COMPARATIVE ARCHITECTURE (II)

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)

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)

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)