A post-wall city
Wenders, Wim, “Der Himmel ueber Berlin” 1987
1988 is the year when the movie “Der Himmel ueber Berlin”(eng: “The sky above Berlin”) was published. A black-and-white vision of West- Berlin is curated from a perspective of two angels. Accompanying human beings in their unspoken dilemmas the eternal creatures themselves seem to be submersed in a certain kind of Weltschmerz, unable to escape the malaise. This melancholy depicts the ambience of West-Berlin: a city in a political vacuum of division – an ideological and consequently, since 1961, a spatial one.
1988 is also the year of the exhibition “Berlin – a monument or a theoretical model?” with entries from architects from all around the globe showcasing “the poles between which the architectural concepts at the end of the 20th century can exist”. “How to think of the architectural visions when no one believes in dreams anymore?” (1) asked then Kristin Feireiss, the German curator of the exhibition. John Hejduk points out in his comment to the exhibition the presence of the pathological condition that seems to endanger the discipline of architecture. Indeed, the whole spectrum of approaching the pathological condition of divided West-Berlin was introduced in 1988, from a denial of the disease existence, to its treatment to letting the patient die in hope for a better after-life.
The momentum of the theoretical future visions has a breakthrough only a year later, in 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall. The absence of the wall becomes paradoxically Berlin’s biggest challenge when almost overnight must it reinvent itself not only as a o n e city but also as a capital of the newly reunified Germany. Entering the last decade of the 20th century Berlin becomes the biggest construction site in Europe and almost every architect wants to have a saying about the city’s future. Renzo Piano, Norman Foster and Richard Rogers design simultaneously Potsdamer Platz, Mario Botta and Daniel Libeskind - Alexanderplatz. The latter one and Peter Eisenmann, each on their own, find in Berlin a perfect site and historical condition for deconstruction.
Defining Berlin - a city with an unprecedented history - both before and after 1989, has always reflected a broader discourse on architecture, collective memory, public space and a city as a political and aesthetical category.
1 Feireiss, Kristin, „Einfuehrung“ in „Berlin: Denkmal oder Denkmodell? Architektonische Entwürfe für den Einbruch in das 21. Jahrhundert“, Ernst&Sohn, 1988 Berlin
This is just an abstract of an essay for Prof. Anthony Vidler’s class on postmodernism at The Cooper Union.
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