The war on patina

[imomus]

Yesterday I really fell in love with Berlin again. I saw the Berlin Biennial, an event I thought I'd missed (it's been extended until June 5th). The art was pretty good, but in a sense it was upstaged by the city itself, and by patina. Curators Cattelan, Gioni and Subotnick found all sorts of spaces up and down Mitte's Auguststrasse; a cargo container, a gilded ballroom, several private apartments, some galleries, some post office stables... and a former Jewish School for Girls.



Here the patina was amazing. The art was arranged alongside communist-era didactic displays of notable Jews, peppy 70s and 80s graffiti, peeling paint and uneven plaster work, tiles and a vast range of fake brick, fake wood and floral wallpapers. Oh, and murals featuring Bertolt Brecht.

After seeing the biennial I went flathunting, ending up in Neukoln -- the only area where I could find decor shabby enough to satisfy my craving for patina, which is, finally, character, personality, history, texture. It's a familiar Berlin battle: how can you reach an area before the developers do, and how can you cling to a friendly bit of texture before some anally clean Germans define it as "dirt" and reduce it to a series of utterly bland, clean, neutral surfaces? "Sanierte", they call this in the lingo; re-organized, sanitized. Given Germany's history, the phrase has a sinister ring to it.

Berlin seems riven between the people who want historical monuments like the Volkspalast preserved, patina intact, and those who want them sanitized or razed. In the case of the former socialist "people's palace", the battle has been lost. It strikes me that this is also a battle between people who want expansion and economic development, and people who want characterful decay, decline, and a "slow life" somewhat protected from market forces. In other words, it relates to yesterday's question about demographics and the management of population decline.



In my last days in New York I visited the Parsons design department degree show. There was lots of excellent work, stuff about recycling and community-oriented design (a portable stoop people could sit on, for instance). The worst piece I saw, though, was a Communication Design piece by Hector Diaz called "The Effects of Spatial Design in New York Public High Schools".

"For the past 5 to 10 years," Diaz explained, "there has been a concern for students attending some New York City High Schools due to small graduation classes, low attendance and a lack of educational interest. My thesis conveys how through environmental design, combined with architecture, color and typography, students can unconsciously change the way their education is pursued."

Showing before-and-after pictures of a place very like the Former Jewish Girls' School, Diaz proposed changing a lovely, fusty building predominantly coloured in earth tones into a zingy electric blue-tinted educational freeway service station, complete with coffee franchise-style "motivational" graphics. I found his whole design-for-growth schtick dismal, sad and aesthetically offensive; a war on patina. He'll probably do very well.

Comments

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

The modernist strip-lit, barren, plastic vision of the future is bankrupt. No one wants banality multiplied on that scale. New futures, please.

Eighteenth-century houses were more advanced in their construction in one sense: the brick and mortar were softer, more porous, and would "breathe", dissipating moisture and mold. People often now unwittingly destroy these buildings when they "repair" the mortar with modern cement, which is notoriously non-porous and relatively impermeable to water. So when the house continues to breathe and settle naturally, the "hard zone" caused by the cement with stay in place, and crack the old english or flemish laid brickwork to pieces.

Organisms need organisms to live in.

Plants. More plants!

[freesurfboards.livejournal.com]

I think that modern buildings are made not to last - since we are living in a time of plenty it makes more business sense to build something which will eventually degrade and then build it again 30 years down the road. Most people know little about the construction about their own homes so they don't know the difference.
The trouble is, what happens when this time of plenty doesn't last?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, that's certainly the case in Japan: buildings there are so flimsy because

a) earthquakes are half-expected at any moment.

b) Buddhism stresses the impermanence of all things.

c) The land the structure stands on is always worth much more than the structure itself, which is easily remade according to the new land-owner's specifications.

d) Few planning regulations or conservation orders to speak of.

It's always interesting to me how easily patina can be re-applied, though. For instance, kudzu can achieve pretty much instant patina. I'm just waiting for them to grow kudzu on the facade of Omotesando Hills... (http://imomus.livejournal.com/148183.html)

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Problem is, once you introduce kudzu, you have it forever. It is such an aggressive plant that it flattens out the variety of species wherever it grows. Better to go with a variety of ivys and plants, each situated on the buildng in accordance with the amount of sunlight they require--a building that hosts a small ecosystem. A cascading hydroponic glass surface covered in plants would be wonderful. Bog gardens inside of the sunny concourses would provide warmth from the decomposing plant matter in the peat.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

I've said this here in the past, but I find that most modernist structures are designed in a vacuum, and do not take into consideration the basic fact that all things decay and degenerate. This should be anticipated at the beginning design stages. Most modernist structures start to look like cheap, discarded toys soon after they have been completed. A more organic mindset should be embraced, the result being buildings that take in the natural processes around them, and age gracefully.

[desant012.livejournal.com]

Organic? Nah. Let's lay down gigantic cubes of concrete and put a door in it somewhere - now that's the good stuff.

Permanent schmermanent; it's washable!

[(Anonymous)]

Glass and aluminum age very well (but panina poorly) thanks; it's reglazing 11-ton elements that sneaks a bit in anyhow. In hospitals a peach glazing dye read as errant blood by a dotty director.... So often it's bluish; pearlescent dyes have not been age proven for more than 15 years yet....

It is explicitly a liability (nevermind risk management) function in any of the Americas or other place with burghs, as you like! There was a phase in the '90s where glass fronts facing a selection of garden elements, with pas-relief panels was taking off, and too reliably some amicus ars (with special relevance lent; later discerned to stem from Hell, not Croesus) would find fault:
-Actual clinical, field OR uses, found wanting
-Bas relief, nonetheless discovered editable to distaste of current reviewers (how now; proven complementarity/reversability?)
-General paranoia about passability of dirt and plant material (soak them in feminism and palmolive and call them out?)

Happy playing-through.