ABANDON ARCHITECTURES

Cocks In Hell

A few days after moving to Berlin, we were in a café in Kreuzberg enjoying what, in hindsight, was an amazing spring. Sitting outdoors with two cappuccinos on the table was already an upgrade in our quality of life, coming from London where sun and good coffee are rare commodities. The terrace was packed with punters, which is so Berlin, it doesn’t matter the time of the day you will always find busy cafés and bars with no apparent rush hours, which makes it difficult to read it as a city (you can even wonder if people work at all).

Half way through our coffee we see this guy approaching riding his bike. He was well built, in his forties, with black jeans, black t-shirt (packet of cigarettes tucked under his sleeve), black motorcycle boots and black shades as if out of The Wild One, riding his bike towards us. You might be wondering how we managed to have such an acute look at him… He was riding a huge chopper bicycle and, although not a Harley, he kept his killer face: very much in his role. Surely he noticed all the crowd looking at him, it almost looked staged, as no cars came for a long time allowing him to pedal through the middle of the road like Brando leading his bunch of misfit tribesmen. As if in slow motion

(the pedalling obviously was not easy on that huge bike) we watched him pass, all heads following his progress until we saw his back… There, written in bold white uppercase Helvetica, it read:

“YOUR MOTHER SUCKS COCKS IN HELL”

And with the same relentless pedalling we watched him, jaws dropping, turn the corner and disappear deep into the neighbourhood. Straight away little nervous looks and smiles were exchanged between adjacent tables, almost as if to leave clear that it was not your mother he was talking about… It had been a fantastic performance. We imagined that he was an artist or a provocateur and that most probably the whole event had been recorded, his timing was so perfect and his audience so well chosen.

At the time we did not know that the acrimonious phrase was an extract from The Exorcist, it was not until few months later that we found out. We were really surprised, as we had seen the movie when we were teenagers in Spain, and surely it is not a phrase that you can easily forget. Then we realised that the movie had been censored (they were still the days before democracy in Spain) and that line was edited out. So, as it happens, the whole situation was all a ‘fortunate’ misreading. As even the t-shirt is not completely un-common (we found a few websites where you can buy them), we guess that this guy was just some bloke who is into his rock’n’roll, movies and bike things who happened to cross by. Dare we say, there was no master plan behind it? But it remains a fantastic statement in our memory, one of those moments of greatness. We are not sure why we are choosing to start this book about design with this particular anecdote, but it feels right because all the elements that made the moment so perfectly memorable were related to design: the bike, the shades, the t-shirt, the quote and (most important of all) our reading of it. But let’s just leave it as it was… something that happened one day in Berlin.

#2 A CHICKEN IN EVERY POT

We have always collected quotes and slogans, they are funny ‘objects’, because as long as they have a minimum of common sense they can be re-contextualised into almost any new situation. And this is how we come across them mostly, re-contextualised, opened to current interpretations, as it was the case with the infamous quote of the introduction to this book. But we also realised that, when aware of their source, the historical context that comes associated with them is almost as powerful as the message itself. In this sense, they are like icebergs floating on the sea of experience.

The idea of creating a piece based on our collection of slogans came about later on, when we were trying to find ways of expressing the idea of superimposed architectures, of how these affect and rule the way we live our lives, and how we manipulate them and redefine their uses according to an ever changing set of circumstances.

A curious example of this could be:

‘A CHICKEN IN EVERY POT, A CAR IN EVERY GARAGE’

which was Herbert Hoover’s 1928 US presidential campaign slogan. At the height of the big recession, this slogan expressed and set a vision for the future of the country, which at the time must have felt almost unobtainable for a large majority of its population. Funnily enough, the slogan found its way to Spain, where it was recycled and adapted by the Franco regime to offer that same vision of wealth: ‘NOT A HOME WITHOUT A STOVE NOR A SPANIARD WITHOUT BREAD’ (a bit downgraded to keep with the realities of the country in the post-war years, and with nationalistic undertones of a fascist government). When reading the original quote now, it is both unavoidable, and ironic, to think that it has managed to become utopian again… Imagine the fight against global warming if we were able to achieve just that: ‘A CAR IN EVERY GARAGE’ rather than the two or three for most average households in the western world.

Treating these bits of text as objects, residual architectures, provided us with manageable materials to play with, assembling them together as ready-mades to generate our own narrative. We put together a list of slogans that had the rhythm of a conversation or a monologue in the style of Beckett’s Not I, where the dogmatic and the sceptical play a game of ‘questions and answers’. The result doesn’t carry a concrete meaning, but is intended to paint a picture that encourages us to question and ultimately ‘abandon architectures’.