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| Berlin - Kiefholzstraße am 14.9.1986 |
At first, when he was new here, he had examined the border wall, whose most notable feature was that it divided the city down the middle instead of surrounding it. But the view from any one of the lookout towers built to afford Westerners a glimpse of life behind the Wall had invariably disappointed him. In no place did the infamous construction achieve the height and breadth of his imagining; it looked more like the cheap realization of an architectonic formula that achieved its fullest expression in the center of the city. At that time he developed a mental image of a city expanding evenly from the edges toward the center, following a program of continuous cell division that seemed exclusively designed for inward expansion. The strangest thing was that the inhabitants appeared not to notice their own Wall complex, for their unceasing separations seemed to trace a pattern that was etched inside their souls.
PETER SCHNEIDER 'Couplings' (1992)