utopia uninc.

BERLIN NOTES (LVII)

noreply@blogger.com (joan) — Thu, 22 Oct 2020 08:55:00 +0000

Konrad Giehr 'Checkpoint Charlie' (1968)

In Berlin, Steve and I ventured through Checkpoint Charlie for an afternoon in the east. Any print you had, newspapers, magazines, was confiscated by the East German border guards. It was a different society; you could feel the boot, the stasis in the streets, and you knew the oppression was real. It changed Steve permanently. After our European trip, the man who had preached that rock ’n’ roll and politics should never mix became an activist, his own music turning defiantly political. The power of the wall that split the world in two, its blunt, ugly, mesmerizing realness, couldn’t be underestimated. It was an offense to humanity; there was something pornographic about it, and once viewed, it held a scent you couldn’t quite get off of you. It truly disturbed some of the band and there was a communal sigh of relief when we moved on to the next town.

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN 'Born To Run' (2016)

BERLIN NOTES (LVI)

noreply@blogger.com (joan) — Mon, 25 Mar 2019 12:16:00 +0000

Hagen Pelka 'Bahnhof Gesundbrunnen von der Swinemünder Brücke' (1984)

Now that the Wall is gone, the city is twice as big and has changed so much that he often doesn’t recognize the intersections. Once he’d known all the city’s bombed-out gaps, first with rubble, then without. Later still there might be a sausage stand, or Christmas trees for sale, or often nothing at all. But recently all these gaps have been filled with buildings, corner lots built up again, firewalls no longer visible. As a child, before the Wall went up, he sold blueberries (having picked them himself) at the West Berlin train station Gesundbrunnen so he could buy his first glossy ball. Glossy rubber balls existed only in the West. When he saw the Gesundbrunnen station for the first time after the fall of the Wall, the tracks leading east were completely overgrown with tall grass, the platforms covered with birch trees swaying in the wind. If he’d been a city planner, he’d have left it just like that in memory of the divided city, and to symbolize the ephemeral nature of all things built by human hands, and maybe just because a stand of birch trees on a train-station platform is beautiful.

JENNY ERPENBECK 'Go, Went, Gone' (2015)

THE REVOLTED ARCHITECT

noreply@blogger.com (joan) — Wed, 26 Jul 2017 08:46:00 +0000

Politiquement, j'ai toujours été un révolté.
OSCAR NIEMEYER

With the end of Estado Novo in Brazil, in 1945, the communist militants, arrested during the dictatorship of Gétulio Vargas, are amnestied. Then, the architect Oscar Niemeyer decides to host, in his own house, Luís Carlos Prestes, general-secretary of the Brazilian Communist Party. After a few weeks of coexistence, Niemeyer converts himself to the cause and joins the party that will chair in 1992.

In 1964, he is invited to Israel by Yekutiel Federman, owner of Dan Hotels, to discuss some potential projects. Meanwhile, there is a military coup in Brazil. The coupists sack the headquarters of the magazine Módulo and his studio. Incidents that force him to extend his, in principle brief, stay in Israel. But, six months later, he ends up returning to his country.

In 1965, a year after his return to Brazil, he resignes from his position as a professor at the university in protest for the dictatorial policies of the Brazilian military government and, taking advantage of the success of his monographic exhibition at the Musée des Arts décoratifs in Paris, leaves for France. In this exile, which will last about twenty years, he designs, among other works, the Headquarters for the French Communist Party in Paris.

Siège du Parti communiste français (sketches by Oscar Niemeyer, 1965)

In a few days, Niemeyer develops a preliminary project in accordance with the local conditions and its surroundings, that is to say: in accordance with the size and shape of the site, as well as with the orientation and operation of the building And at the same time it gives an answer to one of the main requirements of the program: to provide a safe building, with discreet and easy controlled entrances.

All of this explains the final solution adopted: a block in curved line which unfolds throughout the whole area of the plot that borders with the neighbors, where the party's offices are located. In this way it frees the rest of the lot and preserves, between the building and its neighbors, the spaces necessary for its vertical accesses, located outside to facilitate future modifications that the program of the building may eventually require.

Then he places the rest of the building a meter and a half below the street level, creating a system of inclined planes where we can find a large auditorium, semi-buried but easily accessible, and the entrance hall, which it is called foyer de la classe ouvrière, where, through multiple curved walls, a whole series of spaces for exhibition, waiting and conference rooms are located.

Siège du Parti communiste français (photos by Joan de Torres Calsapeu, 2000)

In the words of its own author, the building becomes an example of contemporary architecture and a potential point of tourist attraction. But it is not a simple architectural challenge. It is the worker's house. A building with new, simple forms, without luxurious and superfluous finishings that represents the fight against misery, discrimination and injustice which, according to him, must be the goal of French communism.

However, it is not a communist who welcomes him, and facilitates his architectural practice in France but André Malraux, then minister of culture of President Charles de Gaulle's last government. In 1959 Malraux had described Brasilia as the city of hope and Palácio da Alvorada's columns as the most beautiful ever seen after the Greeks. It is thanks to Malraux's devotion for the work of Niemeyer, which he collects in his Imaginary Museum, that the Brazilian architect owes him, to a large extent, his projects in France.

According to Niemeyer himself, Georges Pompidou, then prime minister, stated that this building is the only good thing that the Communists have done, ignoring the fact that the architect has not a quite very rebellious past. In fact, in 1936 he designed, in collaboration with, among others, Lúcio Costa and the advice of Le Corbusier, the Headquarters of the Ministry of Education and Culture in Rio de Janeiro commissioned by a fervent fascist and Brazilian anti-communist like Gustavo Capanema.

MIES AND THE MEDITERRANEAN

noreply@blogger.com (joan) — Tue, 24 Jan 2017 12:10:00 +0000

Elle est belle, elle ne signifie rien.
ANDRÉ GIDE

Where do the sculptures of Aristides Maillol which appear in Mies van der Rohe's collages in his Museum project for a small town come from? In this project, commissioned by the Architectural Forum for its special issue "New Buildings for 194X" in May 1943, four Maillol sculptures share space with Picasso's Guernica and with another cubist painting by Braque: 'Torse de jeune fille' from 1930, 'Étude pour le monument à Paul Cézanne' from 1912, 'L'Action enchaînée' from 1906 and 'La Nuit' from 1905.

The origin of Guernica in this imaginary museum is clear. Picasso's painting arrives in America in 1939 and, until 1942, it is exhibited in several north american cities. Among them Chicago. From December 4th to 28th, 1940, The Arts Club of Chicago organizes a retrospective exhibition of Maillol's work. In addition, a year before this exhibition, a monograph is published by Berlin-based art historian John Rewald.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe 'Concert Hall' (1942)

In 1942 Mies choses another sculpture by Maillol to illustrate his Concert Hall project. In this case, he creates a photomontage, with an image of the assembly hangar of the aircraft factory Glenn L. Martin Company, by the architect Albert Kahn, as a backdrop, where Maillol's 'Le Méditerranée' appears, in the foreground, as a ready-made. His presence, however, reinforces the idea that, in this context, nothing is what it seems. It is not until a few years later that the sculptor Mary Callery, a personal friend of Mies, will remove Maillol's work to place the figure of a scribe from Ancient Egypt. Although in the catalog of his retrospective exhibition, between September 16th, 1947, and January 25th, 1948, at the MoMA, Maillol's 'Le Méditerranée' will still be there.

That photomontage has its origins in an architectural design course that Mies teaches in January 1941 at the IIT. In this course he proposes as a theme a concert hall and three different ways of approaching his architectural solution. One of his students, Paul Camagna, opts for the solution of a single large open space with strictly acoustic partitions. And this is how the interior photography of a large industrial space is chosen, such as the assembly hangar for the PBM Mariner patrol bomber flying boat. Years later, Campagna himself will admit that the concert hall project is more of Mies than his.

Peter Behrens 'Ausstellungsraum in der Kunsthalle, Internationale Kunst- und Große Gartenbau-Ausstellung, Mannheim' (1907)

A year before Mies entered his studio, Peter Behrens asks Karl Ernst Osthaus, an art collector and patron, for a female nude by Aristides Maillol like the one it was exhibited, between April and September 1906, at the eleventh Kunstausstellung (art show) of the Berlin Secession. Osthaus brings him a plaster reproduction of 'Le Méditerranée'. This is how Maillol's sculpture, perhaps under the influence of german Hellenism, will become the main character of the room created by Behrens at the Internationale Kunst- und Große Gartenbau-Ausstellung in Mannheim.

But Maillol is not the first sculptor to whom Mies turns to in his works. In fact, in his collages for the courtyard houses of 1938 he incorporates sculptures by Wilhelm Lehmbruck, a personal friend of his brother Ewald who was also a sculptor. Another photograph of the interior of Villa Tugendhat from 1930 already shows a sculpture by Lehmbruck himself. It is none other than 'Torso' from 1914. And in the Glasraum (glass room), designed by Mies and Lilly Reich, for the 1927 Werkbund exhibition in Stuttgart, we find his 'Maedchen, sich umwendend' of 1913.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe 'German Pavilion, Barcelona, preliminary scheme' (1928)

In one of the first versions of the German Pavilion in Barcelona, Mies plans to incorporate up to three sculptures. One where we can find now ‘Der Morgen’ (the morning) by Georg Kolbe. A second, also on open air, at the edge of the main pond. And the third in the central space of the Pavilion. On the other hand, in a collage of 1928 a figure seated in the inner pond is glimpsed. There is also a drawing by the architect Sergius Ruegenberg, then Mies's assistant and later Hans Scharoun's collaborator in his Berlin Kollektivplan, where a figure sitting in the same place can also be seen.

If Kolbe’s statue, at that stage of the design, isn’t even drawn it may be because it isn’t expected to be there. If we also consider that Lehmbruck and Kolbe did not make this type of sculpture, it can also be that the sculpture Mies has in mind, from the beginning, is none other than Maillol's 'Le Méditerranée'. On the other hand, the Pavilion is nothing but a Mies collage. In this case, a badly re-constructed collage. Because, despite not being a work by Mies, both Puig i Cadafalch's exterior colonnade and Maillol's 'Le Méditerranée' are integral parts of the Pavilion. Because form, by itself, does not exist.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe 'German Pavilion, Barcelona, interior perspective' (1928-29)

Nowadays, you can see Maillol's 'Le Méditerranée' in the courtyard of Perpignan's City Council. A woman isolated and elevated in a pedestal leaning her, left, arm on her, also left, bent leg. It could be said that his skin is crushed by the sun of this Catalan Arcadia. Go see her, stand in front of her, accompany her for a while. She is all we have left of what could have happened in Mies Pavilion.

"LES HEURES SOMBRES"

noreply@blogger.com (joan) — Tue, 12 Apr 2016 11:16:00 +0000

La maison se posera au milieu de l'herbe comme un objet, sans rien déranger.

LE CORBUSIER

In June 1928 Pierre Savoye, co-founder of the insurance company Gras Savoye, visits Le Corbusier, in his Parisian studio, to entrust a weekend residence, to receive friends and take a break with family, in a field of 7-hectare in Poissy.

The Villa Savoye, spontaneously named by its owners as “Les Heures claires” (The clear hours), is built between 1929 and 1931. As early as 1930, Eugénie Savoye, Pierre’s wife, begins a correspondence with his architect, which will last until 1937, where she communicates all its construction defects.

G.E. Kidder Smith 'Villa Savoye' (1959)

The first letter dates from March 24, 1930, where Madame Savoye already complains that the terrace, garage and cellar are flooded and that the infernal noise of rain on the skylight in her bathroom does not let her sleep. In another letter dated September 6, 1937, she writes: "It's raining in the lobby, it's raining on the ramp, and the garage wall is absolutely soaked. What's more, it's still raining in my bathroom, which is flooding every time that there is rain."

Le Corbusier goes so far as to tell her that, as a client, she should consider architects as friends of their house and not their enemies. Nevertheless, at the beginning of 1938 the owners stop living there. But it is not until May 1940 that they definitively abandone it. Shortly afterwards it is confiscated by the Nazis for its strategic location. From there they can watch the entire Seine Valley and the Ford factory in Paris.

René Burri 'The Villa Savoye' (1959)

It is not until two years after the end of World War II that the Savoye family regains their ownership. Widowed and impoverished, Madame Savoye turns her land into a farm by transforming the house into a barn and, consequently, accelerating its decline.

Perhaps for this reason, in 1958 it is expropriated again. This time by the Poissy City Council which reserves 6 of its 7 hectares for the construction of a new school and ends up transforming the Villa into a Maison des jeunes et de la culture, although at first it was planned to be demolished.

The Villa Savoye, Destruction Through Neglect (1966) MoMA

Then the alarm goes off and a whole series of campaigns and mobilizations begin, on an international scale, to save Villa Savoye. As a result of this pressure, the building passes into the hands of the French Republic. And in 1965, a few months after Le Corbusier's death, André Malraux, then Minister of Culture, classifies it as a historical monument.

But as Arthur Drexler, director of MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design, denounces: the harm is already done. Even restored, the Villa Savoye, due to this amputation, can never again be seen as an object, without anything altering it.

BERLIN NOTES (LV)

noreply@blogger.com (joan) — Wed, 06 Jan 2016 12:28:00 +0000

René Burri 'Along the Berlin Wall' (1961)

Yet despite its physical absence here and elsewhere in Berlin, the dividing wall maintains a vivid presence. Indirectly visible through its historical traces in the otherwise puzzling layout of certain streets and buildings, it can also be seen in the differing visual cultures of East and West: not only in the different styles of architecture and levels of building maintenance, but in the different styles of interior design, like the East Berlin taste for oilcloth table coverings, artificial flowers, and regimented white lace curtains. To the frequent dismay of motorists and public transport commuters, the wall is still strongly felt through the chaos of continuing traffic changes (for example, detours due to road or building construction, disrupted service and altered routes for bus, U-bahn, and S-bahn lines) that its sudden disappearance has engendered after over a generation of walled Berlin life. The enormous, frenetic mass of continuing construction that has overwhelmed Potsdamer Platz paradoxically reasserts the wall it has effaced, by being not only a constructed obstacle of monumental scale but an international tourist attraction as Europe's largest building site. In short, the now absent wall dividing East and West remains in many ways the structuring principle of this unified city, just as the divided cities of East and West Berlin were defined essentially by their contrasting absent parts.

RICHARD SHUSTERMAN 'The Urban Aesthetics of Absence' (1997)

BERLIN NOTES (LIV)

noreply@blogger.com (joan) — Tue, 30 Jun 2015 11:32:00 +0000

Berlin - Kiefholzstraße am 14.9.1986

At first, when he was new here, he had examined the border wall, whose most notable feature was that it divided the city down the middle instead of surrounding it. But the view from any one of the lookout towers built to afford Westerners a glimpse of life behind the Wall had invariably disappointed him. In no place did the infamous construction achieve the height and breadth of his imagining; it looked more like the cheap realization of an architectonic formula that achieved its fullest expression in the center of the city. At that time he developed a mental image of a city expanding evenly from the edges toward the center, following a program of continuous cell division that seemed exclusively designed for inward expansion. The strangest thing was that the inhabitants appeared not to notice their own Wall complex, for their unceasing separations seemed to trace a pattern that was etched inside their souls.

PETER SCHNEIDER 'Couplings' (1992)

SCHINKEL'S MONTSERRAT

noreply@blogger.com (joan) — Thu, 22 Jan 2015 12:17:00 +0000

In which the human being, entirely alone on his own Montserrat, can find peace and happiness.

J.W. GOETHE 'Sämmtliche Werke' (1836)

Recently the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz (Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation) has put online the entire collection of K.F. Schinkel's graphic work. So, one fine day, while procrastinating, I ended up discovering two images with the title of Eisenbergwerk in Katalonien (Iron mine in Catalonia): an exterior view where a limestone relief very similar to Montserrat is intuited, and an interior view which is like a hybrid of the prisons of Piranesi and the caves of Collbató or Salnitre. I immediately checked to see if Schinkel had ever been to Montserrat. But, reviewing his entire travel history, I can state that it is impossible. So who could have talked about Catalonia and its sacred mountain to the Prussian architect? There is only one possibility: Wilhelm von Humboldt, his protector at the Court of Frederick William III of Prussia.

In fact, Humboldt visited Montserrat in 1800 for two days. His ascension is evoked in the poem Die Geheimnisse (The Mysteries), written in 1784 by his friend J.W. Goethe. A poem where Goethe tells us about a pilgrim who climbs a mountain where there is a monastery inhabited by hermits. Just like Montserrat back then. On his return to Paris, still shocked by the experience, Humboldt began to write a letter, in the form of an essay, to his friend, which he did not publish until three years later, in the Allgemeine geographische Ephemeriden, entitled “Der Montserrat, bey Barcelona”. Curiously, the same year when Humboldt and Schinkel, during his stay in Rome, met in person.

K.F. Schinkel 'Eisenbergwerk in Katalonien. Außenansicht' (1815)

In this letter, Humboldt exposes a fascination with the mountain, above all, from a geographical, but also from an aesthetic, point of view. The harmony between man and nature stands out. An almost edenic harmony. Although he pays more attention to the hermits than to the monastery itself. According to him, the hermits show us, in their understanding with nature, that a life in harmony is possible. They represent a place in arcadian life. They are like the good savage of Rousseau. They meditate and find inner peace through pure contemplation. Thus, Montserrat is seen as an earthly paradise. As a return to simplicity, self-sufficiency and peace of mind. As an experience understood as an initiatory journey. But, in the whole essay, he does not tell us anything about its caves.

So how come did Schinkel become aware of its existence? Perhaps because of the French politician, archaeologist and traveler Alexandre de Laborde. Between 1794 and 1797, at the time of the French Revolution, Laborde discovered the mountain and, unlike Humboldt, visited its caves. In fact, in the first volume of his “Voyage pittoresque et historique de l'Espagne”, published in 1806 and dedicated entirely to Catalonia, he includes a detailed description of Montserrat which also includes two engravings, on his own words, of its beautiful stalactite caves.

K.F. Schinkel 'Eisenbergwerk in Katalonien. Innenansicht' (1815)

“This Saturday my Christmas piece, a big old iron mine in Catalonia, will be opened and shown during the Christmas market, from 6 a.m. daily throughout the evening, in my theater at 43 Französische Straße”. With this announcement, at the Berlinischen Nachrichten on December 16th, 1815, Wilhelm Ernst Gropius (Karl Wilhelm Gropius's father) promoted the presentation of these two eminently Montserratian Schaubilder (dioramas with musical accompaniment and human figures and animals) designed by Schinkel. From 1807 to 1815, Schinkel himself worked mainly in the design of panoramas and dioramas for Gropius' optical-mechanical theater until the death of Paul Ludwig Simon, when he was promoted to Geheimer Oberbaurat (private construction adviser). Five years earlier, however, Humboldt had already nominated him for the post of Geheimer Oberbauassessor (private construction consultant) of the Preußischen Oberbaudeputation (Prussian Construction Council).

BERLIN NOTES (LIII)

noreply@blogger.com (joan) — Mon, 22 Dec 2014 10:17:00 +0000

Horst Sturm 'Bertolt Brecht und Helene Weigel am 1 Mai' (1954)

Mr. K. preferred city B to city A. "In city A," he said, "they love me, but in city B they were friendly to me. In city A they made themselves useful to me, but in city B they needed me. In city A they invited me to join them at table, but in city B they invited me into the kitchen."

BERTOLT BRECHT 'Stories of Mr. Keuner'

THE TERRITORIALIZATION OF THE CITY

noreply@blogger.com (joan) — Mon, 24 Nov 2014 12:21:00 +0000

Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it.
Genesis 1:28

Everything that Cerdà talked about had been already fictionalized by Simon Tyssot de Passot about one hundred and fifty years before. Specifically, in his “Voyages et avantures de Jaques Massé”. Where he describes a country without a city and the entire population is statistically redistributed throughout the territory. A territory organized on the basis of a grid with strictly orthogonal channels and paths. Even Gabriel de Foigny in his “La Terre australe connué”, two centuries before Cerdà and half a century before Tyssot himself, tells us about a society made up by a geometric urbanism, a domestication of the land and an egalitarianism guaranteed by the absence of private property and possession of particular goods.

Almost contemporaneously, William Penn devised his Philadelphia Plan. A plan, with a hygienic vocation, developed according to the Quaker principles of his own mentor: religious, racial and gender equality. The future city was organized according to a network of streets perpendicular to each other where two axes with civic and commercial vocation stood out. Two axes that formed the main layouts of the grid. Each quadrant had its public square, conceived as a green lung. Similarly, the plots of houses were evenly spaced to ensure a private green space for each neighbor. That fact allowed to maintain a certain sense of rural life within a fast growing city.

William Penn's Plan for Philadelphia, 1684

A century later, Thomas Jefferson goes beyond Penn when he lays the groundwork, three years before the Constitution of the United States, for the Land Ordinance. A territorial ordinance which plans its expansion to the West following a reticular mesh structure. In fact, an unknown and still uncharted territory is ordered. The abstraction of the mesh becomes the supporting structure of future continental colonization. In this sense, the map precedes the territory. As André Corboz state, project-space overlaps with substrate-space. The grid is based on roads and highways that materialize it as a guarantee of equality and social justice, order and stability. It does not equip, it distributes. It does not argue, it disposes. For Jefferson, utopia and reality are not two opposite categories but convertible into one another. The first serves to prepare the second.

Jefferson-Hartley Map of the United States East of the Mississipi River, 1784

The most paradoxical thing is that all the current defenders of the dense and compact city take Barcelona's Eixample as a reference. Ignoring the biblical maximum of Cerdà himself in his “Teoría general de la urbanización” (General Theory of Urbanization):

«Rurizad lo urbano: urbanizad lo rural:... Replete terram.»*

And by sublimating urbanization, the true territorial vocation of a Saint Simonian like Cerdà has been hidden from us. As well as his general and analogous theory of rurization. If urbanization consisted of opening the land to inhabit it, ruralization consisted of opening it to cultivate it. Anyway, to defend that the current Eixample is the work of Cerdà is like saying that the current Sagrada Família is the work of Gaudí. For some reason both are the result of an unfinished project. Like modernity.

[*] «Ruralise the urban, urbanise the rural:... Replete terram.»

BERLIN NOTES (LII)

noreply@blogger.com (joan) — Mon, 11 Aug 2014 11:18:00 +0000

A woman builder makes repairs to the roof of Berlin's town hall (1910)

As a matter of fact I went to Berlin at a very interesting historical moment. Since 1870, when Berlin had changed from the rather small, sober, and by no means rich capital of the Kingdom of Prussia into the seat of the German Emperor, the homely town on the Spree had taken a mighty upswing. But the leadership in artistic and cultural matters had not yet fallen to it. [...] But ofrecent years, with the rapid economic rise in Berlin, a new page had turned.

It was just at this period of its transition from a mere capital to a world city that I went to Berlin. Coming after the lush beauty of Vienna, inherited from great ancestors, the first impression was rather disappointing. The exodus to the West End, where the new architecture was soon to become manifest as against the pretentious houses of the Tiergarten quarter, had but just begun, and the architecturally tedious Friedrichstrasse and Leipzigerstrasse, with their clumsy ostentation, were still the centre of the city. Suburbs such as Wilmersdorf, Nicolassee, and Steglitz were only accessible by a tiresome journey on the street cars, and it was almost an expedition in those days to reach the lakes of the Mark with their sharp beauty. Other than the old Unter den Linden there was no real centre, no promenade like our Graben and, thanks to the old Prussian thrift, there was no suggestion of general elegance. [...] In every detail one felt the closefistedness of Frederician husbandry. The coffee was thin and bad because every bean was counted, the food was unimaginative, without strength or savour. Cleanliness and rigid and accurate order reigned everywhere instead of our musical rhythm of life.

STEFAN ZWEIG 'The World of Yesterday: Memories of a European' (1942)

BERLIN NOTES (LI)

noreply@blogger.com (joan) — Tue, 22 Apr 2014 10:03:00 +0000

Piero Vivarelli 'Oggi a Berlino' (1962)

Monday, September 6, 1948

As of today we not only have two city police forces, but also two city parliaments. Perhaps by tomorrow we will have two city governments and along the sector boundary a Chinese wall with battlements and watchtowers. Perhaps then one will need a visa to go from Charlottenburg to Unter den Linden. Just as we thought back then in July 1945 when the four-power occupation began. Perhaps.

RUTH ANDREAS-FRIEDRICH 'Battleground Berlin: Diaries, 1945-1948'

EUROPAHAUS

noreply@blogger.com (joan) — Fri, 23 Aug 2013 11:24:00 +0000

But one thing people like us cannot do without: the big city, where the lights are bright at night.

KURT TUCHOLSKY

With the passing of time, the myth of Potsdamer Platz has grown so big it has ended up casting a huge shadow over neighboring Askanischer Platz. However, it should be remembered that, during the first half of the last century, it had become one of the neuralgic centers of Berlin. Then everything revolved around the big train stations. At Askanischer Platz was the Anhalter Bahnhof, the largest and busiest train station in the city. From 1841, the year of its inauguration, large hotels were established in its surroundings. First the Harsburger Hof and later the Excelsior, once the largest hotel on the european continent.

Ideenwettbewerb zur Verbauung der Prinz-Albrecht-Gärten in Berlin, 1924

In 1924, with a desire to take advantage of this dynamic, the promoters of the famous skyscraper at Friedrichstrasse station promoted a new competition. Its aim was to define the western part of the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais, where the royal stables were, with a large building that gave facade to the square and preserved its garden at maximum. The main building, an 18th-century palace, later modified by K.F. Schinkel, occupied its eastern part. The winning proposal of the competition was presented by the architects Richard Bielenberg and Josef Moser, also authors of the Hotel Fürstenhof near Potsdamer Platz. It should be noted that their proposal had nothing to do with what was later eventually built. In fact, the authors went from proposing a neoclassical styled building to a complex of buildings designed according to the principles of the Neue Sachlichkeit, more similar to the proposal presented by Otto Firle.

Europahaus am Anhalter Bahnhof, 1936-37

This complex of buildings, in a certain sense, wanted to be a replica, on the Askanischer Platz, of Haus Vaterland, located just in front of the Potsdamer Bahnhof. Opened in 1911 as Haus Potsdam, the building was designed by Franz Schwechten. Curiously, the same architect who, a few years earlier, had designed the Anhalter Bahnhof. It housed Café Piccadilly, the world’s largest restaurant with 2,500 seats, a theater, with a capacity of 1,200 seats, and numerous offices. In 1928 it was renovated and re-opened, under the motto of the world in a house, with its theater transformed into a cinema and offices into multiple themed restaurants. In addition, Carl Stahl-Vrach, the architect of its renovationa and set designer for films such as Fritz Lang's "Doctor Mabuse", transformed the building into one of the first exponents of the Lichtarchitektur, or architecture of the night.

Saarlandstraße (heute Stresemannstraße), 1941-42

On the other hand, the Askanischer Platz complex had a façade about 280-meter-length and a total area of 35,000 square meters and was built in two phases. In the first phase, completed in 1926, Deutschlandhaus was built. A building which contained a mall, a theater, a ballroom, and a movie theater. Very similar to Tauentzienpalast. A complex of offices, shops and a ballroom of which Bielenberg and Moser were also the authors. The second, after many troubles and the death of Bielenberg, could not be completed until 1931. And it is in this last phase, designed by Moser and Otto Firle, that one of the first tall buildings in Berlin with steel structure was built: the Europahaus. A 12-storey tower that would eventually give its name to the whole complex. Firle surely contributed many of his own ideas, previously included in his competition proposal. One of them, no doubt, was the transformation of the Europahaus into another showcase in Berlin of the architecture of the night. But it was not until 1935 that a 15-meter-high structure was added to the central tower, crowned with the luminous logos of Allianz and Odol, adding up to a total of 50 meters, which broke definitely with the marked horizontality of the winning project.

Abraham Pisarek 'Auf Berliner Straßen', 1945-46

Nazism ended up stripping Europahaus of all its neons lights and turning it into the Reich's ministry of labor headquarters. During that period of darkness, the Anhalter Banhnhof became one of the three main Berlin stations where, between 1941 and 1945, almost a third of Berlin's Jews were deported. From this station, thanks to the infamous and disciplined task developed by Adolf Eichmann, they were sent, in groups of 50 to 100 people, to Theresienstadt Ghetto, in passenger convoys added to regular trains. But RAF's strategic bombing ended up devastating the station and its environs. However, Albert Speer's insane plan to transform Berlin into Welthaupstadt Germania had already envisaged closing the station and turning it into a public swimming pool. In fact, it was not until 1960 that the Anhalter Bahnhof was completely dismantled. And with its closure, and subsequent demolition, a part of Berlin’s history fell into the pit of oblivion. Except for Europahaus which still stands today, but in the darkness originally imposed by the Nazis.

COMPARATIVE ARCHITECTURE (IV)

noreply@blogger.com (joan) — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 08:15:00 +0000

Architektur des Gerüstes, des in All geöffneten Raumes.

BRUNO TAUT

In 1919 Bruno Taut published his Alpine Architektur. An utopian project he began to devise, according to himself, on All Saints' Day 1917, in the midst of the Great War. A project which was outlined and re-drawn throughout 1918. A kind of utopia based on the empathic possibilities of Paul Scheerbart's Glasarchitektur, to whom Taut himself had already dedicated his Glashaus, the glass pavilion built during the first Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne.

Bruno Taut 'Alpine Architektur' (1919)

For Scheerbart, the roots of war and therefore of destruction is boredom. So, to avoid this, Taut proposes this collective project which has the ambition to create a better structured universe capable of contributing to perpetual peace. Because, deep down, alpine architecture is a mystical fable that advocates for a complete reconstruction of the world, trying to fuse nature with architecture. But with a glass architecture, understood as the metaphor of a new and more splendid life. Because only this architecture can help us to transform the life and environment in which we live.

Jakob Tigges 'The Berg' (2009)

Ninety years later, also the architect Jakob Tigges presented a shocking proposal in the contest of ideas for the reorganization of the old and mythical Berlin Tempelhof Airport. Instead of a new neighborhood development or a new park, Tigges proposed building what Berlin lacks: a mountain. But not a simple hill, like the Teufelsberg, but a real alpine architecture: 'The Berg'. An absolutely unusual idea with a strong evocative power. A trully city icon that, in fact, will never have to be built, because no one denies that making it real is completely impossible. Instead, it has only been necessary to imagine it to end up becoming a whole collective utopia.

POMONA'S TEMPLE

noreply@blogger.com (joan) — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 11:46:00 +0000

K.F. Schinkel 'Entwurf für den Pomonatempel bei Potsdam' (1800)

Karl Friedrich Schinkel, on the death of Friedrich Gilly, left the Bauakademie in order to complete his master's unfinished projects. During this period, the young Schinkel, only nineteen years old, received his first commission. The still almost unknown Temple of Pomona in Potsdam. A pavilion in the gardens of the Pfingstberg, then Judenberg, owned by the wife of the cartographer and privy councillor Carl Ludwig von Oesfeld.

Richard Peter 'Pomonatempel am Pfingstberg, Vorderfront' (1945)

In the 18th century, the Pfingstberg was a land planted with vineyards which was later transformed into a garden. In fact, there had already been a small building, intended for leisure, with the same name. In honor of the Roman goddess, with no Greek equivalent or feast on the calendar, Pomona: patrona pomorum, lady of fruits. But not only of fruits but, by extension, of fruit trees and the hortus, during its cropping and also flowering.

'Pomonatempel auf dem Pfingstberg' (1981)

Schinkel, however, located his small temple on a higher site than the previous one. To be able to enjoy a magnificent panoramic view, he turned the roof into a roof, accessible from a back staircase. In a way, it could be said that this first work, a simple prostyle with its four ionic order columns, foreshadows elements that we can find in other projects, subsequent to his trip to Italy. Such as the Mausoleum for Queen Louise in Charlottenburg, or the Neue Wache in Unter den Linden.

Leo Seidel 'Der Pomonatempel heute' (2020)

Years later, between 1847 and 1863, the gardener and landscape architect Peter Joseph Lenné was commissioned by Frederick William IV of Prussia to design a Belvedere on the same site, which is now part of the Neuer Garten. Lenné decided to keep the Temple and decided to incorporate it into his garden. But what he could not avoid was that, after 1945, the temple would be abandoned and turned, paradoxically, into a real romantic ruin. But it has finally been rebuilt, though with a rather dubious aesthetic criterion.

BERLIN NOTES (XLV)

noreply@blogger.com (joan) — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 10:30:00 +0000

Hans-Günter Quaschinsky 'Berlin, Bernauer Straße, Grenze' (1955)

They are all making plans alone. The plan is a tunnel, or you would have to go straight out into the desert, would have to free the camel from the zoo, untie it, saddle it up, ride on it through Brandenburg. You could depend on the camel.

It must be a "disharmony." Something is seeping through the whole city; everyone is sure they have read or heard "disharmony," and some even thought about it, but publicly it’s nowhere to be found. Still more trees are being planted, all in the sand, trees from the desert experience.

Berlin has been tidied up. (…) The sand is everywhere now – in the shoes, on the coal. (…) Below it, a pub is still open in Alt-Moabit, but no one understands how it’s possible. After all, the city has been tidied up. The owner pours double schnapps, then buys a round himself; his pub was the best, the oldest, always full of people. But these people are no longer in Berlin. (…) No one wants to talk anymore either, they speak only to say something, anything, and in any case everything runs out of the corners of their mouths and away, everything double.

At night all Berlin is a place for turnover and exchange. Everything gets mixed up in confusion, then some people pull away. Espionage has an easy time of it, every collapse is transparent. Everyone is out to get rid of his own secret, to surrender his news, to break down during interrogation. Everyone has everyone else on his neck, and in the dim light no one can check the bill foisted on them. Outside it’s morning again, it’s too bright.

INGEBORG BACHMANN 'Ein Ort für Zufälle' (1964)

COMPARATIVE ARCHITECTURE (III)

noreply@blogger.com (joan) — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 17:30:00 +0000

Ce n'est pas une tour.

JEAN NOUVEL

To state that the decline of monumentality coincides with the rise of modernity it is not anything original. According to Charles Jencks, the appearance of this new genre, which he himself named the iconic building, has finally replaced the urban monument. When people stops to believe in God, they don’t believe in anything. They believe in anything. As banal as it may be. So if, in principle, anything can be a work of art, anything could also be an icon. But it is not so. If a building wants to be iconic must have a provocative image that generates controversy. Let anyone talk about you even if it is to criticize you. In essence, the iconic building is the simple application of the shock and awe military doctrine and the wow effect factor, as Mayor Bloomberg a few years ago called for the new singular New York City buildings. Although Deyan Sudjic argues that the iconic building is a fading fashion and it will eventually disappear, Jencks claims that the iconic building is here to stay.

Jean Nouvel 'Torre Agbar, Barcelona' (1999-2005)

It is said that, after dismissing the Italian architect Renzo Piano, Agbar chose Jean Nouvel as the architect in charge of designing their new headquarters. In a first meeting with the client, the French architect presented three tower proposals. At one point during the presentation, Nouvel took out a Montecristo cigar, the same one that Mies van der Rohe usually smoked, from his jacket, and, placing it upside down, said: “but this one is my favorite”. Decontextualizing, shamelessly, both ‘La trahison des images’ by René Magritte and the Adolf Loos’ Dadaist proposal for the Chicago’s Tribune Tower Competition. Next he added that “I think it also evokes the towers of Gaudí's Sagrada Família, and the stone millstones of Montserrat too” and ended up prophesying that “I am convinced that it can become a city icon”.

Norman Foster 'Swiss Re HQ, London' (1997-2004)

Two years earlier, Norman Foster had received a similar commission from Swiss Re. The insurance company wanted to build a new headquarters on the ruins of the Old Baltic Exchange. A building destroyed by an IRA bomb on 10 April 1992 at 9:20 pm, in the heart of the City of London. To justify its absolutely banal form, Lord Foster was forced to bring together a good number of excuses. At the end, the energy performance of the building, which is supposed to consume 50% less compared to other similar buildings, ended up becoming its main, if not the only, argument. However, Madelon Vriesendrop, playing with possible analogies, ended up disguising it in a missile, a lipstick, a matryoshka doll or a cucumber form. And that's how it's finally known today: The Gherkin.

Ivan Leonidov 'Institut des Statistiques, Moscou' (1929-1930)

A few years ago, while walking through one of Centre Pompidou's lost corridors, I discovered a project by Ivan Leonidov which I have never seen published anywhere before. So much controversy, if one had copied the other, and it turned out that both had plagiarized a project, still unpublished today, with more than half a century of existence. A kind of unusual building-manifesto for which the city seems to be nothing more than a mere backdrop. In this case, its shape is explained as a container of new functions. An object in the service of the then new socialist man. The fact is that if Nouvel states that this type is not a tower, it may be because he, intimately, thinks that it is, paradoxically, a socialist icon. Looking at it again, but from a historical perspective, this Leonidovism* revelation as a forerunner of this new architectural genre, which is the iconic building, would not be so strange either.

[*] In a 1930 Stalinist purge report on the petty-bourgeois tendency in Soviet architecture, Leonidovism (a term referring to the work of Leonidov and his disciples) is described as pure aestheticizing graphism, of technical and professional insufficiency, contrary to dialectical materialism and, of course, of being cosmopolitan.

BERLIN NOTES (XLIV)

noreply@blogger.com (joan) — Sun, 23 Dec 2012 10:35:00 +0000

Edward Hopper 'Approaching a City' (1946)

What lures me, amongst many things, was when I first went in there, there were great segments of the city that were empty. There were lots, where buildings had stood. The first thing that it reminded me of was when I was a child, in the Bronx. We used to play in lots that looked like that, of course they were lots without buildings. But here the buildings were destroyed, erased. So there was a correspondence between the lots that I knew as a child and this place in Germany that had these empty lots. That was number one. Number two, what struck me was, although the buildings had been destroyed, and had disappeared, the aura came through the ground. In other words, the physicality of the buildings were not there, but one could feel the sense of structures having been there. That was what we were talking before. There were disappearences that had occured, but yet the atmosphere of these structures was coming out of the earth. That was two. Number three, the strange condition of sensing Edward Hopper. Hopper's paintings were basically of Hoboken and places like that. Somehow, there was a condition in Berlin that brought back senses of Hopper. That was I tried to do, by the way, in my structures that I built in Berlin now. To capture some of those, amongst other things, some of those things.

JOHN HEJDUK in conversation with David Shapiro (1991)

BERLIN NOTES (XLIII)

noreply@blogger.com (joan) — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 10:44:00 +0000

I love Mies. My colleagues may not love Mies, but I love Mies. I love Mies' architecture. The Berlin Museum without a doubt. David, the only other time I had an architectural experience - when I came into Berlin, my soul looked up at the cantilever of the Mies National Museum, the black building made of black steel - was when I was a kid and I went to Italy with Gloria for the first time and we went down to Paestum. When we arrived and saw the Paestum Temples, we looked up and we saw the capital, the column and the lintel, and it was a religious experience. Not too many religious experiences in one's life, and I had two or three of them. But the other one was when I went into Berlin and saw the Berlin Museum at night. There is something about Berlin's air. I want to make this point. To see a black building in the Berlin night, which is blue of the night, the dark blue of the night. The blue of the night is crystal. The air is crystal because Berlin is surrounded by water, Berlin, all kinds of water. So it's a different kind of air that forms an atmosphere which is crystalline, black-blue, you had the black steel that's Berlin.

JOHN HEJDUK in conversation with David Shapiro (1991)

BERLIN NOTES (XLI)

noreply@blogger.com (joan) — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 09:43:00 +0000

Daniel Libeskind 'Out of Line' (1991)

Berlin could be seen as an exemplary spiritual capital of the twenty-first century, as it once was the apocalyptic symbol of the twentieth-century demise. The identity of Berlin cannot be re-founded on the ruins of history or on the illusory ‘reconstructions’ of an arbitrarily selected past.

The transformation of the shape of (future) city must be accompanied by corresponding changes in the mentality associated with prewar lot lines, anachronistic visions, dreams that money can buy. What is necessary is an optimistic view of the twenty-first century: a radical rethinking of zoning, function, property, and program. These categories are no longer appropriate to the changed relation between capitol, capital, public responsibility, and the end of ideology.

What we need is a connection of Berlin to and across its own history. This connection, this movement, goes through the relation of the old and the new, capitol and capital, full and empty, the 'no-longer' and the 'not yet'.

The lost center cannot be reconnected like an artificial limb to an old body, but must generate an overall transformation of the city.

Potsdamer Platz can be the place where the East-West, center-periphery division can overcome the conflicts that were born, witnessed, and died in this very place.

These conflicts cannot be resolved by reconstructing a hollow past, but by laying new foundations and new images that are open to concrete dynamics.

DANIEL LIBESKIND 'Out of Line' (1991)

COMPARATIVE ARCHITECTURE (II)

noreply@blogger.com (joan) — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 11:08:00 +0000

Thirty years, two continents and two natural disasters separate one from each other.

Kisho Kurokawa 'Agricultural City' (1960)

It was 1960 when the Japanese metabolist Kisho Kurokawa designed an agricultural town in Aichi Prefecture, with the intention of replacing the agricultural settlements in Ise Bay that were razed the previous year by Typhoon Vera. A seemingly utopian project which aspired to solve the classical contraposition between city and countryside by integrating agricultural production into an urban structure. The city was made up of multiple communities. Each one of them located on a squared concrete platform, about 300 meters to 500 meters by side, elevated on pilotis, about 4 meters off the ground, to deal with future flooding. This platform was both a structure and an infrastructure, thus reserving all soil for agricultural production. Each community, subdivided by a grid of 25 blocks and 100 meters by side, housed a population of about 2,000 inhabitants. The central block was reserved for public facilities such as an elementary school, a shrine and a temple. The remaining blocks were where the housing of these new settlements was located.

OMA 'Agadir Convention Centre' (1990)

Simultaneously to Kurokawa's project, the Moroccan city of Agadir was destroyed by an earthquake, despite its moderate magnitude of 5.7 on the Richter scale. After this earthquake, it was rebuilt, about two kilometers to the south, as the typical post-Corbusierian new town. And it is from this tabula rasa where thirty years later, the form of this project, with clear metabolic reminiscences, designed by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and his Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) arises. The project is a single building divided into two parts: a socle, which takes the sinuous shapes of the surrounding dunes; and a roof, which takes the form of a cloud. The socle is where the convention center is located, with auditoriums, conference rooms, etc. And the roof is occupied by a large hotel. The remaining in-between space, supported by a forest of pilotis, becomes a huge concrete covered plaza open to the beach and the vastness of the ocean.

BERLIN NOTES (XXXVI)

noreply@blogger.com (joan) — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 13:53:00 +0000

Paul Schutzer 'West Berliners waving to their relatives on the unseen Eastern side of the Wall' (1962)

Here I am, I'm back in Berlin, and as usual I can't get the hang of it.

I've been coming to this city, off and on, for well over thirty years and each time it's different. The world has changed and so has Berlin.

Berlin is harder than it used to be because the most famous landmark has gone. «You're in the East», my driver keeps saying, in spite of the fact he himself is barely old enough to remember the Wall. Then later: «You're in the West». But the dedicated tourists who go looking for Berlin's distinguishing feature can't find it. They made a big mistake. They pulled it down.

The city of the famous Wall not actually having a wall. And the argument about the Wall is one part of a much larger argument the city has been with itself, what it calls the Haupstadtdebatte. What do we do about the capital? What do we do about the past?

Ah yes. The past.

Look at the everyday surface of Berlin, quotidian Berlin, once the city of confrontation, the city of demarcation, one ideology divided against another and separated by a wall. What was Hitler's ambition? To conquer Europe, certainly, but only as a pastime while he pursued his two more serious purposes: to kill the Jews and to rebuild Berlin. Read Speer. Why was Speer favoured? Why were Speer and Hitler intertwined? Speer found himself as close as anyone ever got the great dictator. Because Albert Speer was what Adolf Hitler dreamed of being.

He was an architect.

I see Hitler got what he wanted: not only was pre-war Berlin destroyed by Allied bombardment, but key parts of what was once Soviet Berlin have vanished as well, torn down in the last twenty years in a fit of righteous horror at past sufferings. In 1989, it was predicted that the reunification of Berlin would present the greatest architectural opportunity of the century. But truthfully, how has it worked out?

My best-ever visit to Berlin was just after the Wall came down. It looked poised to take off in new and wilder directions. A city with so much history was shifting once more to let history take another fascinating turn. But today, yhat's not how it feels. No, today it's as if the city's taking a holiday from history. «We had enough history. See where it got us.» Berlin, once the city of polarity, of East and West, of democracy and comunism, of fascism abd resistance, the twentieth-century battleground of art and politics is now the city of the provisional. And that's exactly why people like it.

It's not about ideas. It's about lifestyle.

DAVID HARE 'Berlin' (2009)

BERLIN NOTES (XXXV)

noreply@blogger.com (joan) — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 09:33:00 +0000

Walter Sanders 'Berlin Airlift' (1948)

I have distant memories of Berlin as a battle field: in the foreground of my mind a field of ruins, a capital devastated by the airborne fire of a strategy planned to strike at civilian populations, to demoralise whole societies.

As the main target of the allied air forces, the capital of the enemy state had to be annhilated. After London and in anticipation of Tokyo, Berlin had to be transformed into a desert of some eighty million cubic metres of rubble, a TABULA RASA.

Situated at a crossroads of railways and canals in the great north-German plain, as early as 1926 Berlin had become the aerial turntable of Europe. One of the world's most sprawling cities also came to have the most open skies.

In 1939, the construction of Tempelhof airport further increased its aeronautical ambitions, as if the Futuristic myth of the "flying nation" were bringing together Aryan and aerial -- not just "land" and "blood" but also "the air", the realm of atmospheric domination.

In fact, the victory of the Western allies was not achieved in 1945 but in 1948, with the Berlin Airlift, which continued until 1949 -- an unprecedented aero-strategic event in response to the terrestrial blockade of the German capital by Soviet forces.

The partitioning of occupied Germany and the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961 were therefore the manifestations of a historical event whose importance has been underestimated: the advent of the skies as a vital factor in the history of nations during the 20th century.

So, in the desert of the TABULA RASA, in the fields of ruins encircled by hostile forces, Berlin, restored capital of a reunited Germany. has become a building site, probably the biggest in the world, equalled only by Shanghai.

After the bombs, artillery barrages and "Stalin organs", the heavens con no longer wait. Once again, there is the urge to destroy, to wipe out not only what is really ugly, but anything which spoils the prospect of a glorious globalisation.

In keeping wirh these reconstituted façades, these "recomposed" historic monuments in the centre of the Potsdamer Platz, the absence of the architectural authenticity we find elsewhere reveals the uncertainty of the present time.

Nature is not a temple but a building site, claimed the supporters of historical materialism of sinister memory... When one sees the state in which they have left this "building site", from the Baltic to the Aral sea, one can only hope that the wide-open building site that is Berlin will not repeat the town-planning errors of the last century.

PAUL VIRILIO 'Open Skies over Berlin' (2000)

BERLIN NOTES (XXXIII)

noreply@blogger.com (joan) — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 11:17:00 +0000

Armando 'Zonder titel' (1957)

Berlin is an ugly city with beautiful remains. Berlin was badly mutilated by bomb, but not destroyed beyond recognition like Dresden or some of the cities in the Ruhr. Afterwards, it was still possible to tell which streets were which. Unlike Dresden, but Erich Kästner has described this in his diary.

What do I mean by beautiful remains? I mean the few lovely buildings, erected decades ago by the burgeoisie, which have been left undisturbed in dreary cities ruined by post-war architecture. After May 1945 it was necessary to build residential areas fast; people wanted a roof over their heads again. These neighbourhoods are vast spiritual wastelands, yet Berlin is full of them. At a larger stage, concrete high-rises popped up everywhere. Utopian architects assured us that they were the ultimate in aesthetic pleasure and that they would make humanity happy, but I, for one, find them depressing.

And yet the war is not the chief offender. After 1945 people demolished countless jaunty little houses and buildings from the late nineteenth century. Here too the rule was: new is good, old is ugly, out with the old. In recent years, people have become more cautious about knocking things down. The frenzy modernization has abated somewhat. People are back on the right track. They’re renovating.

In the meantime, a question has arisen: can you make a sweeping statement of that sort about modern architecture? Can I say that I loathe all (or nearly all) of post-war architecture? No. Because then, what about modern art? What about your own paintings? Exactly.

Berlin is a young city. It doesn’t have a majestic medieval past. Oh, here and there you might run across a dilapidated village church looking in disgruntlement at the city around it, but there are no proud Romanesque or Gothic cathedrals. You do see a host of churches built in neo-styles, mostly during the last century, but we won’t hold that against them. Better a neo-church than no church. A little circumspection can’t hurt.

So Berlin may not be a beautiful city, but it is exciting. What makes it exciting is the occasionally unbearable tension between a seemingly carefree present and an oppressive past. Berlin is a city teeming with places and traces.

ARMANDO 'From Berlin' (1996)

COMPARATIVE ARCHITECTURE (I)

noreply@blogger.com (joan) — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 09:17:00 +0000

Simultaneously with his entry as a teacher at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Ludwig Hilberseimer designed a City in the heart of the Friedrichstadt in Berlin. A project that becomes a kind of test of his Hochhausstadt of 1924.

Ludwig Hilberseimer 'Vorschlag zur Bebauung der Berliner City' (1929)

In that case, Hilberseimer took the capitalist logic of functionalism to the extreme. An extreme where the city was confused with the same system that generated it, where it no longer re-presented society but only re-produced it. Against the chaos of the Großstadt: order and uniformity.

Forty years later, Archizoom Associati include this photomontage in "Discorsi per immagini", an expression used by them and Superstudio as the title of their two contributions dedicated to a series of photomontages published in the December issue of Domus, where a whole set of non-functional objects inserted in the territory are represented. Images that show us the utopian conditions of our own reality.

Archizoom 'Quartieri paralleli per Berlino' (1969)

In this case, the multiplication, to infinity, of the Berlin Wall inspires this urban vision of transparent wall-buildings which croses and divides the city into multiple closed areas connected by a motorway.