The city of a hundred voices : Berlin's polyphonic urbanism

THE CITY OF A HUNDRED VOICES

Berlin's Polyphonic Urbanism

by

Benjamin S. Albrecht Master of Arts in Architecture Bachelor of Arts in Architecture

Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Ktinste Stuttgart

MASSACHUSES INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

AUG 2

4

2016

LIBRARIES

ARCHIVE

SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

MASTER OF SCIENCE IN ARCHITECTURE STUDIES AT THE

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

JUNE 2016

0 2016 Benjamin S. Albrecht. All rights reserved

The author herby grants to MIT permission to reproduce and to distribute publicly paper and electronic copies of this thesis document in whole or in part in any medium now known or

here-after created.

Signature redacted

Signatur of Author: Certified by: Accepted by: 'I, a 71 i ~4 tf Architecture

Signature redacted

' N YRafi Segal

Associate Professor of Architecture and Urbanism

_Signature redacted__

Takehiko Nagakura Associate Professor of Design and Computation Chair of the Department Committee on Graduate Students

The City

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Berlin's Polyphonic Urbanism

-Benjamin Albrecht SMArchS Urbanism

2016

THESIS COMMITTEE

Advisor: Rafi Segal Associate Professor of Architecture and Urbanism Department of Architecture, MIT

Reader: Mark Jarzombek Professor of History and Theory of Architecture

Department of Architecture, MIT

Roi Salgueiro Barrio Research Associate at the Center for Advanced Urbanism, MIT

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The City of a Hundred Voices

Berlin's Polyphonic Urbanism

by

Benjamin Albrecht

Submitted to the Department of Architecture on May 19, 2016 in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Architecture Studies.

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ABSTRACT:

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Berlin's multiple layers and its eclectic urban character of the past 100 years have resulted in a

city rich with different architectural voices and urban ideals. The constant making and unmaking -of Berlin's urban form has become part -of the its unique DNA. Yet, after its reunification in 1989, 0 a new voice emerged which began to strongly dominate the city's other "voices". Reacting to the C_ traumas of the previous century, this voice, now termed "The Critical Reconstruction," attempts to > glaze over the city's rich and conflicted personalities of the past. It resurrects a convenient and con- 0 servative interpretation of the 19th Century city and its bourgeois ideal of urbanity to "beautify" U)

and "unify" the urban environment. New projects that appear old, zoning laws that dictate all new

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inner-city developments to mimic Berlins fictive and idealized past, and many other planning and

uJ design operations, most symbolically the recent reconstruction of the Stadtschloss (City Castle),

are all representative of this trend. This "Critical Reconstruction" approach continues to lead the city into an architectural-urban monoculture, creating a homogenous image of the city, overpow-ering its other voices. Where there was once a plurality, now stands a single voice above the rest.

This project brings to the forefront a polyphonic mechanism by which Berlin's diminishing other voices can recover and regain a prominent role in shaping its urban character. By redeveloping the principles of each voice into spatial operations, speculative interventions into the city fabric redraw the image of the city through a manipulation of the lens through which the city is read by its users.

Supervisor: Rafi Segal, Associate Professor Department of Architecture, MIT Title: The City of a Hundred Voices: Berlin's Polyphonic Urbanism

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Table of Contents

Prologue

A Visit to Berlin

The City

of a Hundred Voices

Introduction Dyagnosis Proposal 5;

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The Voices Of Berlin

Griinderzeit / 19th Century Berlin Early Modernism

Nazi Architecture Socialist Classicism / Stalinism

DDR Modernism Late Western Modernism

Post-Modernism Period of Enthusiasm

Neo Conservative

Intermission

Excursion to Swan Island

Remixing the Voices: Urban Shuffle

Principles Operations Schemes Testing Ground

Bibliography

Appendix

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Berlin's Polyphonic Urbanism

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After beingy away from Germany for several years I came back and I went for a walk thrlougch the

city center of Berfln.

wanted to act a fresh look at the city, act as a t ourist or a situationist on a derive. I was c~irious aboult what I would see if I went into the representative center of Germany's capital. What kind of

limage would the city try to commun1-11icate?

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When I got out of the subway and walked past the endless construction sites on my way to the Museum Island. I saw that Berlin is still the same: construction as far as the eye can reach.

But then. as I got closer to the central island the first thing the struck me was this:

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Looking at it. I was a little confused, and not quite sure about what I saw there. As an architect educated in Germany I thought I should probably know what it is. So I looked it up and it turns out

that this is a reconstructed piece of Friedrich Schinkels Bauakadenie building from 1836.

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As I continued to the Island, still not sure what that piece was doing there, the next thing I saw was this:

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This is not a prop for a movie, It is a one-to-one detail section of the future facade of Berlin's new city castle.

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The city castle was the next thing I saw, and it looked something like this: 4

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And I remember that at this very location there was the famous Palace of the Republic, the former Eastern Germany's representative government center. This is a picture from 2008, where the

Palace of the Republic still exists bUt the prop for the new castle is already positioned. waiting to be realized.

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After seeing all of these strange and surreal additions to the cityscape, I had some new questions

about Berlin (and also about Germany). What is this city trying to do? What kind of cultural identity is it striving for with this? And what is the intended image of the city of Berlin and its

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On my search for Berlin's identity I found an interesting quote by the cultural historian Karl Scheffler that seemed to fit quite perfectly:

"Berlin is a city condemnedforever to becoming and never to being"

This quote is from 1910 but it more relevant now than ever before. Considering the last 100 years of Berlin with all of its traumatic events, the constant making and unmaking of Berlin's urban form has become part of its unique DNA. Berlin has become a city of multiple layers and its eclectic

urban character has resulted in a city rich with different architectural voices and urban ideals.

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The multiple layers and eclectic urban character of Berlin in the past 100 years have resulted in a city rich with different architectural voices. An architectural voice, an expression of an urban ideal comprised of both formal and conceptual elements,

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shapes the experience of the city and communicates visions of past and future society.

The conversation of these voices guides the city, creating an ethos unique to Berlin. Nine primary voices have contributed to the past century, falling in and out of favor, but always keeping up a dialogue. The range of the voices begins with the late 19th Century Grtnderzeit architecture, to Early Modernism, Nazi Architecture, Stalinism or Socialist Classicism, Late Modernism in East and West Berlin, Post-modernism to the enthusiastic Period of reunification and finally the now popular neo-conservative or "Critical Reconstruction".

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Each of these voices entered the conversation in its own specific way. Originating from individual traumas or various forces of transformation (see page 57-93), these voices were triggered by events that gave them their individual forms and ideologies. Each one possesses a unique answer to their transformative forces, and a new vision for an existing urbanity, which reacts to preexisting conditions.

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These new visions are communicated through strong images

-images that reflect a desired urbanity and in many cases also communicate a desired society. For example, the imagery produced by the Nazi regime communicates its vision of society both through its political propaganda as well as through the monumental nature of its architecture, as an axial classicism stripped down to its bare bones. Reacting to this, the 1954 Hauptstadt competition in West Berlin was full of proposals of anti-monumental, dispersed urbanisms embedded in nature, such as the entries by Hans Scharoun and Alison and Peter Smithson. Simultaneously, an alternative reaction to the Nazi fascist architecture arose in East Berlin, termed Stalinist Classicism, which monumentalized open spaces with heroic statues, amplifying the citizens Linder their new socialist leader.

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For about one century the voices of Berlin participated in a mutual U0 performance of overwriting, erasing, remaking, and combining to U maintain urban equilibrium in the city. However, emerging in the

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last twenty years, one voice has insidiously spread, dominating the existing fabric. Beginning at the reunification of Berlin by LU reacting to the traumas of the previous century, this voice, now 0 termed "The Critical Reconstruction," attempts to glaze over the

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Stadtschloss (City Castle), are all representative of this trend.

Acting at the building and city scale, the Critical Reconstruction created new zoning laws that dictate a perimeter block organization with a maximum building height of five stories and a faqade design that includes a specife ratio of stone and glass. The zoning is applied to the entire inner city and erases the non-conforming voices piece by piece. Taking the existing 19th century perimeter block as its inspiration, the new perimeter block of the Critical Reconstruction strips down and simplifies what was a rich and complex urban form, replacing it with a homogenous and simplistic interpretation.

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On an architectural scale, one of the key symptoms of the Critical Reconstruction's desire for a historicized city is exemplified by the reconstruction of the City Castle (Stadtschloss). Replacing the now unfashionable Palace of the Republic from the socialist GDR era, this project marks a unique moment where collective memory is made manifest through a work of architecture. The initial idea of the 2008 brief was to create a public monument that represents an open worldview, communicating a city ready for the 21st century, which embraces technology and change, yet rooted in culture and tradition.

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The idea to rebuild the castle stems from the use of historical monuments to evoke a gesture of reunification in a divided city. The new castle - or what will now be called the Humboldtforum

- is meant to reunite the East and West and create a new but old common center. However, the planners conveniently forgot that this was never what the original feudal castle of the 19th century was intended to do. The main prominent fagade was oriented to the West, towards the newly developed Friedrichstadt, effectively making the old medieval East of Berlin its backyard. Following the model of a baroque castle, the formal organization of the current project is deeply rooted in segregation. A closed and uninviting block surrounds a royal courtyard protected by thick walls. The project of the Humboldforum is reconstructing an urban condition that never was, fabricating a memory of a reality that never existed.

These future memories can be found sprinkled all around the city. The Visit to Berlin shows some of them, these prop-like building 0 sections that suggest an inevitable future and project the image of the city before it is built. Are they just images, or are they tools of subversion that covertly instill a homogenous morphology? And further, what does it mean to build an image of the city based on an interpretation of one specific voice, namely the 19th century and its bourgeois ideal of urbanity? Why this voice?

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Projecting a counter image to the over-saturated one of the current status quo, this proposal operates on the same grounds as its target. By interjecting in the contemporary image of the city, the project facilely combats the assertions being imposed by the Critical Reconstruction. By hacking Google Street View, the contemporary image of the city, the project brings to the forefront a polyphonic mechanism by which Berlin's diminishing other voices can recover, and positions them so that they can regain a prominent role in shaping Berlin's urban character.

Each voice comes with a very specific formal principle that is U translated into a set of operations (see page 105-129) and applied

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onto the visual testing ground. By redeveloping the principles of Q each voice into spatial operations, speculative interventions into

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Mollmfnen talizing spaces instead o f bild ings.

Grand llaici gme and simplistic decoratiOrs

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REACTION TO TRAUMA:

Urban Landscape and the Anti-Monumental City.

Based on the ideals of German Expressionism (Gkusernekette/ Bruno Taut) and Earlyv Modernism.

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Rational and modern architectural language for represenitative buildings. Pragmatic solutiols for prefalbricated mass housing: Plattenbauten

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Failure of rationalistic modernism and the divisioni of the city in: housing, workinil, leisure

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A skeptical and critical interprelatiions of Clture and history cis a reaction to rationalistic modern ideas

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Berlin's reunification and restablisment as the new / old capital citv of

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A ftesh startfor hC City that l(Iddresses its historic traumnas but is optimistic

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A Short Essay of the film Swan Island

-This excursion shines a spotlight on one of the many moments in Berlin's history when its self-remaking was highly active. The film Swan Island from 1983 tells a story that highlights the discourse between two different architectural voices in Berlin, the late

GDR Modernism and the 19th Century tenement housing.

The age-old question of the correlation between built form and social behavior finds an answer in 1980's East Berlin, revealed by the film Swan Island ("Insel der Schwane" 1983) directed by Herrmann Zschoche. Following the life of Stefan Kolbe, who was relocated from an idyllic rural life by a new job for his construction worker father, the film unravels the adjustments, both social and phenomenological,

the boy undergoes in his new concrete environment of the Marzahn housing projects. Beyond a tale of the poignancy and angst of coming-of-age,

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improvable ways in the lives of their inhabitants. Explicitly,

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narrative, and implicitly, through a reading of the reactions of official and public voices to the films' release and historical events the film addressed, the effects of architecture are mapped onto the social sphere. In this way they serve to define a particular moment of convergence of the various transitions occurring at that moment in Berlin's history.

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Swan Island acts as an eyewitness to the historic events, showing an urbanism reduced to pure efficiency producing a non functional society: Parents who don't care about their kids, a janitor with a strict conception of tidiness which he tries to impose onto the kids, weak teachers, and an anarchic rowdy attitude of the young boys that try to use their environment in a playful and free manner. All this happens in front of a dystopic background of unfinished concrete slabs situated loosely in muddy ground. When the film was shot in 1983 the housing projects of Marzahn

98 Benjamin Albrecht 9. -4 I' W--_J I

were nearly completed but around the big residential towers it was still a construction

site everywhere - none of the promised

public plazas had been realized. Upon his arrival at the new "Plattenbauten" Stefan is overwhelmed with the appearance of the development and the ongoing construction everywhere. The "Plattenbauten" were intended to represent pinnacles of socialist community planning and forward thinking,

but, as was so often the case in the later years in East Germany, the system's ever-growing bureaucracy became its own worst enemy. Compromises to the ideas of the Marzahn communities were made every day until the final result was a pale shadow of the ideas and ideals of the original planners.' The German city planner and theorist Harald Bodenschatz explains in his brief history of Berlins urban design "The public spaces in between the concrete-slab apartment buildings were often neglected due to the rapid pace of construction. Nevertheless, moving into such a settlement represented upward social mobility as the older,

pre-World War I housing stock had not been modernized and

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therefore generally lacked appropriate sanitary fittings."

The story centers around the teens living in the housing complex, their internal conflicts and their attempts to have some influence over the features of the complex's playground that was promised but was never built. The viewer follows Stefan's struggles as he adapts to new people and the radically

different environment. With its visually cold

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realism the director shows us his view of the housing projects; construction everywhere, M1

newly finished towers, artificial and slick, loosely dispersed in a field of mud and decamped earth. In many scenes the kids fight in the dystopic and brutal architectural landscapes of the

construction sites. Contrasting this to the idyllic countryside scenes in the beginning of the movie, the new housing area reminds the viewer more of an industrial mine rather than of an ideal housing community. The schools are temporary barracks and the kids look rather lost between the machinery and the concrete slabs. Their playgrounds are unfinished buildings or stacks of precast concrete elements. In the first years of the Marzahn developments most public functions were either of tentative nature or simply nonexistent.

The film also communicates how the usual atmospheres of these developments affected their inhabitants. For example, the sheer scale of the buildings completely

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Stefan thinks they ridiculously resemble advent calendars. The director embedded symbols in the movie that are emblematic of the social conditions in the period of the early 80s in East Berlin. The most prominent of these is the elevator. In a tense scene, the older kid called Windjacke, who has been threatening Stefan, displays his power over the elevator. He knows how to stop it and what to do in case it gets stuck somewhere in between floors, and he also knows that Stefan is new to this technology. He broadcasts his superiority as the older teenager who knows the technique, and manipulates the elevator to make it stop and scare the young boy.

The elevator is also the social space of the building. In one scene, Stefan is coached on how to navigate this new social realm. The janitor tells him, "You have to greet everyone in the elevator, you are not allowed to paint the walls of the elevator or any other

walls of the building! No strangers are allowed in the building. Don't walk on the grass or leave any of the designated paths. Don't let anyone in! clear to you young fella'?!?'- In the final scene of the movie Stefan and Windjacke are chasing each other through the skeleton of a raw and unfinished housing tower. The showdown is a fight between the two in an empty elevator shaft. Windjacke tries to push Stefan down into the depths of the shaft but Stefan manages to jump to the side and Windjacke falls down instead. He manages to hold on to a steel rebar and together with Stefan's help escapes his near death. This scene had to be heavily adapted to the demanded regulations of the censorship. Zschoches first version had a more dramatic ending, leaving it open and not clear to the viewer which kid fell to his death.

The city center, another symbol, represents another reality, similar to the idyllic rural one of Stefan's past, which is being displaced by the new regime. On a trip to the historic center of Berlin Stefan and a girlfriend from his school visit the abandoned and desolate 19' century tenement houses of Prenzlauer Berg. She brings him to the pre-World War I housing area where she was born and tells him about the vibrant social life they had there: "there was interaction everywhere, my grandmother lived right across the street and everybody was connected" until the whole family moved to the new "Plattenbauten" (GDR housing projects), dispersed over the whole city, wherever they could get an apartment. This scene was shot in 1981,

just

shortly before the 1987 restorations of the central area of Berlin. Here, Herrmann Zschoche picks up a popular theme of the time. explained by Florian Urban in his dissertation "The Invention of the Historic City" as the increasing awareness of the importance of the historic urban fabric of East Berlin in the 1980s that let to its expensive restoration and rebuilding of the late 191h century architecture for the 750' anniversary of central

area.-For the historical context of the movie it is important to

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understand the general dynamics of the time in the GDR. The film was released in the 1980s, when the GDR was facing increasing economical., political and social problems. Prices for food and commodities were increasing at a staggering rate.' Despite all the efforts of the propaganda it

became more and more clear to a broader public range of society that the economic politics of the GDR were not successful. In this political climate of rising frustration, culture, such as music, art and film, played an important role in the articulation of such problems. However. with increasing political instability in the GDR, the freedom of expression and the

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freedom of speech were more and more reduced and the cultural institutions underwent increasing censorship. The state-owned DEFA Film production company experienced rising problems when realizing any film that could have been understood as even slightly critical of the regime or the political ideals of the society. The directors were under high pressure and censorship, which resulted in many cases of resignations throughout the 1980s.' In the case of Swan Island the movie had to undergo multiple steps of censorship. In 1983, after many passes of adaptation, such as giving the protagonist a short monologue of explaining the advantages of the new housing projects, Zschoche finally released a version of his movie. Even though he made drastic changes to the movie

in order to get it release through the DEFA Film Production, Swan Island was still very controversial and too critical for the regime of the GDR. Many scenes of this movie reflect problems of daily life in the GDR and allowed the viewers to identify with the situations of the protagonists. This portrait was not aligned with the official propaganda for a successful housing policy of

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the GDR. It turned out to be an unsuccessful production and a financial disaster and only later got recognition from a broader public.

Thinking of the importance of the DEFA film academy in the GDR, the cultural studies of its relation between society and politics are few and far between.

One of the important researchers in this field is Dagmar Schittly. In her book "Zwischen Regie und Regime" she explains the dynamics between the Eastern German culture of film-making and the politics of the republic and the social conditions. To her. the medium of film reflects in a unique way the social condition

and the relation between culture and politics in the GDR . As

a-the German director and film critic Egon Guna-ther puts it; "The DEFA movies show in many cases, an often unintentional, reflection of the condition of circumstances in the GDR"'. In the

pragmatic realism of many examples

the everyday life is reflected and shows us clearly that every action in the GDR was political - there was no private realm the way we think about it now. The movie was criticized in the GDR media as "distorting the view

of our reality"9 being "on the shadow

-side of DEFA Film production"'

and for not representing the "real"

GDR youth in the magazine Junge Welt 3.Mai 1983. Interestingly, even the BdA ("Bund der Architekten"

-the Architectural Association of the GDR) campaigned for a restriction of the movie, claiming that the image of the housing policy had been sullied." However, the fact that the movie addresses the problems of the built environment from within the GDR and from a "non-professional" perspective gives us an interesting understanding of the hopes and disappointments in the everyday life of the regime.

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Clearly, the architectural environment surrounding people in a society is a controversial issue that cuts to the core of the very

ideals of a society. Swan Island demonstrates, through the story

of one boy, the kinds of effects that architecture can have on lived experience, and tells the tale of how this may have played out during this period in Berlin. It shows that despite problematic occurrences and the overall pessimistc tone of the film, stemming from the drastic shift from rural life to living in the "Plattenbauten," the director creates an austere beauty with a severely plain feeling, not only melancholic

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and lonely, but also unscripted and somehow full of potential. He orchestrates the image of the Marzahn projects according to the aesthetics of Modernism and Russian Constructivism - orthogonal objects floating in the turbulence of raw earth. Kids play in-between, moving freely, neglecting existing borders as they rewrite the terrain according to their own rules. They act as agents of re-naturalization in a rigid and "unnatural" environment of rationality. In other images of photographers in the same period in Marzahn we can see similar scenarios; mostly finished concrete slabs, sitting amidst untamed earth, creating a wild and jungle-like feeling. (Fig.5,6,7) The movie picked up this very aesthetic and amplified it. In that way it can be read as not only criticizing the missed opportunities of the social housing projects of East Germany but also creating a hope and faith in the human ingenuity and its potential to generate a public social life that reshapes its own environment. As if taking cues from the latent message residing in the film, Marzahn mostly overcame the 1990s exodus due to high crime rates and unappealing living conditions, to become an area that

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is now experiencing expanding popularity and another wave of individuals rezoning its potential to fill the desires unachievable

in city centers."

1 This process is portrait very well in the DEFA movie 'The Architects' from 1990 by Peter Kahane

2 Harald Bodenschatz: Berlin Urban Design -A Brief History, p.66

3 https://www.berlin.de/ba-marzahn-hellersdorf/ ueber-den-bezirk/historisches/artikel.234978.php

4 Florian Urban: The Invention of the Historic City - Building the Past in East Berlin 1970-1990, MIT p.19

5 Bundeszentrale fur politische Bildung: Entwicklung der DDR bis Ende der 80er Jahre http://www.bpb.de/izpb/9753/ entwicklung-der-ddr-bis-ende-der-80er-jahre?p=all

6 Bundeszentrale fur politische Bildung: DDR-Alltag Im Film Verbotene uns zensierte Spielfilme

(http://www.bpb.de/apuz/26959/ddr-alltag-im-film-verbotene-und-zensierte-spielfilme-der-defa?p=all )

7 Dagmar Schittly: Zwischen Regie und Regime. Die Filmpolitik der SED im Spiegel der DEFA-Produktionen

8 Egon Gunter: Ja, sind die noch zu retten? Vom unbemerkten Ver schwinden der DDR Filmgeschichte", Suddeutsche Zeitung 21. Dec. 1995

9 Horst Knietzsch in: Neues Deutschland 4.Mai 1983: "Verstellt die Sicht auf unsere Wirklichkeit"

10 Hans Eggert in: Junge Welt 13. Mai 1983

11 Maria Brosing: '""Es ist ein Experiment". Traditionsbildung in der DDR-Literatur anhand von Brigitte Reimanns Roman "Franziska Linkerhand"" p.68

12 Theresa MUnch: Marzahn wird hip, Die Welt:

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