Disturbance At The Hejduk House

(Image of John Hejduk's Charlottenstrasse Housing, via)

There's a sad story unfolding over at Architecture In Berlin regarding John Hejduk's Kreuzberg housing block, which is currently subject to a horrendous 'refurbishment'. Somehow the current owners/developers have managed to transform Hejduk's highly enigmatic design into the kind of generic crap so correctly despised by Bad British Architecture. The images below illustrate the demolition job, complete with ubiquitous external render system and jaunty Ribena coloured balconies.

I remember visiting the buildings when I lived in Berlin in the mid-'90's. I was going through a fairly heavy Hejduk phase at the time (despite the poetry) and had just bought his Collapse of Time and Mask of Medusa books from the architecture bookshop in Kreuzberg just around the corner. They seemed utterly unique, really very peculiar but also beautiful in a spartan and austere sort of way. They were, perhaps, closest to someone like Aldo Rossi in their pared down simplicity and their daring lack of formal or expressionist bravado. I also liked them for daring not to be terribly exciting, at least not in the way that architects conventionally strive to be.

I've also always liked their anthropomorphic qualities, being something of a sucker for an architectural 'face' (see the alternately gurning and grinning facades of Islington Square) and the way the strange upside-down-funnel window shades and boxy balconies give the facade an air of Edwin Lutyens meets The Fat Controller. They are cartoon-like without being in the least bit 'fun' and are (or at least were) painted in a bracingly un-groovy shade of green.

In short they never seemed to fit in, either to the Kleihues endorsed Berlin block typology or the declamatory expressionism of Liebeskind et al. Instead, they evolved out of the idiosyncratic language of Hejduk's Berlin Masque series, a series of objects endowed with narrative characteristics. The strange menagerie of forms inhabiting Hejduk's world were like characters from some archetypal community, people represented by Heath Robinson-esque machines and semi-figurative forms.


(John Hejduk, Berlin Masque, 1983)

No doubt there are legitimate reasons for the refurbishment (rattly windows, cold apartments, cracking in the render etc.) although nothing justifies the deeply horrible way in which it's being done. Having argued the case before against preserving buildings in aspic, and for the legitimate and creative re-use of them through DIY, I might sound a little hypocritical here becoming a champion of preservation. But there's a big difference, I think, between the freedom of people to adapt their own houses over time (and avoid the tasteful admonishments of architects and English Heritage in the process) and developers cheaply and insensitively fucking-up an architecturally distinguished building.

There are more pictures and descriptions of the refurbishment work here and you can join a Save The Hejduk houses Facebook group here. There are also two other Hejduk projects in Berlin, including this one in Tegel, known in Hejduk's personal mythology as the House For Two Brothers.

Finally, just in case all this sounds like armchair architectural tourism at the expense of anyone actually living in Hejduk's design, there is an eloquent defence of them from a former resident posted over at Slab.

To The Birds

(Ron Onions' Pigeon Loft, Albany)

I've always loved allotments and, in particular, the little sheds that are built on them. These are artful assemblages of as-found building components; old doors, windows and timber panels lashed together to make hybridised, miniature houses.


(Joe Bridges's Racing Loft, Timsbury, UK)

The same strain of home made ad-hocism exists in the world of the pigeon loft only with the added interest of the obsessive pigeon fancier thrown in. The photographs accompanying this post are taken from here - a South Western Australian pigeon fancier's (who knew?) website, cataloguing lofts from around the world.


(Graham Britton's Garden Loft, Newborough, UK.)

They are a lovely collection, a group of miniature buildings ranging from the almost Miesian simplicity of the one at the top of this post (owned by the fabulously named Ron Onions) through Mittel European style chalets to the (slightly decrepit) LA poolhouse style loft below.


(Fred Thompson's Poolside Loft, Western Aust.)

There is a strong sense that the lofts are far more expansive and luxurious than required. They are clearly an expression of the owners obsessive love of racing pigeons and the dedication it takes to train them. In the world of the pigeon fancier the birds are the 'talent' and these lofts are their Bel Air mansions. They're a far cry from the terrace rooftop lofts of the Northern England stereotype anyway, and the term loft is a bit of a misnomer. These are houses in their own right.


(Advanced Pigeon Loft diagram, Via)

The site also contains detail of each fancier's dietary and training regime should you be interested. Each one has a personal profile offering an insight into a remarkable world of obsessive feeding patterns and slightly obscene sounding terminology ("widowhood cocks"). Like most hobbies it is a sort of parallel universe, one where humans build houses for birds to live in that are quite probably a lot nicer than their own.

(Joe Baker's Racing Loft, Hereford, UK)

Farrow and Ballification

Farrow and Ball Paint Swatch

Ordinary things contain the greatest mysteries, someone once wrote. Yes, and the strongest ideologies. One of the things that makes English Heritage’s urban gentrification guide (see previous post) so odious is the way it assumes a position of complete normality, as if no one could possibly argue with its premise. And yet it represents a very specific cultural position behind which lurks an intersection of taste, class and politics.

The obsessive desire for preserving particular aspects of our built heritage (or rather certain versions of it) is, paradoxically, a recent thing. English Heritage itself was set up in 1983 with wider powers than previous national conservation bodies. Membership of the National Trust has trebled since 1981, growing to 3.5million by 2007. Both these institutions represent a marked shift in our attitudes to heritage since the early 1980's, a situation that parallels Thatcherism's rejection of the post war welfare state and the technological optimism of the 1960's.


Using paint to brighten an exterior, taken from the Reader's Digest DIY Manual.

If you look at interior design and DIY books from the late 1960's and '70’s one of the things that strikes you is the lack of interest in preserving the original features and historic detail in Victorian/Edwardian houses. The 1974 edition of the Reader’s Digest DIY Manual (a fine thing and about the same size as a Victorian terrace) for instance happily suggests ways to place MDF panels over old mouldings, rip out Victorian fire places and paint garishly over exterior brickwork (usually in dark brown and/or orange). Apart from a certain invigorating lack of taste the manual is significant in illustrating the way that attitudes to historic architecture have changed over the years.


Transforming A Victorian Home to Suit the '70's, taken from the Reader's Digest DIY Manual.

The manual suggests in its own how-could-you-possibly-argue-with-this way for a different concept of living in traditional housing than English Heritage's interactive gentrifier. Completely un-hungup on notions of authenticity, nothing could have been further from the mind of the mid-‘70’s home improver than unearthing and fetishising period features. Lowered ceilings, conversation pits, T&G cladding and hammocks (for some reason) predominate.


How To Improve a Victorian Hallway, taken from the Reader's Digest DIY Manual

The section on refurbishing a Victorian hallway is particularly salutary. With an admirable lack of deference the manual suggests removing every feature that might be found desirable today: timber mouldings, high ceilings, original paneling. Elsewhere, pebble dashing, oversized dormer windows and other crimes against English Heritage's taste dictats are described in a series of lovely 'how to' diagrams.

Ultimately though English Heritage's sanitised version of the urban streetscape with its heritage paint shades and expensive bread shops is as historically suspect as any other era's. For all its assumed sensitivity it is ultimately more about a certain kind of pervasive middle class aspiration than it is about conserving the past. It's just that right now the two things have converged.

More Rocket Baroque

I've been meaning to link to this excellent essay by Naomi Stead for a while, since being alerted to it via Things magazine. Things quite rightly pointed out my ignorance of Reyner Banham's essay on the "Rocket-baroque" phase of the ice cream van when writing my previous post on them. 

Stead's essay on Banham looks at the relationship between his infatuation with ephemeral products of pop culture and his status as an architectural historian. She explores a number of extremely pertinent issues to do with the transient nature of design journalism (and even more so now, blog writing) and the aspirations to timelessness of the historian. Most intriguingly she suggests that it was Banham's immersion in the here-and-now, the seemingly throw-away quality of his prodigious journalistic output, that made him such an important historian.

Banham's interest in ice cream vans* lay in their seeming invisibility to design critics. His attempt to trace the "Rocket baroque" phase of their stylistic development was part of an ongoing project to bring a critical sensibility to everyday objects that generally went overlooked. Ice cream vans are part of a vast landscape of commercial objects that are designed and manufactured away from the glare of art and design culture.

These objects were therefore denied a history, a history that Banham's critical writing was instrumental in uncovering. It was Banham's interest in the objects that resulted from the intersection of pop culture, consumerism and technology - rather than high-art architecture - and his attempt to develop a critical language for looking at them that made him such an interesting and pertinent writer. 

Whilst the outlandish and grotesque designs of custom car owners are hardly invisible, they do exist outside any accepted realm of 'proper' design. Or proper design criticism. In comparison to ice cream vans even they are a marginal enthusiasm, a narrow genre for the most part equally oblivious to notions of good design or, especially, good taste. For which, if for no other reason, they should be celebrated. 

Banham probably wouldn't have approved of the technological redundancy of these vehicles, or, perhaps, their limited, elitist appeal either. Certainly they test the notion of functionality to its limits, some of them only just about capable of being driven and only then to the next prize show. In this sense they are very interesting, 'pure' expressions of design free of commercial or functional constraint, despite their bastardised quality. Classic car shows are pedigree competitions for mongrel design.

Despite the owner's claims to originality and the cliched rhetoric of freedom and self-expression that runs through the custom car world, they are in fact all developed within tight aesthetic constraints from which deviation is frowned upon. And they are un-changing. Like corn dollies or crochet they are an art form that is not moving forward. 

The designs are based on a limited number of types: the elongated limo, the jacked up old timer and the dragster recur. As do the flame paint jobs, lavish amounts of chrome and outlandish projections of the male sexual imagination that adorn them.

Despite, or because of, this they are also fabulous objects, fusions of 50's comic book art, pseudo-medievalism and Rococo ornament. Like the dogs at Crufts they are bred to the point of perversity and beyond. And like dog breeding, along with tattooing and fantasy art, custom cars are, ultimately, a design backwater, a sub-cult with their own incrementally evolving language. A bit like architecture then in some ways.

So, below is a brief photo-essay - partly in tribute to Banham's fabulous Rocket Baroque - of the custom car vernacular. All photos are from this site.

* See his essay Sundae Painters, in A Critic Writes.