Modern Façades Today, Now #006
This is the inside of one of those chocolate-coated snacks which is light and fluffy on the inside so that you can eat it between meals, right? A malt honeycomb center coated in a coagulated skimmed-milk paste stabilized with soya lecithin and sorbitan tristearate, all held in place with a masonry substrate of demineralised whey powders.
Somehow inevitably this series must also direct its gaze to the Fellini Residences – currently nearing completion – and perhaps unfairly Slab’s own Messers Warner and Miller have gotten pretty intimate with it, going right up close, training their macro lenses almost pornographically upon its nether regions, its intimate crevices and orifices; probing away where no self-respecting critic of architecture has previously dared to insert his or her fingers and faces with the simple aim of revealing the truth, and nothing less.
But unfair for whom, or what? Why, for this fine series of articles, of course, which is supposed to deal with the surface of things and go no further. Here we cannot point to damage as such, but rather to a kind of pre-damage: the micro-horror of construction itself and the unseemly manner in which five separate surfaces might conjoin. Not much of this gloppy, viscid, battery goo-gam will still be visible once ribbons are cut and corks have flown. But we will know. We will know.