Words on the Wall

A number of people have asked me when I’m finally going to put up a site on my Words on the Wall project. Well, blogging is a lazy way to do this, but if I don’t put it up here, who knows when I’ll manage it?

I’ll post an outline of the project later, but here are a few photos to get started.

Origins

This is my grandfather, around 1924 or so (the year my father was born). He's stripping a billboard in preparation for new pasting. I’m guessing at the year, based on the Model T in the picture.

Sparkasse Puschkinstrasse

The manager’s name of the bank housed in this building is "Dieter Bauhaus". Cool. He agreed to finance one of the other quotations (on the Herderhaus), so I put a quote on his bank as well. It says: “I want to treat gold like moist clay – you can turn this metal into anything” (spoken by the devil in Goethe’s Faust). I still think it was pretty ballsy of this guy to accept this quote, since it could be interpreted negatively.

Röslerisches Haus

This is the back of a building which houses part of the Franz Liszt Musikhochschule. One could translate it as “Because of inclement weather, the German revolution took place in its music”. My signpainter for this project was Norbert Gladis.