What Google Maps Won’t Tell You
Cities are organisms: mutating, shedding, growing, contracting, swallowing, proliferating. You need to be there, be in the present, able to touch the ever evolving architectural surface – the living and breathing skin clasping the façades.
While google maps is a terrific tool to navigate you to almost any location, the satellite snaps give a distorted picture of a cities’ reality. Looking at them, one should simply be reminded what is shown: already shedded layers of skin, buildings deeply drowned in formaldehyde.
Some snapshots to serve as a reminder of the ubiquitous change, to serve as a plea to wander the streets of reality.
Storefront Weserstraße Neukölln
Weserstraße 53. What google portrays as vacancy and decay in 2008, has become one of the liveliest streets in Berlin Neukölln. Weserstraße is illuminated in the evening hours by the glow bursting out the window fronts of numerous small shops and cafés.
Area Around Platoon Kunsthalle Schönhauser Allee
Till the cows come home. Some of the most interesting spaces in Berlin are gaps, the spaces in between spaces. They are potential breading grounds for heterotopias. Just a few years back the gap above was dominated by a graffiti postulating “This city is sold-out!”. As if the city had ears, it listened to the artist’s warning – the vacant lot has been filled with art and a café.
Gärtnerstraße Friedrichshain
Eismanufaktur. As a façade is painted, old interior thrown out, a new use implemented, we can discover something new in the old, adding a flavor to our area’s palate . The city knows how to give us ice-cream out of nothing.
Optimism in Mitte
The Optimistic Store. Reading the city is a good way to make sense of (or at least start thinking about) your surroundings. Though it might not always be as blatant as in the above pictures: a store gone from crumpled to optimistic, it will usually tell you something, if you dare to look close enough.
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