large cumulus clouds and then re-appearing to cast strong, elongated shadows. We enter a building and continue down a lengthy corridor with rooms either side, many dead ends filled with detritus: damaged furniture, collapsed masonry, warped doors and general rubbish. He talks about the radomes, as they are called. They are made of a whitish material that allows radar and radio waves unimpeded passage—winter cold too, I suspect—but prevents the weather from damaging the sensitive equipment used by the US and British Intelligence as part of the ECHELON programme of intelligence sharing of, in this case, the interception of traffic between East Berlin (GDR) and other Warsaw Pact countries. Conversation stops as we climb flights of stairs and pop out onto a flat roof with three radomes in close proximity. And they’re more impressive close up, losing the football on top of an upended Lego brick impression they gave from a distance. The building and the radomes have been savaged, at times more artistically or politically than others. The skins have the multi-coloured spray graffiti that is the go-to costume of our consumerist culture– publicly accessible architecture. It covers most intact and reachable surfaces. Atrocious and stimulating varieties pop up in interstitial spaces with the top layer often over tagging the work of previous sprayers. It puts me in mind of the time when we first moved into the house in Bucksburn, on the outskirts of Aberdeen in Scotland. My father decided that the new wallpaper (restrained flowery, 1950s pastel) should be on top of the original plaster and not simply pasted
over the previous layer of paper. That decision was more momentous than he imagined and resulted in one of the first incidents that brought home to me an awareness of material history. As an eleven year-old I was called on to help scrape down through the layers at floor level. I was fascinated as hot water, sponged on, loosened design after design, working back through a grubby, nondescript pattern to a subdued art deco geometry, a traditional floral pattern from the same period on through restrained art nouveau vines and Edwardian stripes to arrive at a dark red mid-Victorian paper from a hundred years before. My father kept samples for a number of years afterwards to illustrate the oft repeated story of the ‘seven layers of the living room’, making it sound as historically significant as a chapter from the Seven Pillars of Wisdom . The fabric skin of one of the radomes is tattered and one dome has actually been shredded down to its skeleton from ground level to above head height all the way round. Through the tatters, I glimpse the Berlin Olympic Stadium and clock tower built for the 1936 games filmed by Leni Riefenstahl: Olympia (1938), though her fame had already been established by the Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of the Will (1935). They must be about two crow kilometres away and some distance behind them is the cooling tower of a thermal power station. Now we go up the tower, our guide says, and afterwards we can look at a better class of wall art. Intriguing. More stairs to climb with camera, sound equipment and tripod. Unlike the more accessible domes which have been ripped
Tim Sharp
12 on site review 46 :: travel
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