BETONBABE .

GREAT SCENE FROM VIER MINUTEN (2006).

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 21:33:12 +0100

GREAT SCENE FROM VIER MINUTEN (2006).

FOUND TODAY IN BERLIN FRIEDRICHSHAIN.

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 21:08:44 +0100

FOUND TODAY IN BERLIN FRIEDRICHSHAIN.

HAUS RUCKER CO. BALLON FÜR 2, 1967

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 20:32:29 +0100

HAUS RUCKER CO.

BALLON FÜR 2, 1967

WOLFGANG FEIERBACH PLASTIC STAIRS, 1968

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 20:25:31 +0100

WOLFGANG FEIERBACH

PLASTIC STAIRS, 1968

WOLFGANG FEIERBACH SYSTEM FG2000, 1968PLASTIC HOUSE

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 20:22:29 +0100

WOLFGANG FEIERBACH

SYSTEM FG2000, 1968
PLASTIC HOUSE

GIAMBATTISTA NOLLI, 1692-1756 MAP OF ROME figure-ground...

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 15:40:56 +0100

GIAMBATTISTA NOLLI, 1692-1756

MAP OF ROME

figure-ground representation of enclosed public spaces as open civic space

SPACE AGE FUTURISM FASHION FROM THE 60s

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 21:59:38 +0100

SPACE AGE FUTURISM FASHION FROM THE 60s

JAMMING THE GENTRIFICATION MACHINE: a manifesto

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 21:01:00 +0100

“A spectre has been haunting Europe since US economist Richard Florida predicted that the future belongs to cities in which the “creative class” feels at home. “Cities without gays and rock bands are losing the economic development race,” Florida writes. Many European capitals are competing with one another to be the settlement zone for this “creative class”. In Hamburg’s case, the competition now means that city politics are increasingly subordinated to an “Image City”. The idea is to send out a very specific image of the city into the world: the image of the “pulsating capital”, which offers a “stimulating atmosphere and the best opportunities for creatives of all stripes”. A local marketing company feeds this image to the media as “the brand Hamburg”. It is flooding the republic with brochures that turn Hamburg into a consistent, socially passified fantasialand with Elbe Philharmonic and table dancing, Blankenese and Schanzenviertel, agency life and art scenes, local Harley Days, gay parades in St. Georg, alternative art spectacles in the “HafenCity”, Reeperbahn festivals, fan miles and Cruise Days. Hardly a week goes by without some tourist mega-event carrying out its “brand-strengthening function.”

We say: Ouch, this is painful. Stop this shit. We won’t be taken for fools. Dear location politicians: we refuse to talk about this city in marketing categories. We don’t want to “position” local neighbourhoods as “colourful, brash, eclectic” parts of town, nor will we think of Hamburg in terms of “water, cosmopolitanism, internationality,” or any other “success modules of the brand Hamburg” that you chose to concoct. We are thinking about other things. About the million-plus square metres of empty office space, for example, or the fact that you continue to line the Elbe with premium glass teeth. We hereby state, that in the western city centre it is almost impossible to rent a room in a shared flat for less than 450 Euro per month, or a flat for under 10 Euro per square meter. That the amount of social housing will be slashed by half within ten years. That the poor, elderly and immigrant inhabitants are being driven to the edge of town by Hartz IV (welfare money) and city housing-distribution policies. We think that your “growing city” is actually a segregated city of the 19th century: promenades for the wealthy, tenements for the rabble.

Which is why we want nothing to do with the ad campaign for “brand Hamburg”. Not that you asked us nicely. On the contrary: it has not escaped our attention that cultural funding for artists has been on the decline for years, and is increasingly linked to local political criteria. Look at Wilhelmsburg, Neue Große Bergstraße and Hafencity: artists are expected to follow the funding money and interim-use opportunities like donkeys after carrots – into development areas that need life injecting into them, or investors or new, more solvent residents. You obviously consider it a matter of course that cultural resources should be siphoned “directly into urban development”, “to boost the city’s image”. Culture should be an ornament for turbo-gentrification. St. Pauli and Schanzenviertel are shining examples of what this means: former working class districts become “trendy areas” and, in no time at all, exclusive residential areas with adjoining party and shopping neighbourhoods, where food and clothing chains like H&M milk the amusement-hungry hordes.

Hamburg’s cultural politics has long formed an integral component of your eventification strategy. Thirty million Euro was poured into the militaria museum of some reactionary prince collector. Over forty percent of cultural spending is earmarked for the “Elb philhamonic Hall”. The cultural authorities have been taken hostage by this 500-million Euro grave which, on completion, will at best be a luxury venue for megastars from the international classical and jazz circus. Quite apart from the fact that the symbolic effect of the Elb Philharmonic Hall is socially cynical to the core: the city is building a “lighthouse project”, which offers the moneyed aristocracy a five-star hotel and 47 exclusive freehold apartments, and a draughty viewing platform for the general public. How telling!

And the “growing city” is making it increasingly hard to find halfway affordable studios and rehearsal rooms, or to run clubs and venues, which are not tied to the dictates of turnover. Which is why we say: the last people who should be talking about “pulsating art and music scenes” are city councillors who essentially leave it up to the tax office to decide what should happen on state property. Whenever money is to be made in the inner city, whenever a park can be squeezed, a building slapped onto a patch of green, or a hole filled, the tax office will toss these “prime locations” onto the property market, to the highest bidder with a minimum of conditions. And the result is a history and culture-free investor city of steel and concrete.

We get the picture: We, the music, DJs, art, film and theatre people, the groovy-little-shop owners and anyone who represents a different quality of life, are supposed to function as a counterpoint to the “city of subterranean parking” (Süddeutsche Zeitung). We are meant to take care of the atmosphere, the aura and leisure quality, without which an urban location has little chance in the global competition. We are welcome. In a way. On the one hand. On the other, the blanket development of urban space means that we - the decoys – are moving out in droves, because it is getting increasingly impossible to afford space here.

In the mean time, dear location politicians, you have noticed that this will have a negative impact on your plans. But then, tragically, your proposed solutions never venture one iota beyond the logic of the corporate city. A freshly printed document from the Senate announces its plan to “develop the future potential of the creative economy by strengthening its competitiveness.” It will set up a “creative agency” to function, among other things as “the point of contact for real estate brokerage”. If you can’t afford to pay the rent, you can get yourself ranked as a “young artist” and consult the creative agency about “temporary usage of empty buildings”. You can even get the rent subsidised if you provide proof of “urgent necessity and relevance for Hamburg as a creative location”. There could not be a more unequivocal definition of the role that “creativity” is supposed to play: namely of profit centre for the “growing city”.

And this is where we draw the line. We don’t want any of the quartier developers’ strategically placed “creative real estate” or “creative yards”. We come from squatted housed, stuffy rehearsal rooms, we started clubs in damp cellars and in empty department stores. Our studios were in abandoned administrative buildings and we preferred un-renovated over renovated buildings because the rent was cheaper. In this city, we have always been on the look out for places that had temporarily fallen off the market – because we could be freer there, more autonomous, more independent. And we don’t want to increase their value now. We don’t want to discuss “how we want to live” in urban development workshops. As far as we are concerned, everything we do in this city has to to with open spaces, alternative ideas, utopias, with undermining the logic of exploitation and location.

We say: A city is not a brand. A city is not a corporation. A city is a community. We ask the social question which, in cities today, is also about a battle for territory. This is about taking over and defending places that make life worth living in this city, which don’t belong to the target group of the “growing city”. We claim our right to the city – together with all the residents of Hamburg who refuse to be a location factor.”

*

The Not in our Name manifesto NION now has several thousand signatories including musicians, actors, writers and painters like Ted Gaier, Daniel Richter, Rocko Schamoni, Peter Lohmeyer and Christoph Twickel.

MEDIA SPREE: THIS IS WHAT’S KILLING BERLIN, PEOPLE.

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 18:01:00 +0100

MEDIA SPREE: THIS IS WHAT’S KILLING BERLIN, PEOPLE.

IKEA VS. SUPERSTUDIOLACK TABLE VS. QUADERNA...

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 00:12:00 +0100

IKEA VS. SUPERSTUDIO
LACK TABLE VS. QUADERNA TABLE

”[…]The Quaderna, a table presented 37 years ago as a utopian statement against design, rebounded a little more than a decade later, becoming the ultimate design icon. Superstudio unconsciously wrote the lyrics for a world-hit and IKEA made it play.

One could say Lack is the ultimate global compromise, the table of all tables. If the United Nations had an assembly to decide what a world table – representing all the cultures and nations on earth – should look like, Lack would be the outcome. It’s square – avoiding the discussions of which culture invented the wheel; it’s average in height – right between the Asian and Western dimensions; it’s endlessly extendable – seating anywhere from one person to all the people in the world.

Lack avoids any reference to any particular culture; it is the common denominator of all tables of all cultures. It is the ultimate success story of the international style, or better: intercultural style, the style of the global middle class. Lack started a world tour and when it’s done, Lack will have globally reformatted the notion of the table. In the end there will be only one table left: Lack.

Lack is unavoidable; it is neither good nor bad, neither ugly nor beautiful and most important of all, it is cheap.

By omitting the Quaderna quadrangles, the table was released from its theoretical burden, it was liberated from the last evidence of culture that Superstudio ‘forgot’ to remove. By doing this, IKEA managed to turn the whole theory of Anti-Design inside out and baptised it, ironically, Lack.”

(via)

VENICE FADING DENSITY

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 23:14:51 +0100

VENICE

FADING DENSITY

JACK LYNN + IVOR SMITH PARK HILL FLATS, SHEFFIELD UK...

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 23:11:22 +0100

JACK LYNN + IVOR SMITH

PARK HILL FLATS, SHEFFIELD UK 1957-61

Smithsons’s Golden Lane meets Corbu’s Unité.
Beautiful brutalism and a clash of scales - bulk versus façades.

>more

I FOUND IT THIS MORNING IN BERLIN CHARLOTTENBURG.

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 22:27:00 +0100

I FOUND IT THIS MORNING IN BERLIN CHARLOTTENBURG.

HOW TO UNGENTRIFY YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD. too sad that it’s...

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 19:25:28 +0100

HOW TO UNGENTRIFY YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD.

too sad that it’s only in german…

DAVID LYNCH UNTITLED, 2004. DISTORTED NUDES DARK SPLENDOR...

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 18:23:00 +0100

DAVID LYNCH

UNTITLED, 2004. DISTORTED NUDES

DARK SPLENDOR EXHIBITION 11/22/2009 - 03/21/2010
@ MAX ERNST MUSEUM IN BRÜHL, GERMANY

STAN ALLEN DIAGRAMS OF FIELD CONDITIONS, 1996 “All grids...

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 23:40:53 +0100

STAN ALLEN

DIAGRAMS OF FIELD CONDITIONS, 1996

“All grids are fields, but not all fields are grids. One of the potentials of the field is to redefine the relation between figure and ground. If we think of the figure not as a demarcated object read against a stable field, but as an effect emerging from the field itself - as moments of intensity, as peaks or valley within a continuous field - than it might be possible to imagine figure and field as more closely allied. (…)”

R.I.P. DAUL KIM / May 31, 1989–Nov 19, 2009 (via)

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:48:24 +0100

R.I.P. DAUL KIM / May 31, 1989–Nov 19, 2009

(via)

MYONG HO LEE TREE #3, 2007PHYSICAL ISOLATION AND VISUAL...

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 10:46:25 +0100

MYONG HO LEE

TREE #3, 2007
PHYSICAL ISOLATION AND VISUAL CONFIRMATION

(via)

SYLVANO BUSSOTTI RHIZOME

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 20:11:27 +0100

SYLVANO BUSSOTTI

RHIZOME

(ARCHITECT UNKNOWN) STENS HUS »more

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 18:12:00 +0100

(ARCHITECT UNKNOWN)

STENS HUS

»more