betonbabe:

HILD UND K

‘SAMMELN’ (‘COLLECT’ IN GERMAN), WASTE DEPOT + BUS STOP IN LANDSHUT, 1996

“SAMMELN, says the built structure. Is it some ironic chapel of refuse? Or the categorical imperative of the wealthy bourgeoisie? Or a memento mori of surplus? Or a site for the alchemical sublimation of rubbish?
It is more like a piece of oversized graffiti. Here, however, it is a word cast in gilded concrete, converted into a wall, as eternal as only temples and underground car parks are. Graffiti as a building for waste storage. The building as categorical imperative. The imperative (SAMMELN!) as a word in the urban landscape and a transitional stage of past values.
Where buildings assume on all sides the condition of rubbish, words have lost their power. In opposition to this, the architects have set up their eternally materialized word in seven concrete slabs, the letters formed by the two unfilled sections in each cast panel. Thus the thought becomes word and the word becomes building.”