Berlin - city without form

lecture at the university of puerto rico, san juan,
15th of april 2009

lecturer: martin schwegmann, urban passion, berlin



"Berlin is the rome of the 20th century"

Berlin is a city torn between the historic reconstruction in the spirit of the innercity masterplan (planwerk innenstadt) after 1990 and temporary uses with its vibrant club culture. The titel, "berlin - city without form", is also the title of a book by philipp oswalt, the director of the bauhaus foundation in dessau. His book was written in 2001, about 10 years after the reunification. Back than it was an important counter voice to the backwards directed planning culture of berlin. He was one of the first who systematically analysed and acknowledged the underground and unplanned development in berlin. To oswalt, the urban quality of berlin lies not in its planned spaces, but much more in the overlapping and the resulting cracks of many different planing paradigms, which give berlin its harsh, yet very vivid impetus. To him berlin is the rome of the 20th century, showing all big political utopias and disasters in one big scared face.



Ten years after his book came out, the questions and concepts he brought up are still of utmost importance. The discussions are still going on and berlin is about to loose a great deal of its shapelessness - and maybe by this its unmistakable vigour. The re-erection of the castle is a new peak in brainless reconstruction. Martin Schwegmann, a witness and one of a new generation of architects, who studied in Berlin in the 90ies and is following the development for about 15 years, draws the main lines of the urban development of Berlin and gives an inside to the contemporary discourses, battle fields and glory wholes of berlins urban development.

Workshop :"SPACES AND IDEAS -Urban Utopias and Realities from Latin America to Eastern Europe"

20th of june 2009, georg simmel center of metropolitan studies, berlin

Utopias of modernism between Latin America and Eastern Europe: How do they look and what has become of them? In the framework of the GSZ workshop “Spaces and Ideas” on June 20th, different urban utopias got revisited and compared. Prof. Jorge Lizardi-Pollock, an architectural historian of the university of Puerto Rico, focuses on the development of city renewal from the 1930s to the 1960s in Latin America, especially in Mexico and the Caribbean. The town planner Florian Koch (University of Applied Sciences, Erfurt) describes the archetypical construction of the “socialist city” and shows the realities of socialist urban development by looking at assorted Eastern European cities. In the last lecture Joanna Kusiak (University of Warsaw, Philosophy, Sociology) analyses the specific condition of South-East European urban development as a result of the immediate availability of the city for dictatorships. The workshop was moderated by Martin Schwegmann, Architect and Urban Researcher. Download Program

http://graduatesstudiesgroup.blogspot.com/