AA - An Ordinary City

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AN ORDINARY CITYAuthor(s): William FirebraceSource: AA Files, No. 22 (Autumn 1991), pp. 66-68Published by: Architectural Association School of ArchitectureStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29543757Accessed: 19-08-2014 20:25 UTC

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AN ORDINARY CITYWilliam Firebrace

The Hausmeister hands you a key. It has no handle but consists ofa metal bar with an identical flange at either end. It operates thelocks in the two doors from the street into the courtyard. You place

one end of the key in the keyhole, turn the lock, push open the doorand pass into the hall. You pass the key through the lock so that thesecond flange engages with the lock mechanism and you relock thedoor. The

keycan t be removed from the lock without first

beingpassed through the door. You can t open the door without also

having to relock it. You can t be on the inside without consciouslylocking others outside.

Sometimes, sitting inyour room, you hear the faint sound of a voice

intoning. The sound is so low that at first you are not sure that it

really is a voice ? it could be the sound of a machine or the rattleof the elevated railway. It continues for about an hour and, justwhen you are used to it, it stops, leaving the sense that somethingismissing. One day the courtyard is filled with Turkish men and

boys. You realize that they have emerged from a small door on theother side of the courtyard, a door you had previously supposed tobe an industrial hatch. When they have moved away you descendand open the door. It leads to a staircase. On the first floor is a printworks. Lines of string cross the room at ceiling level. On them are

pegged pieces of paper covered with Turkish writing. On thesecond floor the door is closed, but marked with a sign, also inTurkish. On the third there is a corridor lined with shoe racks. Some

pairs of trainers and heavy leather shoes still remain. The floor iscovered with carpets. You hear from within the low drone of a voice

intoning prayer. A door-keeper sits on a wooden chair, reading anewspaper. You descend the stairs.

You take a different route to the shops, but you mistake a turningand find yourself on a deserted road beside the river. You realize theborder used to run along here, but that t some point it veered awayfrom the river, into the fabric of the town. Somewhere there shouldnow be a gap, a missing strip in the town, but you can t find it.

Perhaps itwas here where there are rows of densely planted trees.

Perhaps itwas where this building is under construction. Or maybe

this playground wasn t there before. You see a vast, semi-derelicthouse, standing back a little from the road. Its courtyard isoccupiedby a second-hand car lot lined with small red flags and banners. Thecars are covered by stickers proclaiming their performance andreliability. A few prospective buyers peer through the car windows

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or sit inside, staring through the windscreens. High up on the barebrick wall of the house is scrawled inwhite paint themessage Theborder is no longer between peoples of the same land. It is betweenthe rich and the poor.

In the summer you journey to the woods which reach from the

countrysidealmost into the centre of the

city.On the

mapthe land?

scape seems curiously regulated, divided into a numbered grid, as

though there was some attempt to make the land take on the

organization of the town. But you find that in reality the woods arewild and, unlike the rest of the city, where the land is flat, they coversmall steep hills, as though the city occupied the plain but allowedthe hills to remain untouched. Standing on one of these hills youhear the sound of horses hoofs and you see, on the road below, twccart-horses, trotting, pulling behind them a wagon. On the wagonis placed upright a large tree in full bloom. The wagon passesthrough thewoods and out of sight. Some months later in a different

part of the woods you chance on a small, round timber buildingstanding by a lake. You peer into the interior. At first nothing isvisible. You hear only the sound of straw moving and a kind of

coughing. Then you are able to make out the two cart-horses,tethered in stalls. Their vast forms seem to fill the interior. Theybreathe alternately, in irregular, almost violent expulsions of air.

In the corner of the room stands an oven. It is about two metres talland one wide, and is covered with white tiles. Each morning inwinter you carry out the same ritual. You open the flue lever, the

top door, the bottom door. You place the paper and wood inside andset them alight. You add the coal, wait for it to glow, then close thedoors and damp the flue. The oven doesn t really heat the room, foroutside the temperature may be minus ten or fifteen degrees. But ithas an imposing presence. It seems to demand a certain reverence.

When people visit the room they speak about the oven. You realizethat these ovens are obsessive objects for many others in the town.

The ceremony attached to lighting them suggests more than just a

pragmatic action, such as the turning on of a switch, but thesequence of motions involves your body actively with this object in

the room. Sometimes you feel a hatred for this oven, that you havebecome its servant, that it has begun to control part of your life. Youfeed itwith the coal you have carried up the stairs, you stack thebriquettes in neat piles and calculate how long they will last, thecoal dust stains your hands and lies under your fingernails. The

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waiting, the opening and closing of doors ? it is almost as thoughyou need to perform some primitive, personal sacrifice in order thatwarmth will return.

You are passing Humboldt University in the east side of the city.You step into the entrance hall. The end wall is lined with newcurtains. Before the curtains stand some busts of literary figures,

mounted on classical pedestals, and some glass cases containingopen books. There is something artificial about the display. Youmove one of the curtains a little to one side. The stone wall behindis revealed, with a diagonal line incised into the surface, painted in

gold. A further movement reveals this line to be the stroke of theletter R. By pulling the curtain some centimetres more you revealthe shining letters of the word MARX.

You walk along the street beside the canal. Attached to each lamp?post is a coloured photocopy of a young child, standing naked in a

kitchen. She is looking up, smiling at the camera. Behind her lies anuntidy worktop cluttered with dishes. You find something ambigu?ous in the picture. It seems charming, but somehow the effect of thesun and the rain on the photocopy makes the colours seem lurid,leering. Eventually you stop and read the handwritten note abovethe photograph: the girl has gone missing some days before fromher playground. Information concerning her whereabouts is ur?

gently sought. Some days later you see the same picture, very much

enlarged, on the front page of a daily newspaper. The girl has beenabducted and murdered. Her abductor has confessed. He has taken

the police to the place where he hid the body, in a wood beside thePolish border.

You struggle to speak the language, to understand what people are

saying. Always you hear your own voice mispronouncing words,muddling the grammar. You feel frustrated by this inability tocommunicate, that you are so obviously an outsider. As you listenyou are unsure whether you have really understood the true

meaning, or that perhaps you have taken hold of something thatonly sounds similar but bears some very different meaning. Youbecome aware that sometimes

people speaka different kind of

German, harsher and more guttural than the language you are usedto. They speak in one way to you and in another among themselves,and you realize this is the dialect of the city, that the city containsan original population, overwhelmed by subsequent waves of

immigration. This original population is half proud, half ashamedof its dialect. You ask a woman in a shop why she pronounces wordsin two ways, and she tells you she was instructed by her parentsnever to speak in dialect to outsiders. You realize how far you arefrom reaching the interior of the city, that even the language youhave been trying to speak is not really the language of the city, butof others who arrived later.

You travel to one of the industrial areas of the east side, to a

landscape of unoccupied factories, chimneys, pipes, defunctmachines. Beside the factories lies a small wood of pine trees. Thenyou find yourself in an orchard with long grass and trees laden withred apples. Neat gardens are laid out, with huts, in front of whichfamilies sit drinking coffee from thermos flasks. In one of theallotments a group of workers is preparing the ground with hoes.You see that they are all Vietnamese. You feel surprised at findingthis group here, you feel almost that you wandered somewhere youshouldn t go, that you have entered some private place. As youapproach they seem suspicious. You ask them the way, they replyin the thick city dialect. They tell you that they came to this cityunder the previous regime. Now they have lost their jobs, but they

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don t wish to return to Asia. You notice one of the group has a longred cut down the side of the face. They tell you angrily of attacks on

immigrant workers by ultra-right groups. Homes for immigrantshave been set on fire. You recall the news stories you have seen ontelevision. You feel a revulsion at being confronted so directly withthis violence. You stand beside the rows of flowers and vegetables.

You find yourself staring at, then looking away from, the crime.You wish to show your sympathy. They begin to talk very fastamong themselves. Some of them return to working the land. Theyturn over the earth with the hoes.

You press the light-switch and somewhere, deep within, a dim

lightbulb glows. The cellar consists of a series of corridors, one

leading off another, so that as you penetrate further within the

system you become increasingly uncertain of the way eitherforward or backward. The ceiling of the corridors is of gentlycurved brick. On either side are cubicles walled off by partitions

made of timber slats. On each cubicle is painted the name of one ofthe occupants of the house, but the names are very old. Many of the

occupants have changed so that now these names represent only atrace of some previous habitation. As you walk you keep in yourhead the name of the former occupant of your flat, almost as thoughyou were searching, not for your cubicle, but for this otherinhabitant, towhom you are now linked. You locate the door andgrope in the dim light for the padlock. Within the cubicle arestacked high bundles of coal briquettes. You feel their unevensurface with your hands and find the candle and the matches. The

mass of coal reflects no light. You are uncertain of the size of thespace. The metal straps securing the bundles glint slightly. Some?times you feel frightened down here. The underground location, the

German names, themusty smell of the coal ?you feel isolated from

the rest of the city. Occasionally you hear noises from the othercorridors. You wonder whether someone else may be in the cellarnetwork, whether the cellar entrance may become locked and youwill be unable to find your way out. But as you remain here a littlewhile you become accustomed to the lack of light and the faintsounds. You almost find a certain comfort here. You come moreoften to fetch coal. You discover

youcan trace

your way throughthe corridors by remembering the pattern of the names. You beginto go deeper into the system than you really need. You are not surehow far you have gone or whether you may have wandered out ofthe boundaries of your house into some other territory. You see thatthere are small openings within the walls, providing ventilation forother cellar systems. Sometimes you see light through these

openings and you realize that you are in a part of an undergroundsystem that must spread thoughout the city. At the end of onecorridor you find a small door with a broken glass pane. The dooris locked but you see part of a garden. A woman moves along a pathlined with small coloured windmills. She uses a wooden shovel toclear away the snow.

Each day you travel the same route on the U-Bahn. You get on the

underground at Bahnhof Zoo and you recite the stations of the

journey. Bahnhof Zoo. Wittembergplatz. Nollendorfjplatz. Kufuerstenstrasse. As the train leaves Kufuerstenstrasse itbegins to climbvery steeply. You see daylight seeping into the front carriages, and

suddenly you are also out in the daylight and the track is fifteenmetres above ground. Through a tangle of metal girders you makeout a vast wasteland stretching north into the centre of the city andsouth as far as you can see, filled with mounds of earth and digging

machines and sheds, and then the train rises even higher as it rossesthe raised line of the magnetic railway and passes intoGleisdreieck.

Moeckenbrucke. Halleshestor, where at night a great illuminated

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sign stands out over a modern block proclaiming Gedenk Bibliotek ( The Library of Thought ). Prinzenstrasse. Kottbussertor.

Goerlitzerbahnhof. Finally, just short of the former borderline andalmost on the river, Schlesischestor.

You drink coffee in bars which are clean and where the service isefficient. You stare through the shop windows at themerchandise.

You try o translate the placards, to transfer the prices into your ownmonetary system. You go to the bakery and see the shelves piledhigh with different types of bread, each with its own name. You goto the leather shop, the paper shop, the shop that sells only potatoes,the shop with twenty different types of vodka, the kitchen shopfilled with equipment whose use you can only begin to imagine.You visit the department store. You take the lift to the top floor and,as the door opens, as far as you can see there stretch before youcases of delicacies. You feel intimidated by the quantities of

material. You buy nothing. You feel pleased to be here, rather than

in your own country, which is certainly not poor but now seemssomehow mean, mediocre. Outside the cheap supermarkets by the

railway stations you see cars being loaded up with cut-price tins of

pineapple, bargain stereo sets. Sometimes beggars ask you for

money. They seem different and you realize that they speak noGerman. They carry pieces of paper with messages relating toevents that until now seemed distant, that you only read about innewspapers: the war in Iraq, the flight of the Kurds, the problemsof the Polish economy, the collapse of Yugoslavia. The corridors ofthe railway stations are sometimes filled with migrants. Refugeesfrom the east stand in the streets and sell

cheapvodka and

cigarettes. Sometimes they have only a few household items, someelectric plugs, a pair of old shoes. At first you don t wish to seethese people, to allow them into your world. They seem unabsorbedinto the normal mode of behaviour of the city. Their poverty seemsalmost exotic. The poor occupy thewastelands of the city. You findthat certain streets are lined at night with vans filled with sleeping

migrant workers. And as you travel more often, and deeper, into thecity you realize the area of wealth is of limited extent, and issurrounded by large, often densely inhabited, zones of economic

stagnation. Your perception of the city begins to change. It no

longer seems so easy to inhabit, so secure.

One evening you become tired of this courtyard. It feels confined,almost too picturesque. You take the bus to the centre of the eastside of the city and stand in a great open space surrounded by

modern buildings. All the elements of the town stand here ? the

department store, the TV tower, the government offices, the

housing blocks. There is a bleakness, but also an optimism, a desireto create an environment purely of the twentieth century. The scaleof these places resists the aestheticism of the West. They are

awkward but they are also assured. They have dignity. You walk inamongst the housing blocks. There are no graffiti. There is a senseof a social order that still functions. At the entrance to one block, ona neat noticeboard are printed the names of the inhabitants. A largetravel agency photograph of an exotic island fills the entrance

lobby. You take the lift to the top and look out over the city, beyondthe high-rise blocks. From here you do see a kind of order in the

city, but it seems an external order, visible only from above. As youdescend a man gets into the lift, carrying, in the middle of summer,a large wooden sledge. You ask him why he is holding the sledge.He waves his arms, he speaks with great enthusiasm, but he is notspeaking German. He is speaking perhaps Polish. You understand

nothing. On the third floor he shakes your hand warmly. He seems

genuinely sorry to leave you. He gets out of the lift.

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CL

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