2/27/2009

BERLIN NOTES (XII)


Spielvogel 'Berlin Wall at Stresemannstrasse' (1985)

Imagining Nothingness is:

Pompeii – a city built with the absolute minimum of walls and roofs...
The Manhattan Grid – there a century before there was a “there” there...
Central Park – a void that provoked the cliffs that now define it...
The Guggenheim...
Hilberseimer's “Mid West” with its vast plains of zero-degree architecture...
The Berlin Wall...

They all reveal that emptiness in the metropolis is not empty, that each void can be used for programs whose insertion into the existing texture is a procustean effort leading to mutilation of both activity and texture.

REM KOOLHAAS 'Imagining Nothingness' (1985)