TUTOR: ALEXIS GERMANOS ‘Each creative act involves an exchange. Each new work of…
XX Designing Histories
TUTOR: ALEXIS GERMANOS
‘Each creative act involves an exchange. Each new work of art is supported and enriched by its sources and its cultural and physical contexts. Once in existence, the new work in turn revises its sources and contents, acting on them directly or refuting that they be reevaluated in light of its presence…in each creative act the old and the new are inextricably entwined and inescapably beholden to each other.’
– Paul S Byard
30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the resurrection of the Berliner Schloss, on the site of the former The Palast Der Republik, the symbolic seat of power for the GDR, marks the culmination of the Critical Reconstruction of the City as the capital of the reunified Germany- the rebuilding of the city on the pre-war figureground plan.
Recalling the fragmented writings of Berlin-born Walter Benjamin, who makes a distinction between experience ‘with’ history, rather than mere experience ‘of history’, the rebuilding of the Schloss raises many questions.
These contexts created the critical conditions for our interrogation of Berlin and the advancement of individual theses projects in which we have explored how interdependent notions of history, memory, preservation & mythology operate on the processes of our architectural design and our interpretation of the city. As storytellers, we have combined words and architecture to tell the story we don’t yet know how to tell.
With reference to Paul Byard’s notions of the ‘Combined-Work,’ and through a process of addition, subtraction and intervention, we have sought to explore the opportunities set-out by existing bodies of expressive material as located within our project sites.
Working in the axis of time, we have considered how architecture can reform and renew- how our building proposals anticipate change, how they can have multiple life-spans and multiple meanings as the history of the city evolves and transform. We have questioned how can one artefact or building affect the meaning of another when different expressions combine and interact?
In Unit XX we design through making. We are interested in the potential of the physical model as a heuristic device, as a tool to arrive at an idea. Models are works of craftsmanship, but they are also a mechanism for thinking and designing.
We have sought the potential of making, of engaging with the substance of materials, as a means to unlock our immanent architectural attitudes that have led to serendipitous, yet poetic and meaningful designs.
Tracing architecture’s genealogical lines, we have examined how Berlin’s architect’s have looked back to the past to understand the present and reimagine the future- not to replicate architecture, but to transform it and draw out its relevance for our own era.
In this sense, we are interested in the creative tension between memory and invention or in other words, between making and the architect’s memory. We have asked, where does memory end and invention begin?
ISABEL BAZETT
“Constructing Memories -Architecture as a framework to analyse Berlin’s struggle with redemption through…
OLIVER BURCHELL
“Counter-iconoclasm at the Intersection of Discrepant Body and Soul” This project utilises Unit…
ANDREEA-IOANA CIUTAC
“Babel’s Tower – Wrapping History Around Ruins” As a story teller, I have embarked…
BILLY GIBSON
“Spiritual Embodiment, A Diasporic City and The Palace of Tacheles” This thesis explores notions of…
SAMUEL JONES
Schinkel-School: Authenticity Through Capriccio Following World War II, many damaged buildings found themselves…
KATERINA KOUROUSHI
“Archeological Retrofit of Hansaviertel” After WWII there was a debate in Berlin on how…
ABI LUCAS
“The Anti-Museum: An Abstracted Monumental Landscape” This thesis is a critique on preservation,…
SENURA RATIYALA
“The City of Critical Reconciliation|Die Stadt der Kritischen Versöhnung“ The thesis looks to…