POMONA'S TEMPLE

K.F. Schinkel 'Entwurf für den Pomonatempel bei Potsdam' (1800)

Karl Friedrich Schinkel, on the death of Friedrich Gilly, left the Bauakademie in order to complete his master's unfinished projects. During this period, the young Schinkel, only nineteen years old, received his first commission. The still almost unknown Temple of Pomona in Potsdam. A pavilion in the gardens of the Pfingstberg, then Judenberg, owned by the wife of the cartographer and privy councillor Carl Ludwig von Oesfeld.

Richard Peter 'Pomonatempel am Pfingstberg, Vorderfront' (1945)

In the 18th century, the Pfingstberg was a land planted with vineyards which was later transformed into a garden. In fact, there had already been a small building, intended for leisure, with the same name. In honor of the Roman goddess, with no Greek equivalent or feast on the calendar, Pomona: patrona pomorum, lady of fruits. But not only of fruits but, by extension, of fruit trees and the hortus, during its cropping and also flowering.

'Pomonatempel auf dem Pfingstberg' (1981)

Schinkel, however, located his small temple on a higher site than the previous one. To be able to enjoy a magnificent panoramic view, he turned the roof into a roof, accessible from a back staircase. In a way, it could be said that this first work, a simple prostyle with its four ionic order columns, foreshadows elements that we can find in other projects, subsequent to his trip to Italy. Such as the Mausoleum for Queen Louise in Charlottenburg, or the Neue Wache in Unter den Linden.

Leo Seidel 'Der Pomonatempel heute' (2020)

Years later, between 1847 and 1863, the gardener and landscape architect Peter Joseph Lenné was commissioned by Frederick William IV of Prussia to design a Belvedere on the same site, which is now part of the Neuer Garten. Lenné decided to keep the Temple and decided to incorporate it into his garden. But what he could not avoid was that, after 1945, the temple would be abandoned and turned, paradoxically, into a real romantic ruin. But it has finally been rebuilt, though with a rather dubious aesthetic criterion.

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)

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)

BERLIN NOTES (XXXIII)

Armando 'Zonder titel'  (1957)

Berlin is an ugly city with beautiful remains. Berlin was badly mutilated by bomb, but not destroyed beyond recognition like Dresden or some of the cities in the Ruhr. Afterwards, it was still possible to tell which streets were which. Unlike Dresden, but Erich Kästner has described this in his diary.

What do I mean by beautiful remains? I mean the few lovely buildings, erected decades ago by the burgeoisie, which have been left undisturbed in dreary cities ruined by post-war architecture. After May 1945 it was necessary to build residential areas fast; people wanted a roof over their heads again. These neighbourhoods are vast spiritual wastelands, yet Berlin is full of them. At a larger stage, concrete high-rises popped up everywhere. Utopian architects assured us that they were the ultimate in aesthetic pleasure and that they would make humanity happy, but I, for one, find them depressing.

And yet the war is not the chief offender. After 1945 people demolished countless jaunty little houses and buildings from the late nineteenth century. Here too the rule was: new is good, old is ugly, out with the old. In recent years, people have become more cautious about knocking things down. The frenzy modernization has abated somewhat. People are back on the right track. They’re renovating.

In the meantime, a question has arisen: can you make a sweeping statement of that sort about modern architecture? Can I say that I loathe all (or nearly all) of post-war architecture? No. Because then, what about modern art? What about your own paintings? Exactly.

Berlin is a young city. It doesn’t have a majestic medieval past. Oh, here and there you might run across a dilapidated village church looking in disgruntlement at the city around it, but there are no proud Romanesque or Gothic cathedrals. You do see a host of churches built in neo-styles, mostly during the last century, but we won’t hold that against them. Better a neo-church than no church. A little circumspection can’t hurt.

So Berlin may not be a beautiful city, but it is exciting. What  makes it exciting is the occasionally unbearable tension between a seemingly carefree present and an oppressive past. Berlin is a city teeming with places and traces.

ARMANDO 'From Berlin' (1996)

BERLIN NOTES (XIX)

Des enfants se risquent à regarder au-dessus du Mur de Berlin dans le quartier de Kreutzberg (1963)

West Berlin, May 1978: a city under siege yet open. [...] As with any siege, there must be fortifications, or at least a wall, and here this was built not by the besieged but by the besiegers, not so much to surround the other as in self-defense against the fascination exerted by the other, and to prevent defection from within its own ranks. In this sense, the Berlin Wall marked a singular advance in the 'de-construction' of the binary oppositions upon which our culture rests.

A wall: in truth, at least in its most recent form (1967), a mere barrier, a simple partition [...] that now seems absurdly miserable.

Recto/verso, obverse/reverse: the wall - like an écroché, like a ruin: the ruin that it was from the begining - had no readily identifiable wrong side. [...] The people on the other side, like the prisoner's in Plato's cave, perceived only an echo (in the distance, beyond the no-man's-land).

HUBERT DAMISCH 'Skyline. La ville Narcisse' (1996)