the Germans are to associations with the Nazi dictatorship, was mildly surprised to stumble across Charles Lindbergh Strasse on my travels around the extremities of Berlin.

Having read Philip Roth's The Plot Against America and Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke , the American aviator and proto-fascist ("America First", or "America Next!" as Woody Guthrie sang) was clearly an admirer and friend of Hitler and Goering. He even went house-hunting in nearby Wansee in 1938.

Most ironic of all is the location - a new housing estate thrown up on the edge of the airfield which was, during the Cold War, RAF Gatow - a military runway in the British sector which helped with the Berlin Airlift.

However, before that, RAF Gatow was built as a training station for the Luftwaffe elite (more of that in the next post), so, as a fan of the Germans, the Nazis and the Luftwaffe, I suppose Lindbergh has found his spiritual home.

RAF Gatow is now the Luftwaffe Museum.

We Are The Pope

2011-09-21T02:50:00.000-07:00

20-storey reproduction of Bild's frontpage on the accession of Joseph Ratzinger as pontiff, hung down the side of the Axel Springer HQ in Berlin to mark the visit of the pope to Germany, September 2011.

It looks even better/worse/scarier floodlit at night.

1936 Olympic Village, Berlin

2011-08-11T14:27:00.000-07:00

Everyone who visits Berlin goes to the Olympic Stadium - far fewer make it out to the 1936 Olympic Village.

Hitler had it built nearly an hour outside the capital, and not even near a train station - the site sits next to an Autobahn (the glorious future of the motorcar), but two kilometres from Elstar train station.

The Nazis built it specifically so it could rapidly be turned into army barracks - which it was, only by the Soviets, following Germany's defeat. (Although the Olympic Stadium is in old West Berlin, the Olympic Village, being west of West Berlin, was in East Germany.)

The entire site is now derelict, but preserved, with a two euro entry fee.

Above, the foundations of the Icelandic team's accomodation.

Above, the communal restaurant/canteen for athletes. I say communal, but in fact each nationality sat in segregated rooms, being served by waiters who used the external balconies.

Above, one of dozens of abandoned, windowless Soviet army barracks later built on the site.

Nazi surprise

2011-08-11T14:22:00.000-07:00

Looks like an idyllic suburban German home. It's between the derelict railway sidings at Elstal, outside Berlin, and the derelict 1936 Olympic village.

But look closely at the orange patch on the wall - that's rust. This entire row of prefab houses are made of metal sheeting, one of three sites in Germany where the Third Reich built prototype housing for the planned quick colonization of Ukraine.

DDR wall, Neubrandenburg

2011-08-11T14:18:00.000-07:00

DDR mural, Neubrandenburg

2011-08-11T14:16:00.000-07:00

Rare example of DDR public art looking back, rather than "Forwards!". Depictions of Neubrandenburg's surviving four medieval city gates.

DDR mural, Neubrandenburg

2011-08-11T14:14:00.000-07:00

"Culture Finger" in Friedrich Engels Ring

2011-08-11T14:09:00.000-07:00

This is/was a DDR library (base block) with artists studios (tower) in the town of Neubrandenburg. Each floor of the tower is only around 5 metres wide. It is empty, bar a rooftop cafe, and being converted into a Volkshochschule (adult education classes.)

In DDR times, the locals dubbed it the "Culture Finger", and it stands in the middle of Neubrandenburg's ringroad, which is called Friedrich Engels Ring.

Former wine, cigarettes, tobacco business, Stralsund

2011-08-11T14:06:00.000-07:00

Derelict DDR Milkbar, Stalsund

2011-08-11T14:04:00.000-07:00

Derelict DDR youth centre, Sassnitz, Island of Ruegen

2011-08-11T14:02:00.000-07:00

DDR hotel, Sassnitz, Island of Ruegen

2011-08-11T14:00:00.000-07:00

RIP Sean Hoare

2011-07-18T13:27:00.000-07:00

The white supremacist who let off bombs on three successive Saturdays in 1999 was a dream come true for Sunday paper hacks.
Each went off before deadline, late on Saturday, was guaranteed the splash - and we had a murderous, racist madman on our hands.
The first was a failed device outside Brixton's Iceland (blacks). I went down there with Sean Hoare (died today) and Rupert Hamer (killed in Afghanistan for the Sunday Mirror last year.) Our editor at the Sunday Mirror was Colin Myler (made redundant last week when the News of the World closed.)
The next week was Brick lane (Asians.) Again, I went there with Sean (dead) and Rupert (dead), and another reporter named Doug Kemp, who I believe is now in prison.
Sean and I ended up on the Sunday People the next year. There our editor was Neil Wallis (arrested), and the news desk Dave Wooding (made redundant when the NotW closed last week), James Weatherup (arrested) and Ian Edmondson (arrested).

The irony of the Brixton bomber was he was a racist homophobic skinhead who ended up killing a white, heterosexual, married, pregnant couple in Soho.

The irony of Sean Hoare? I don't know. He was he was a sweet, funny, troubled guy in a seedy, stressful world. He reminded me in many ways of a Timothy Spall character.

One for Bruno Taut fans

2011-07-06T14:48:00.000-07:00

Every Lidl helps.

Although those in the know think that Max Taut might have been better ...

(Jim) Stirling in the Eurozone

2011-06-16T04:48:00.000-07:00

For me, the revelation of the current James Stirling retrospective at the Tate Britain was the Clore Gallery itself.

As a callow undergraduate arriving in London in 1992, my initial impressions were of a shallow, Playschool "through-the-round-window" postmodernism, in crass and garish colours, and about as amusing as a novelty tie.

I was already prejudiced against Stirling, having read the debate, via the Sunday Times magazine as a schoolboy, on his demolishing the Mappin & Webb building - who were both a northern firm, and whose London HQ was so reminiscent of much of the Italianate Victorian architecture of my native Bratfud.

I also didn't like the idea of ridding London of a "flat-iron"building, which I associated with Manhattan - although there was a modest example in Bradford itself near my school.

(For some reason I didn't twig that No. 1 Poultry would also be a flat-iron. Of sorts.)

I already knew my Stirling faves - the Olivetti HQ in Haslemere, the Florey accommodation block in boo, hiss, Oxford, and the Ham Common residential cubes.

There were surprises in the show - his (unknown to me, now demolished) terraced housing in Preston (thanks to @StoneRoberts) . A far better reinvention of the northern terrace than anything Urban Splash came up with 40 years later.

Also, his unbuilt proposal for Mitterand's Bibliotheque Nationale, a sort of Festival of Shapes, or spilled bag of Liquorice Allsorts - some of whose ideas were recycled into the Berlin Wirtschaftsforschungzentrum.

(Having now lived in Berlin and Paris, and seen two of Dominique Perrault's major projects - his winning Bibiliotheque Nationale and his Berlin Velodrom and Schwimmbad - he appears to be the master of the failed public plaza. His Parisian 1990s Alphaville library, with four corner towers mimicking open books, is pretty bare and windswept (the central, sunken garden, however, is a mysterious joy) whilst the Berlin rooftop "orchard" is a litter and weed-strewn no man's land, with great vistas of horrendous derelict Ossie factories and office blocks.)

But, visiting the Tate in April, I realised I hadn't done a righthand swerve into the Clore since that first visit in c.1994.

Archive photos within show the Clore originally came with a sunken, reflective pond in the three-sided courtyard. According to @LangRabbie this was removed at some point due to stagnant, stinky weeds. Without it, as @FatCharlesH says, the receessed patio benches look somewhat twee.

However, the sheer medieval girth of the entrance wall, the jigsaw-like blending with Sir Nicholas Serota's grace-and-favour flat next door, and, yes, the playful zingy green all melted my heart.

Either the building's grown old gracefully, or I've mellowed.

That said, having read Mark Girouard's Stirling biography, it appears Stirling's life was cut short prematurely on the operating table, and the fact that this chameleon architect's unwitting "Late Style" of pastel post-modernism became his signature style is slightly sad - like one's final memory of a friend being from a fancy dress party.

I still prefer the "Scandinavian Stirling" of Camberwell primary school or Ham Common flats, or the constructivism-on-stilts of his Florey building to the 1980s Loadsamoney po-mo of his final works.

Back in Berlin, inspired by Clore, I took another peep at his 1988 Wirtschaftsforchungzentrum. Again, the palette of sponge-washed orange and pink grates on my sensibilities like a cheap Italian bistro or sorded Buenos Aries bordello, but the three-sided windowsills without a windowsill give the ensemble a sinister Chirico affect, and, yes, the lime green window frames are, up close, zingy again.

(This chap has noticed that from above the complex takes on the form of a Latin cross church.)

For some reason the building - by Berlin standards - is fairly impermeable. Well, it has a high fence and CCTV, which is extremely unBerlin.

But, fittingly, it's far better maintained than anything by Stirling in Britain - bar the Clore itself.

(West) Berlin balconies - summer

2011-06-15T13:45:00.000-07:00

A companion piece to this

East Germany? No, East Croydon

2011-06-15T13:43:00.000-07:00

Albany House, I think it was called. Down the side of the station. Any idea of artist, or what is being symbolised?

Time for God in SE26

2011-06-15T13:41:00.001-07:00

Fossils at The Economist

2011-06-15T02:46:00.000-07:00

There's one other way to get into The Economist, apart from going to Magdalen College, Oxford and having links to MI6 - being a Jurassic-age fossil.

Portland stone fossils in the Smithson's Economist building. Note bevelled edges of bench supports exactly foreshadows the corners of the two southern end towers of Robin Hood Gardens.

Cold War fonts

2011-05-22T04:44:00.000-07:00

On the fontline of the Cold War, it wasn't all DDR-tastic. This, from the old West Berlin. U-bahn station Jungfernheide.

Beneath The Cobbles - The Beach!

2011-05-22T04:30:00.000-07:00

And, thanks to Neukoelln council, now: Beneath The Tarmac - The Cobbles!

In an act of criminal philistinism, they have tarmac-ed over the cobbles in WeserStr, round the corner from me.

My favourite Berlin building

2011-05-11T14:39:00.000-07:00

It's not in the guidebooks, and others that are (Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt, the StadtBibliothek, Mies Van Der Rohe's Neu Nationalgalerie, the Philharmonik, the International Conference Centre, the Berlin Conference Centre, the Czech Embassy, the Fernsehturm) run it close, but this is called the Bierpinsel (Pear Cone), a derelict motorway cafeteria above a U-bahn station turned art gallery.

Its panels were originally a rusty magenta - here bastardised in the name of a community art project.

Architects: Ralf Schueler and Ursulina Schueler-Witte. Opened 1976.

Below is one shot of the base of the tower and U-bahn station.

Axel Springer, the Berlin Wall, the plot against Harold Wilson - and Hull

2011-05-11T14:12:00.000-07:00

This is a photograph of a photograph. It shows the headquarters of Axel Springer publisher, the newspaper magnate who owned Germany's Bild (Europe's biggest selling tabloid) and Die Welt (a sober centre-right German broadsheet). Springer, who died in the 1980s, but before the fall of the Wall, is a sort of domestic German Rupert Murdoch - owner of the country's biggest tabloid and broadsheet, friend and patron of politicians, espouser of free-market causes, the rights of Israel, and Atlantacism.

Springer built his shiny gold tower block right up against the Berlin Wall in 1968, as a beacon to the oppressed proletariat in the East. I work in a building next door, and hadn't realised until I saw this photograph quite *how* close to the Wall he built it. Chutzpah? 10 out of 10.

In fact, the DDR authorities were moved to build a series of apartment blocks on Leipziger Strasse, directly across No Man's Land, to block the view of this beacon of capitalism from East Berlin.

Springer is also famous for the riots his rightwing editorials caused during the 1968 uprising in West Germany. There is footage on YouTube of molotov cocktails being thrown against the building, and the street it stands on has now been renamed Rudi Dutschke Strasse in honour of the unarmed German student radical shot and fatally injured by police outside the building.

A couple of years ago, I read Cecil King's diaries. King was the proprieter of the Daily Mirror in its 1960s trend-setting, Wilsonian, Pilger-publishing, White-heat-of-technology, heyday.

He was also a product of Winchester College, and Christchurch, Oxford, a governor of the Bank of England, and a traitor who plotted a coup, with Mountbatten, against the democratically-elected Wilson government.

In his diaries, King recalls travelling to Berlin for the opening of this Springer HQ, at the height of the student disturbances in 1968.

Over drinks Springer tells him, King recalls, that if the worst comes to the worst, Springer has a fast speedboat permanently moored in Hamburg, so if West Germany revolts, he can flee to ... Hull.

British readers of the blog will deduce that Hull was probably not the final destination of Springer's planned escape from the baying mob.

A couple of years ago, at a screening of a documentary about the German student protests of 1968 at the Goethe Institute in London - which featured footage of the reception to open the Springer building - I mentioned this anecdote from King, and got heckled and shouted down by a woman in the audience, accusing me of "James Bond conspiracy theories."

That woman was Astrid Proll - ex-member of the Rotes Armee Faktion (RAF).

Anti-mayoral poster - Berlin style

2011-05-11T14:06:00.000-07:00

The poster reads: "In 8 years, 150,000 flats have been privatised - we are the party of the renter!" and shows Klaus Wowereit, the SPD mayor of Berlin.

Woweriet rules the city state in a coalition with Die Linke: a sort of Red/Deep Red coalition. He is likely to lose his post to the Greens' Renate Kuenast in city elections later this year.

For greater analysis of the sell-off of municipal apartments, and the erosion of rent controls (remember them? I don't.), see my friend Joel Atlas' piece in Tagesspiegel.

May Day: Kreuzberg

2011-05-11T14:01:00.000-07:00

The banner says, in part, "Ein Kommunist Welt Ist Moglich" (A Communist World Is Possible). It says this ever year. Every year, it's as true as it was the previous year.

Gott in Himmel sagt: "Atomkraft? Nein Danke"

2011-05-11T13:59:00.000-07:00

Parish noticeboard at my local Protestant church, Neukoelln

The 1986 West Berlin disco bomb

2011-04-25T12:57:00.001-07:00

La Belle discotheque is long gone (did it ever reopen after the attack?) but this, rather vague, plaque ("several people perished in a bomb attack") marks the spot of the 1986 West Berlin disco terrorist attack, which saw two US servicemen and a Turkish woman die when a explosive concealed in a bag went off near the dancefloor at 1.45am on April 5, 1986.

More than 200 people injured, and 15 days later Reagan ordered the fly-by bombings of "Mad Dog's" Tripoli and Benghazi.

Although the Bedtime for Bonzo star immediately blamed Libya, it wasn't until the fall of the Wall that documents were found linking Tripoli to the attack, and even then a trial didn't take place until 1997. Four defendents were found guilty and sentenced in 2001.

They are due to be freed between 2013 and 2015 - which could provide an Alex Salmond moment for Merkel, or her successor, considering current relations.

It's on Hauptstrasse, a trafficky, bland and slighty shabby thoroughfare in the old West, although it was possibly more upmarket in the days of the Wall. A downmarket C&A-style department store is on the site now.

Laundrette, Kreuzberg

2011-04-22T12:51:00.000-07:00

(It's a Miele, by the way).

Denglish

2011-04-22T12:49:00.000-07:00

Englische Fruehstuck (English Breakfast), Kreuzberg-style. Try asking for this at your local greasy spoon.

Wanted

2011-04-22T12:48:00.000-07:00

There appear to be "Wanted" posters of me all over town

May Day is coming

2011-04-22T12:42:00.000-07:00

Munich: Olympic Village (1971)

2011-03-14T15:57:00.001-07:00

Munich: HypoVerein Bank HQ (1975-81)

2011-03-14T15:53:00.000-07:00

Munich: BMW HQ (1968-71)

2011-03-14T15:48:00.000-07:00

The BMW logo was temporarily removed from the building during the 1972 Olympics - the Olympic Park is across the road - so no advertising logos sullied the elan of the occasion.

Munich: Fuhrerbau (c.1936?)

2011-03-14T15:27:00.000-07:00

The Fuhrerbau (Leader's Building) where Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich Agreement, 1.30am September 30, 1938, giving the Third Reich Czechoslovakia in return for peace in our time.
Now the Hochschule fur Musik (Music Academy).

The UK's Onshore Oil Industry

2011-03-07T11:49:00.000-08:00

BP's nodding donkey oil well at Studland Bay, Isle of Purbeck. Britain's oldest (only?) continuous onshore oil facility. Produces 80 barrels of oil per day, from 530 metres below sea level, stored in two tanks, collected by twice-weekly tanker. At today's OPEC price of c.108 dollars a barrel, that's 3.15 million dollars a year revenue.
Downwind (the donkey's arse's end) was a distinct whiff of petrol.

(West) Berlin balconies. Spring.

2011-03-07T11:44:00.000-08:00

Journalism: Chris Nolan - the student film-maker

2011-03-07T11:33:00.000-08:00

Bit of a diversion into the day job, here.
Piece I wrote for the Guardian's film site on the Chris Nolan I knew at UCL film society nearly 20 years ago - before Following, let alone Memento, Batman or Inception. An incredibly focused, talented, self-possessed individual. (The headline is the Guardian's. I hope the piece makes clear we were simply two people whose paths crossed as students and budding film-makers - they were others who knew him far better.)

Freie Universitaet (1967): Candilis, Josik, Woods

2011-02-24T13:09:00.000-08:00

Reclad in 2006. Known as the rotlaube (rustbucket) for its Coreten steel facade. Very hospital-like interiors. Free access.

Glimpses of Gatwick Past

2011-02-20T14:33:00.000-08:00

Inspired by Will Wiles post raging at Global Infrastructure Patners (GIP), the owners of the formerly state-owned Gatwick Airport, decision to replace the "railway-age" Helvetica font from public signage with a naff "bespoke" lets-rent-a-DVD-of-Leonardo-di-Caprio's-Catch-Me-If-You-Can-chic font, I went looking for archaeological remains of the original Yorke, Rosenberg and Mardall white-tiled 1960s Gatwick.

The quality of these photos is abysmal, because in 2011's Airstrip One, one can't linger taking pictures of crucial transport infrastructure. Or Original Cornish Pasties franchise outlets. In no order, a seemingly original clock from above disused luggage reclaim conveyor belt number 6, the soon-to-be-deceased Helvetica fire shutter, and various attempts to capture the Yorke, Rosenberg and Mardall "we never cut a tile" aesthetic at the ticket foyer of Gatwick Airport train station. Sorry, "Your Gatwick" airport train station. "Your Gatwick" as in, you paid for it, and it's been sold to the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and South Korean National Pension Service.

Telephone Thing (apologies to Mark E. Smith)

2011-02-20T14:30:00.001-08:00

Spotted Kreuzberg Troedl shop, February 2011

Smoke Your Ganja Raw

2011-02-20T14:24:00.000-08:00

Spotted Kreuzberg, February 2011. First saw this flyposter sticker in Treptower Park, November 2004. No website, no contact address. The Campaign for a Higher Meditation's advice appears to be entirely altruistic.

Socialist Mural, Karl-Marx Allee, Berlin

2011-02-09T15:01:00.000-08:00

Communist fountain

2011-02-02T15:10:00.000-08:00

Ruin: Ulrich Muether's 1968 Exhibition Hall, Magdeburg

2011-02-02T15:01:00.000-08:00

Karstadt - DDR department store

2011-02-02T14:56:00.000-08:00

Communist wall #4

2011-02-02T14:51:00.000-08:00

CCTV warning, Hauptbahnhof, Magdeburg

2011-02-02T14:48:00.000-08:00

Note old-skool VHS tape heads, cable. Almost cine-8 hipster CCTV

Magdeburg, Haupstadt Sachsen-Anhalt

2011-02-02T14:39:00.000-08:00

The double-decker Birthday Express

The Hoff, Baywatch and the Baltic

2010-12-31T05:36:00.000-08:00

David Hasselhof is one of the reasons I gave up learning German at school - to my current cost and disadvantage.
At the relevant period, c.1986-89, David Hasselhof was "Big In Germany". My taste was for puritanically guitar-based indie. Black jeans offset with black jumpers. Duck-arsed perms, snow-washed denim, and middle-of-the-road power ballads were everything I despised, and Germany - in the shape of The Hoff (as he wasn't yet know) - embraced. Rumours circulated the UK that the hairy-chested pretend coastguard could *actually sell out stadiums of people wanting to hear him sing.*
So, after GCSEs, me and German went our separate ways. I seem to remember - and I'm not going to Google this - that Bruce Willis' Under The Boardwalk then went on to be Number One in Germany for months, proving my general prognosis about the FRG.
Meanwhile, behind the Iron Curtain, in the northern DDR dockyard city of Rostock, this building had gone up, in 1979. It's the Stadthalle Rostock, built in a rather isolated location on the ringroad behind the main train station, on a plaza called something socialist and fraternal, like "Concourse of the Friendships of the Peoples."
In February 2011, David Hasselhof will play a sell-out gig there. Rostock in February is about as far, in climate and distance, from California as you can go and still be in the Western world. The city lost tens of thousands of heavy industry jobs as the shipyards shrank after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Poverty (relative) and racism (overt) are rife. Unemployment is only not as high as might be expected because many call centres opened. There is no minimum wage in Germany, but if there was, that's what the ex-shipbuilding engineers are now on. Or Haertz IV. It's fair to guess that very, very few former Wessies have emigrated to Rostock since 1989. So the residents (who do share California's propensity to suntans, albeit of a more orange, sunbed, flavour) are Ossies. Or the children of Ossies.
These hard-up, working class, ex-communists, anti-communists, non-communists ands children of communists are the paying customers that keep Hasselhof's fortune, and his remote, bizarre, Californian celebrity lifestyle on the road.

They look out at the Baltic, but they see Baywatch, California and the capitalist dream.

(Of course, no doubt the Rostockers enjoy getting pissed too.)

Bradford Permanent Building Society

2010-12-30T03:29:00.000-08:00

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bradford_timeline/5177959372/

Built 1973, architect John Tempest, my Dad. Later Yorkshire Building Society. Now standing empty.

Communist wall #3

2010-12-29T15:05:00.000-08:00

Dispensing machine sells rubbers

2010-12-20T06:05:00.000-08:00

You see a lot of these around Berlin - there were three within a 500-metre radius of my old apartment. Not selling Cadburys, Marlboros (you need an age-proof token for fags in Berlin) or strawberry-and-lager flavoured condoms, a la the Wetherspoons back home, but a variety of inner tubes in either presta or schraeder valves. 6 euros a time. Note also the air pump hanging at the side. Free air.

Capitalism doesn't do sculptures like this#2

2010-12-17T14:07:00.000-08:00

Communist wall #2

2010-12-17T12:24:00.000-08:00

Communist wall

2010-12-17T12:21:00.000-08:00

Lights. Acolytes.

2010-12-17T12:17:00.000-08:00

Capitalism doesn't do sculptures like this

2010-11-29T13:08:00.000-08:00

Rostock, Nov 26 2010