personal bauhaus -1

Ok ok, it’s been a bit too flowery around here in the latest posts. So let’s go back to the roots of our own private interpretation of “Prussian Altbau grows bauhaus with a little help from recycling and IKEA”.

In our flat we had excellent raw materials to work with. First of all, a century-old oak herringbone parquet, restored to its glorious beauty. Oh, if you could hear the sound of it!

The flat has indeed great bones, namely its 4-metres-high walls. After lots, lots of research, we chose a warm shade of gray, in order to make the cold North-German winter light seem warmer. I agree with Bruno Taut: even under the strictest bauhaus constraints, white in Germany is treacherous, it can turn to “gray-ish white” very easily. White is abbacinante in Italy (can’t find the proper word in English…light so strong it makes you blind), but we feared it may turn into psychiatric-hospital mood under the Berlin sky…especially on bare walls.

I quite like the way – in Germany, mainly – wood is being refrigerated by adding stainless steel. I don’t know if this is quintessential to bauhaus, but it definitely is for me. This is the rationale for the IKEA table with stainless steel U-shaped legs, and for the cantilevered chairs found at a second-hand store, little Marcel Breuer mongrels with a couple of Wassily genes. You saw them dusty in previous posts.

Talking about stainless steel, MeinMann is still skeptical on this solution, maybe as a character in a novel in the ’30s who described this furniture as “dentists’ style”. We well see how we get along with these objects.

And the french doors? They match our Prussian beautiful bow-window, the stucco on the ceiling, all things which are so un-bauhaus. But even during bauhaus, people didn’t throw in the bin their Jugendstil apartments. The flats transitioned from one style to another. The Altbau was born under Historicismus, was raised under Jugendstil, but I like to imagine that it became adult and independent only with the bauhaus, in the ’30s.

Berlin, the anxious punk…

Now that’s what I call a well-documented analysis. The Irish Times reports on Berlin, the fractured metropolis. The anxious punk?

Graveyard of ambitions?

A collection of individuals pursuing their interesting paths outside national ghettos?

A local management culture difficult to grasp?

A city attracting people who don’t know what to do next?

Or a place where – if you know what you want and fight for it in an equally disciplined way as you would do in Paris or London – you can find an unparalleled quality of living (after gray-sky vaccination)?

Find out…

The fractured metropolis?

THE IRISH IN BERLIN

Is Berlin a capital of creativity, as the hype would have you believe, or rather a slacker’s paradise, where every day is a Saturday? DEREK SCALLY talks to some Irish immigrants who have managed to forge careers there.

JOHN LENNON ONCE remarked that life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans. For many Irish, the German capital is a place they never intended to make their home but, to stretch Lennon’s logic, they have found Berlin to be a fine spot to live while making other arrangements.

Boring, tedious, envious or just plain lazy?

“Gentrification has hit Prenzlauer Berg at a speed unmatched even by the most tarted-up quarters of other European capitals. Ninety per cent of the district’s apartments have been vacated by their original East German inhabitants since the Wall’s fall. They have been replaced by a generation of young Germans who have arrived as rich invaders from the West. The standing joke in Prenzlauer Berg is that the borough is populated exclusively by Swabians from wealthy south-western Germany. Like most jokes, it contains an element of truth”.

This morning I found this article on my virtual shore, the Google tide brought it from The Independent.

A flavor on the pros and cons of gentrified Prenzl’berg. A panoramique on the former-DDR Länder demographic, economic and neo-nazi problems. All in all not so original. Frankly, I expected something better from the Independent. This piece feels stale, like a “Panorama” article, full of clichés and made of rechauffé themes.

Or is it just envious? To me, the british society doesn’t seem so “full or harmony” or heavenly homogeneous in terms of economic and social opportunities. Heathrow airport or some stops of the Tube don’t even evoke “poor but sexy” thoughts like some rusty rail platforms in OstBerlin. And there was never an iron curtain in between Putney and Islington.

If you want to read articles criticizing Germany, read the German press…it’s more interesting. Be it on the debate on prams in Prenzl’berg. Or the unemployment rate in Mecklemburg. Or Rostock gangs. Or the Swabian invasion.

gazing through green glass

For some reason I am attracted to green glass. Not broken Heineken bottles, which sometimes on friday nights you can find right on your bike track in Berlin. I find watching light filtering through green glass mesmerizing.

Countless green tumblers are in our roman cupboards. And plates, of a nice emerald green. To me, drinking fresh tap water (great in Rome) in a green glass makes it even more refreshing.

And then I love books. And bookshelves. And Berlin’s green forests and lakes.

The consequence is pretty obvious. I fell for green glass also in Berlin.

My first finding was this pretty kitsch fruit-bowl, now detournée en vide-poches, bought with the objective to force myself to put keys, USB-key, purse, phone, japanese note pad and S-bahn tickets all in the same place. In a new flat it is just so easy to disseminate key objects (keys!) around and forget them since there is not yet a gravitational law of essentials. Two euros, at my favorite russian flea market. DDR design for the masses. The (other) lives of objects.

Once again, I admit it’s quite fleuri but you are now familiar with my personal theory on “occasional splashes of color – giving the mood of the season – costing next to nothing – and which have a practical use”. Fruit bowl, key bowl, you name it.

The second finding…you will find out about in August! It has something to do with a previous post on Salone del Mobile bookshelves, love for crafted items (like those DDR benches),  green glass  of course…and with a little help from our Viktoria-Luise-Platz friends!

stairway to heaven

You may have navigated among my links here on the right hand side, so you know that two of them are dedicated to staircases. One for humans , called Stairporn, and the other for feline friends: Catladder.

I love both blogs and I would like to thank Stairporn for publishing, in his stunningly beautiful new website, also one of my pre-digital era pictures, which means a lot to me…a staircase in Tangier.

I am not a good photographer but the thought of this staircase kept me awake all night back in 1998 and the emotion of it is still vivid. My friend Lys and I had just arrived in Tangier after having hitch-hiked the Rif all the way down from Chefchaouen to the Mediterranean and the atmosphere of this old hotel where we moored was amazing. I could not sleep all night at the thought of this stunning vertigo view. At 5 am, as soon as light started to filter through, I left the room we shared and ventured out in the deserted hotel to take this picture.

As I was returning to the room, I spotted a very elderly waiter, a Philippe Noiret lookalike, retrieving his bow tie from his pocket while keeping the tray on balance…and adjusting it carefully before knocking at our door. He served our breakfast with infinite grace in the once grand, now shabby but dignified hotel room…

love at first light

I had been looking – unsuccessfully so far  – for bauhaus lamps during my latest weekends in Berlin. But this time round I badly needed to get some lamps in the living room. We need enlightment during our berliner weekends…

Unconvinced I went to the IKEA round the corner. I had seen a number of times their lamps offer and nothing really inspired me. Älang looked too late-1990s. Stockholm had nothing to do with the flat and was too shiny. The cone-shaped lamps look too IKEA to feel real. I think IKEA has some great pieces of design, but I don’t want to feel like I’m living in a catalogue.

So I thought to get some cheap paper Noguchi-style lamps, such as Storm, in order to solve the problem with an emergency solution and look for proper lamps with more time on my hands.

But then, I came across a new design, which was not yet on the paper catalogue I had perused on the plane. It was the perfect product! Heavy it was, made of metal, mat finish, and that sounded good…with a”capsized wok” shape which I found very functional and yes, very bauhaus.

The other bauhaus thing is the dimmer. A beautiful, functional, simple steel button very visible and easy to find, not those hideous plastic sliding boxy switches getting in the way on the floor (even classy Artemide makes such mis-bauhaus mistakes), or those very anglo nasty little hard levers hidden too close to the lightbulb.

So these lamps did respond to a few basic bauhaus rules of thumb, and I got the standing and the table versions. In black. Drop-dead gorgeous. Almost broke my back carrying them around in the store but hey I had found the perfect lamps!

The quality of light is golden and warm, which complements the masculine and serious shape of the lamp. The designers A. Nilsson/H. Preutz/T. Eliasson in my opinion wanted definitely to honour the 80th anniversary of bauhaus with this product. And even if this is not true, it shows that sometimes, waiting for the right encounter pays back. Love at first light.

PS

IKEA arbitrageurs: this lamp is more expensive in Germany than in Italy. We discussed on this blog already about price discrepancies at IKEA and so far I had spotted that kitchens and curtains were much more expensive in Italy. Probably for lamps the elasticity of demand is lower in Germany than in Italy?

pink tea in Berlin

June in Berlin and spring is in full bloom…orange blossoms, peonies, colors fill the streets, the balconies and even the store window displays. Stunning color combinations at my favourite flower store in Bayerischer Platz – crimson red peonies and yellow daisies! daring! – but beautiful peonies are a temptation also in the not alluring light at Nolle’s U-bahn station…you simply can’t resist them!

Another thing I cannot avoid is my local flea market, so this time the temptation to dive in the green-pink mood was too strong, and the DDR 1960’s cups were simply too cute to be left there on the stalls!

I know, I know. This isn’t either very prussian or bauhaus. But hey, it’s spring…I would NEVER have a flowerly Laura Ashley-esque wallpaper, but I’m all for ephemeral  splashes of color, especially in the bedroom! Some flowers, a cushion. Just to remember what season we’re in.

So this time I wanted to take inspiration from Li Edelkoort’s matches of flowers & objects, and, even if a little predictable, I did like playing around with tea and peonies…and a little pink, the color of balconies this spring in Schöneberg.

Now we can go back to rigorous and linear bauhaus things…in the living room.

bookshelf in Goltzstrasse

Who knows if the italian designer Radaelli drew the inspiration for his “bookshape” bookshelf from this Goltzstrasse shelf artisanal menuisier?

It is true that his shelf rang a bell with something I had spotted in a second-hand store recently…it’s still there, waiting for me…this time I could not get my hands on it but during my next weekend in Berlin I will go and get it!