BERLIN NOTES (XLIV)

Edward Hopper 'Approaching a City' (1946)

What lures me, amongst many things, was when I first went in there, there were great segments of the city that were empty. There were lots, where buildings had stood. The first thing that it reminded me of was when I was a child, in the Bronx. We used to play in lots that looked like that, of course they were lots without buildings. But here the buildings were destroyed, erased. So there was a correspondence between the lots that I knew as a child and this place in Germany that had these empty lots. That was number one. Number two, what struck me was, although the buildings had been destroyed, and had disappeared, the aura came through the ground. In other words, the physicality of the buildings were not there, but one could feel the sense of structures having been there. That was what we were talking before. There were disappearences that had occured, but yet the atmosphere of these structures was coming out of the earth. That was two. Number three, the strange condition of sensing Edward Hopper. Hopper's paintings were basically of Hoboken and places like that. Somehow, there was a condition in Berlin that brought back senses of Hopper. That was I tried to do, by the way, in my structures that I built in Berlin now. To capture some of those, amongst other things, some of those things.

JOHN HEJDUK in conversation with David Shapiro (1991)

BERLIN NOTES (XLIII)

Ⓒ Neue Nationalgalerie, Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Reinhard Friedrich, 1968.

I love Mies. My colleagues may not love Mies, but I love Mies. I love Mies' architecture. The Berlin Museum without a doubt. David, the only other time I had an architectural experience - when I came into Berlin, my soul looked up at the cantilever of the Mies National Museum, the black building made of black steel - was when I was a kid and I went to Italy with Gloria for the first time and we went down to Paestum. When we arrived and saw the Paestum Temples, we looked up and we saw the capital, the column and the lintel, and it was a religious experience. Not too many religious experiences in one's life, and I had two or three of them. But the other one was when I went into Berlin and saw the Berlin Museum at night. There is something about Berlin's air. I want to make this point. To see a black building in the Berlin night, which is blue of the night, the dark blue of the night. The blue of the night is crystal. The air is crystal because Berlin is surrounded by water, Berlin, all kinds of water. So it's a different kind of air that forms an atmosphere which is crystalline, black-blue, you had the black steel that's Berlin.

JOHN HEJDUK in conversation with David Shapiro (1991)

BERLIN NOTES (XLI)

Daniel Libeskind 'Out of Line' (1991)

Berlin could be seen as an exemplary spiritual capital of the twenty-first century, as it once was the apocalyptic symbol of the twentieth-century demise. The identity of Berlin cannot be re-founded on the ruins of history or on the illusory ‘reconstructions’ of an arbitrarily selected past.

The transformation of the shape of (future) city must be accompanied by corresponding changes in the mentality associated with prewar lot lines, anachronistic visions, dreams that money can buy. What is necessary is an optimistic view of the twenty-first century: a radical rethinking of zoning, function, property, and program. These categories are no longer appropriate to the changed relation between capitol, capital, public responsibility, and the end of ideology.

What we need is a connection of Berlin to and across its own history. This connection, this movement, goes through the relation of the old and the new, capitol and capital, full and empty, the 'no-longer' and the 'not yet'.

The lost center cannot be reconnected like an artificial limb to an old body, but must generate an overall transformation of the city.

Potsdamer Platz can be the place where the East-West, center-periphery division can overcome the conflicts that were born, witnessed, and died in this very place.

These conflicts cannot be resolved by reconstructing a hollow past, but by laying new foundations and new images that are open to concrete dynamics.

DANIEL LIBESKIND 'Out of Line' (1991)