lranslated from the German by

Francesco Rogier
Fntz , cumeycr is chairman and profes-
sor of history and theory at the chool of
\rchitccturc, Uni\crsitv of Dortmund
Federal Republic of '
1, 2. Views of Berlin and
Pompeii
Fritz Neumeyer
OMA's Berlin: The Polemic
Island in the City
This essay was written far away from Berlin, in 1987-88,
dunng my stay at the Getty Center for the History of Art
and the Humanities in Santa Monica. Against the back-
drop of Southern California, whose way of life provides a
distinct ease seemingly capable of accommodating every
conceivable kind of private philosophy and ideology, the
fenced-in condition of Berlin, together with its ideological
narrow-mindedness, took on a bizarre remoteness and
almost surreal artificiality.
ow 1 am, for a while, back in my hometown Berlin. The
dynamics of the reality here have accelerated in an incred-
ible way, equally surreal and fantastic simply because
nobody would ever have imagined things to happen as they
did. The events of 9 ovember 1989 took place during the
translation of this essay. The opening of the Berlin Wall
required at least a revision of the verb tenses, switching
from the present to the past. For a historian, to witnes
history in action is a singular experience: one rarely gets the
chance to watch one's own observations disappear into the
past and suddenly become part of history because of the
vital changes of life- which is the very essence of history.
The Pregnant Gaze: As Architecture
"Berlin is a laboratory. It historical richness reside in the
prototypical sequence of its models: neoclassical city, early
metropolis, modernist testbed, war victim, Lazarus, Cold
War demonstration, etc. First bombed, then divided, Ber-
lin is now centerle s, a collection of centers, some of
37
lranslated from the German by
Francesco Rogier
Fntz , cumeycr is chairman and profes-
sor of history and theory at the chool of
\rchitccturc, Uni\crsitv of Dortmund
Federal Republic of '
1, 2. Views of Berlin and
Pompeii
Fritz Neumeyer
OMA's Berlin: The Polemic
Island in the City
This essay was written far away from Berlin, in 1987-88,
dunng my stay at the Getty Center for the History of Art
and the Humanities in Santa Monica. Against the back-
drop of Southern California, whose way of life provides a
distinct ease seemingly capable of accommodating every
conceivable kind of private philosophy and ideology, the
fenced-in condition of Berlin, together with its ideological
narrow-mindedness, took on a bizarre remoteness and
almost surreal artificiality.
ow 1 am, for a while, back in my hometown Berlin. The
dynamics of the reality here have accelerated in an incred-
ible way, equally surreal and fantastic simply because
nobody would ever have imagined things to happen as they
did. The events of 9 ovember 1989 took place during the
translation of this essay. The opening of the Berlin Wall
required at least a revision of the verb tenses, switching
from the present to the past. For a historian, to witnes
history in action is a singular experience: one rarely gets the
chance to watch one's own observations disappear into the
past and suddenly become part of history because of the
vital changes of life- which is the very essence of history.
The Pregnant Gaze: As Architecture
"Berlin is a laboratory. It historical richness reside in the
prototypical sequence of its models: neoclassical city, early
metropolis, modernist testbed, war victim, Lazarus, Cold
War demonstration, etc. First bombed, then divided, Ber-
lin is now centerle s, a collection of centers, some of
37
3. Delirious Berlin: wall graffiti,
1987
assemblage 11
which are voids. "
1
This portrait of Berlin, which Rem
Koolhaas drew from his collection of metropolitan picture
postcards, and from his own urban imagination, catalogues
a panorama of historical stations, pre enting Berlin as an
archaeological site upon which enigmatic circumstances
have layered themselves. As a modern-day Pompeii, this
city, divided in two by a wall that, at the same time, sepa-
rated the world into ideological camps, has secured its
place next to ew York, Paris, and Los Angeles within
Koolhaas's manifestos of "metropolitan architecture." The
characteristic mixture of mass and void, history and
destruction, the coexistence of historical form and radically
altered reality exists nowhere else as it does in Berlin. The
spectrum of contradictions accumulated here has had an
especially stimulating effect on OMA's sense of experimen-
tation and peculiar urban optimism the islandlike situation
of West Berlin seemed to provoke questions of identity
around the artificial organism of the metropolis in a wholly
u111que way.
OMA's place of origin is not New York, as one might
assume, but Berlin. From there the path led to Manhat-
tan, and thus, ahead of the Delirious New York of 1978, a
book through which Koolhaas became widely known,
2
a
less spectacular but simil arly "del irious" Berlin is to be
located. Like a red thread, this Berlin winds throughout
the earl y projects and bears silent witness to the past of the
Office for Metropolitan Architecture, whose history -
how could it be otherwise in this city? - started directly at
the Berlin Wall. The paradoxes and aporias in the sandy
soil of the Mark Brandenburg represented a mode of per-
ceiving reality that trained the eye well for the psychologi-
cal terrain of the metropolis and its "delirium. " In this
place, the hunger for reality could find abundant, exotic
nourishment and the desire for contradiction could dis-
cover sudden surfa ces of friction to lay bare the secret
poetic content of this reality.
OMA's founding project of 1972, "Exodus or the Volun-
tary Prisoners of Architecture," its very title a pure Berlin
metaphor, is suggestive of the imaginary axis that leads
from Berlin to New York. As reinforced by the images in
the photocollage, the eastward gaze travels far beyond the
horizon of the Berlin Wall toward Manhattan. On this si de
38
t
4. Angels in no-man's-land:
OMA, "Exodus," 1972, view of
the wall
5. Angels in no-man's-land :
Damiel and Cassie! in Wim
Wenders, Wings of Desire, 1987
Neumeyer
39
3. Delirious Berlin: wall graffiti,
1987
assemblage 11
which are voids. "
1
This portrait of Berlin, which Rem
Koolhaas drew from his collection of metropolitan picture
postcards, and from his own urban imagination, catalogues
a panorama of historical stations, pre enting Berlin as an
archaeological site upon which enigmatic circumstances
have layered themselves. As a modern-day Pompeii, this
city, divided in two by a wall that, at the same time, sepa-
rated the world into ideological camps, has secured its
place next to ew York, Paris, and Los Angeles within
Koolhaas's manifestos of "metropolitan architecture." The
characteristic mixture of mass and void, history and
destruction, the coexistence of historical form and radically
altered reality exists nowhere else as it does in Berlin. The
spectrum of contradictions accumulated here has had an
especially stimulating effect on OMA's sense of experimen-
tation and peculiar urban optimism the islandlike situation
of West Berlin seemed to provoke questions of identity
around the artificial organism of the metropolis in a wholly
u111que way.
OMA's place of origin is not New York, as one might
assume, but Berlin. From there the path led to Manhat-
tan, and thus, ahead of the Delirious New York of 1978, a
book through which Koolhaas became widely known,
2
a
less spectacular but simil arly "del irious" Berlin is to be
located. Like a red thread, this Berlin winds throughout
the earl y projects and bears silent witness to the past of the
Office for Metropolitan Architecture, whose history -
how could it be otherwise in this city? - started directly at
the Berlin Wall. The paradoxes and aporias in the sandy
soil of the Mark Brandenburg represented a mode of per-
ceiving reality that trained the eye well for the psychologi-
cal terrain of the metropolis and its "delirium. " In this
place, the hunger for reality could find abundant, exotic
nourishment and the desire for contradiction could dis-
cover sudden surfa ces of friction to lay bare the secret
poetic content of this reality.
OMA's founding project of 1972, "Exodus or the Volun-
tary Prisoners of Architecture," its very title a pure Berlin
metaphor, is suggestive of the imaginary axis that leads
from Berlin to New York. As reinforced by the images in
the photocollage, the eastward gaze travels far beyond the
horizon of the Berlin Wall toward Manhattan. On this si de
38
t
4. Angels in no-man's-land:
OMA, "Exodus," 1972, view of
the wall
5. Angels in no-man's-land :
Damiel and Cassie! in Wim
Wenders, Wings of Desire, 1987
Neumeyer
39
of the wall, in the foreground, appears one of the emblem-
atic wooden frames of the viewing towers. These utterly
archaic, simple tructures emit a magical presence, like
some fabulous creature personally designed by John Hej-
duk. These structures, ascended at least once by nearly
every tourist of Berlin, have become silent servants of a
ritual dedicated to the gaze nach Driiben, "over there."
They embody the secret but true sacred symbol of Berlin.
On the other side of the wall, another symbolic structure
rises out of the darkness, this time, however, borrowed
from the urban theater of Manhattan: the prominent
Empire State Building. In a kind of mechanical ballet with
multiple images of itself, this building engenders the sky-
line of a coveted new world of architecture. Toward it
yearn the running figures of "Exodus" - Rem Koolhaas,
Elia Zenghelis, and the crew of OMA no doubt among
them. Like a band of angels they windingly float over the
"no-man's-land," the wall, and the "death strip," a fore-
shadow of the angels Damiel and Cassie!, who walk
between the layers of the wall in Wim Wenders' latest
film, Wings of Desire.
In "Exodus," Berlin, the prototypical captive city, becomes
a suburb of Manhattan, purgatory to Delirious ew York or
the earlier "City of the Captive Globe," which repeats the
theme of captivity within ideologies on a global scale. 3
Berlin is also contained within the grid of this imaginary
metropolis. In the form of a wall with its self-observing
observation towers, the "wall-city" has been celebrated with
an appropriate memorial.
On the poetic journey of discovery into the abysses and
mysteries of the giant "metropolis," the Berlin repertoire of
the absurd and the paradoxical has assumed the honorable
function of midwife. In 1971, to the astonishment of his
advisor at the Architectural Association in London, Kool-
haas submitted "The Berlin Wall as Architecture" as a
theme for his final thesis project- an almost perverse-
seeming theme. The "psychological confrontation" with
the Berlin Wall, which Koolhaas could not dispossess of a
"bizarre, spontaneous meaning and sense of credibility,"
proved to be of particular value.
4
As a city confined within
walls and ideologies, Berlin encompassed the theme of
assemblage 11
6. Rem Koolhaas and Zoe
Zenghelis, Berlin monument,
detail of "The City of the
Captive Globe," 1972
40
7. Rem Koolhaas, "The Berlin
Wall as Architecture," 1971
8. Ivan Leonidov, project for a
linear city, collage, 1930
Neumeyer
a COB TC
41
of the wall, in the foreground, appears one of the emblem-
atic wooden frames of the viewing towers. These utterly
archaic, simple tructures emit a magical presence, like
some fabulous creature personally designed by John Hej-
duk. These structures, ascended at least once by nearly
every tourist of Berlin, have become silent servants of a
ritual dedicated to the gaze nach Driiben, "over there."
They embody the secret but true sacred symbol of Berlin.
On the other side of the wall, another symbolic structure
rises out of the darkness, this time, however, borrowed
from the urban theater of Manhattan: the prominent
Empire State Building. In a kind of mechanical ballet with
multiple images of itself, this building engenders the sky-
line of a coveted new world of architecture. Toward it
yearn the running figures of "Exodus" - Rem Koolhaas,
Elia Zenghelis, and the crew of OMA no doubt among
them. Like a band of angels they windingly float over the
"no-man's-land," the wall, and the "death strip," a fore-
shadow of the angels Damiel and Cassie!, who walk
between the layers of the wall in Wim Wenders' latest
film, Wings of Desire.
In "Exodus," Berlin, the prototypical captive city, becomes
a suburb of Manhattan, purgatory to Delirious ew York or
the earlier "City of the Captive Globe," which repeats the
theme of captivity within ideologies on a global scale. 3
Berlin is also contained within the grid of this imaginary
metropolis. In the form of a wall with its self-observing
observation towers, the "wall-city" has been celebrated with
an appropriate memorial.
On the poetic journey of discovery into the abysses and
mysteries of the giant "metropolis," the Berlin repertoire of
the absurd and the paradoxical has assumed the honorable
function of midwife. In 1971, to the astonishment of his
advisor at the Architectural Association in London, Kool-
haas submitted "The Berlin Wall as Architecture" as a
theme for his final thesis project- an almost perverse-
seeming theme. The "psychological confrontation" with
the Berlin Wall, which Koolhaas could not dispossess of a
"bizarre, spontaneous meaning and sense of credibility,"
proved to be of particular value.
4
As a city confined within
walls and ideologies, Berlin encompassed the theme of
assemblage 11
6. Rem Koolhaas and Zoe
Zenghelis, Berlin monument,
detail of "The City of the
Captive Globe," 1972
40
7. Rem Koolhaas, "The Berlin
Wall as Architecture," 1971
8. Ivan Leonidov, project for a
linear city, collage, 1930
Neumeyer
a COB TC
41
9. OMA, "House in Miami,"
collage, 1972
assemblage 11
split reality par excellence, and the "critical paranoid
methods" of the interpretation of Delirious ew York- in
which Koolhaas referred to Oali and Breton -seemed a
perfect transcription of the Berlin cxi tcncc. Convictions
and ideologic were heightened here to a level of senseless-
ness; people sacrificed themselves to a degree of self-
annihi lation and thus more or less "voluntarily" turned
themselves into captives of the imaginary "architecture"
built by their own ideals and obsessions.
::he B.crlin Wall, this bizarre but very real set piece of a
Contmuous Monument"- for which the work of the
Superstudio group almost served as an architectural-
utopian variant - transformed itself, for Koolhaas, into
the symbol of a tradition of interventions into the cultural
context that might be symptomatic of the modern condi-
In a similarly reckles fashion, the industrial age with
1ts phenomena of mass culture penetrated the traditional
order, destroying old cultures. But this rupture also
possible perspectives on a new way of life, promis-
mg unforeseen sensations. The "shocking beauty of the
twentieth century" is based upon this ambivalence of great-
ness and m1sery, hope and destruction.' And Superstudio
celebrated the fatal polish of its gleam with hyperreal scen-
anos m wh1ch systematic aesthcticization propelled ocial
reality beyond the horizon of it potentials into the realm
of radical artifice.
this angle of vision, Berlin had to assume the quali-
ties of an "ideal city. "
6
Architecturally, the linear territory
along the wall formed nothing more than a simple spatial
figure that read abstractly, like a preliminary architectural
layout. The no-man's-land between the two strips of the
wall, a \'Old watched over by armed border guards to pre-
vent Germans fl eeing from Germany to Germany, became
an open space 111 the center of Berlin that other metropo-
lises m1ght actually hope for. This empty zone in the
urban center offered itself for occupation a long as the
obstacles of political reality in the foreground did not
obscure the gaze toward the architectural horizon into the
fantasies of urban life. Through the polemical device of
collage, one had only to affix to a postcard of the Branden-
burg Gate an airborne jet rising above the corridor in the
center of Berlin as an icon of progress, like the inevitable
42
zeppelin of Leonidov. Thus a new chapter of the metropo-
lis could be opened.
"The wall as architecture" was basically an ordinary strip of
space delineated by a minimal architectural intervention, a
space waiting to accommodate a program. Leonidov's rib-
bon cities, which likewise attempted to generate a complex
reality with a minimal architectural effort, followed a very
similar concept. The linear territory of the no-man's-land
rigorously demonstrated a way to neutralize space through
its displacement in layers and strips. The early OMA proj-
ects, such as "Exodu " or "House in Miami" of 1974, cele-
brated fantasies of the wall in this fashion with absolute
sensual delight. In the cutting juxtaposition of old and
new, the model of Berlin appears to have acted as god-
father for these projects, as well as for the extension of the
Parliament building in the Hague of 1978 and such proj-
ects as those for the Pare de Ia Villette of 1982-83 and the
1989 world exposition in Pari of 1983. In the latter, a
field of program was realized in its purest form, almost
without architectural intervention. Even in OMA's inter-
pretation of the skyscraper, for example, the Downtown
Athletic Club, the preoccupation with linear space seems
to be backed up by this concept of "the wall as architec-
ture."7 In this version- replete with an intense program
- the concept of self-propagating, banal stretches of wall
was interpreted vertically: "a turbulent aggregation of
metropolitan life in everchanging configurations ... with
a daring program in a conventional (even boring)
architecture."
From this very basic opposition of program and architec-
ture, form and meaning, OMA's architectural theory dis-
tilled the classic formula "a maximum of program and a
minimum of architecture" - a contemporary affirmation
of form similarly stated as a gripping imperative fifty years
before by the protagonists of elementary form.
9
The aes-
thetic of production of the early 1920s avant-garde called
for functionalism in place of representation and for
authenticity of life in place of its artificially reproduced
image: therein consisted the Copernican change in art and
architecture. Contemporary reality contained a promise of
art more exciting than the potentials of tradition. The early
twentieth century turned away from sandstone far,;ades and
Neumeyer
10. OMA, project for the 1989
world exposition, Paris, 1983
43
9. OMA, "House in Miami,"
collage, 1972
assemblage 11
split reality par excellence, and the "critical paranoid
methods" of the interpretation of Delirious ew York- in
which Koolhaas referred to Oali and Breton -seemed a
perfect transcription of the Berlin cxi tcncc. Convictions
and ideologic were heightened here to a level of senseless-
ness; people sacrificed themselves to a degree of self-
annihi lation and thus more or less "voluntarily" turned
themselves into captives of the imaginary "architecture"
built by their own ideals and obsessions.
::he B.crlin Wall, this bizarre but very real set piece of a
Contmuous Monument"- for which the work of the
Superstudio group almost served as an architectural-
utopian variant - transformed itself, for Koolhaas, into
the symbol of a tradition of interventions into the cultural
context that might be symptomatic of the modern condi-
In a similarly reckles fashion, the industrial age with
1ts phenomena of mass culture penetrated the traditional
order, destroying old cultures. But this rupture also
possible perspectives on a new way of life, promis-
mg unforeseen sensations. The "shocking beauty of the
twentieth century" is based upon this ambivalence of great-
ness and m1sery, hope and destruction.' And Superstudio
celebrated the fatal polish of its gleam with hyperreal scen-
anos m wh1ch systematic aesthcticization propelled ocial
reality beyond the horizon of it potentials into the realm
of radical artifice.
this angle of vision, Berlin had to assume the quali-
ties of an "ideal city. "
6
Architecturally, the linear territory
along the wall formed nothing more than a simple spatial
figure that read abstractly, like a preliminary architectural
layout. The no-man's-land between the two strips of the
wall, a \'Old watched over by armed border guards to pre-
vent Germans fl eeing from Germany to Germany, became
an open space 111 the center of Berlin that other metropo-
lises m1ght actually hope for. This empty zone in the
urban center offered itself for occupation a long as the
obstacles of political reality in the foreground did not
obscure the gaze toward the architectural horizon into the
fantasies of urban life. Through the polemical device of
collage, one had only to affix to a postcard of the Branden-
burg Gate an airborne jet rising above the corridor in the
center of Berlin as an icon of progress, like the inevitable
42
zeppelin of Leonidov. Thus a new chapter of the metropo-
lis could be opened.
"The wall as architecture" was basically an ordinary strip of
space delineated by a minimal architectural intervention, a
space waiting to accommodate a program. Leonidov's rib-
bon cities, which likewise attempted to generate a complex
reality with a minimal architectural effort, followed a very
similar concept. The linear territory of the no-man's-land
rigorously demonstrated a way to neutralize space through
its displacement in layers and strips. The early OMA proj-
ects, such as "Exodu " or "House in Miami" of 1974, cele-
brated fantasies of the wall in this fashion with absolute
sensual delight. In the cutting juxtaposition of old and
new, the model of Berlin appears to have acted as god-
father for these projects, as well as for the extension of the
Parliament building in the Hague of 1978 and such proj-
ects as those for the Pare de Ia Villette of 1982-83 and the
1989 world exposition in Pari of 1983. In the latter, a
field of program was realized in its purest form, almost
without architectural intervention. Even in OMA's inter-
pretation of the skyscraper, for example, the Downtown
Athletic Club, the preoccupation with linear space seems
to be backed up by this concept of "the wall as architec-
ture."7 In this version- replete with an intense program
- the concept of self-propagating, banal stretches of wall
was interpreted vertically: "a turbulent aggregation of
metropolitan life in everchanging configurations ... with
a daring program in a conventional (even boring)
architecture."
From this very basic opposition of program and architec-
ture, form and meaning, OMA's architectural theory dis-
tilled the classic formula "a maximum of program and a
minimum of architecture" - a contemporary affirmation
of form similarly stated as a gripping imperative fifty years
before by the protagonists of elementary form.
9
The aes-
thetic of production of the early 1920s avant-garde called
for functionalism in place of representation and for
authenticity of life in place of its artificially reproduced
image: therein consisted the Copernican change in art and
architecture. Contemporary reality contained a promise of
art more exciting than the potentials of tradition. The early
twentieth century turned away from sandstone far,;ades and
Neumeyer
10. OMA, project for the 1989
world exposition, Paris, 1983
43
11. "Where one does not see
anything of the 'architecture'":
Friedrichstrasse station Berlin
1891 ' '
12. Mies van der Rohe, project
for a skyscraper next to the
Friedrichstrasse station, 1921-2
2
assemblage 11
monumental forms and eli covered, in the "beyond" not
yet perceived by aesthetic criteria, the ource of a new art.
This historic change of perspectives was best expressed by
August Enclell in his essay of 1908 "The Beauty of the
Metropolis" (Die Schonheit der Crossen Stadt), wherein he
remarked upon a train station in Berlin: "How wonderful
the Frieclrichstrasse station if seen from the outer platform
over the Spree River where one does not see anything of
the 'architecture. "'
10
What instead attracted Enclell's eye
was the wrong side of the architecture, here, the con true-
bon work of the engineer ignored by nineteenth-century
aesthetics. A glittering glass screen suspended above the
tracks, the "off side" of the far,;acle at the head of the train
hall , provided the vision of a new kind of architectural
beauty to come. In 1921-22 this promise took shape in the
cles1gn for a glass skyscraper rising next to the Frieclrich-
stra se train station: Mies van cler Rohe had freed the
neighboring glass "curtain wall" from its restricted existence
in the twilight of an architectural "no-man's-lancl," viewing
1t as what 1t should become- as architecture.
For anyone who, like Rem Koolhaas, shares "a special
penchant for gray zones," the gaze into the "beyond" and
:nto that "where one not see anything of the
arch1tecture can provtcle an mcreclible source of inspira-
tion.
11
W1th the magic formula "to imagine nothingness, "
one could open up and utilize this "beyond" for oneself.
For the vast metaphysical terrain of the void represented by
the no-man's-lancl of Berlin to attain its artistic potential
requnecl a new perception of the city and a different
approach to urban intervention: "Where there is nothing,
ts possible; where there is architecture, nothing
(else) IS posstble .... To imagine nothingness is Pompeii,
the Manhattan grid, . .. the Berlin Wall. They all
reveal that the emptiness of the metropolis is not empty;
that each votcl can be used for programs whose insertion in
the ex1St111g texture is a Procrustean effort leading to the
mutilation. of both activity and texture. "
12
Consequently,
the potentials of the void transformed into the urban ambi-
tion "to invest the heart of the metropolis with the quality
of nothzngness. "13
Koolhaas has compared the strip of space along the Berlin
Wall , an urban landscape as a symbol of urban decay and
44
stagnation, with a desert: a "conceptual evacla" in which
all the laws of architecture are suspended. The cri is of the
city in the 1960s and the end of "progress" in the ea rl y
1970s provoked a change of climate that also steamed up
the windowpanes of the showcase city of West Berlin.
Declining population, aging, diminishing economic
strength became symptomatic of the metropolitan invalid.
Its face was marked by the scars of history, the terrains
vagues bordering the wall, the vacant lots along railroad
lines that nourished its image of decay. House trailers in
front of scorched pediments, rusting tracks in the grass,
bunkers in open sandbanks opposite a half-burned-out Wil-
helminian (pre-World War I) luxury hotel - these were
the motifs of the old center around Potsclamer Platz, which
read like a sequence of pictures from a doomed civiliza-
tion. This fascinating "liberty zone" strikingly demonstrated
that the challenge for design lay in the key issue of con-
temporary urbanism: "More important than the design of
cities is the design of their decay. "
14
Urban Flight to the Center: Islands of Modernity
"Exodus or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture" took
up the threads of "The Berlin Wall as Architecture." A
case study based on the proposition "to invest the heart of
the metropolis with the quality of nothingnc s" through a
"design of decay," "Exodus" took the form of a kind of
photoreporting for an urbanistic fiction film that was about
Berlin, but which actually took place in London. Void and
decay were the central themes of the ruinous Berlin from
which Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis extracted mate-
rial for their metropolitan dreams. In the atmosphere of
both a torture chamber and a laboratory, OMA's "Exodus"
somewhat equalled a modern version of Piranesi 's Carceri.
In a crude organ transplant operation, OMA inserted a
new core into the weary city of London to provide it with
a new urban identity. The procedure for bringing the tired
metropolis back to its feet was as simple as it was mania-
cal. It transformed London into a kind of urban Franken-
stein. London had to be cliviclecl like Berlin so that
ultimately one could also erect a wall. "Once upon a time
a city was divided into two parts": so began the horror story
of "Exodus." The division of Berlin was recounted as in a
fast-motion film, this time, however, with a happy ending:
Neumeyer
13. Design of decay: Berlin
Wall
14. Design of decay: "Exodus"
45
1
11. "Where one does not see
anything of the 'architecture'":
Friedrichstrasse station Berlin
1891 ' '
12. Mies van der Rohe, project
for a skyscraper next to the
Friedrichstrasse station, 1921-2
2
assemblage 11
monumental forms and eli covered, in the "beyond" not
yet perceived by aesthetic criteria, the ource of a new art.
This historic change of perspectives was best expressed by
August Enclell in his essay of 1908 "The Beauty of the
Metropolis" (Die Schonheit der Crossen Stadt), wherein he
remarked upon a train station in Berlin: "How wonderful
the Frieclrichstrasse station if seen from the outer platform
over the Spree River where one does not see anything of
the 'architecture. "'
10
What instead attracted Enclell's eye
was the wrong side of the architecture, here, the con true-
bon work of the engineer ignored by nineteenth-century
aesthetics. A glittering glass screen suspended above the
tracks, the "off side" of the far,;acle at the head of the train
hall , provided the vision of a new kind of architectural
beauty to come. In 1921-22 this promise took shape in the
cles1gn for a glass skyscraper rising next to the Frieclrich-
stra se train station: Mies van cler Rohe had freed the
neighboring glass "curtain wall" from its restricted existence
in the twilight of an architectural "no-man's-lancl," viewing
1t as what 1t should become- as architecture.
For anyone who, like Rem Koolhaas, shares "a special
penchant for gray zones," the gaze into the "beyond" and
:nto that "where one not see anything of the
arch1tecture can provtcle an mcreclible source of inspira-
tion.
11
W1th the magic formula "to imagine nothingness, "
one could open up and utilize this "beyond" for oneself.
For the vast metaphysical terrain of the void represented by
the no-man's-lancl of Berlin to attain its artistic potential
requnecl a new perception of the city and a different
approach to urban intervention: "Where there is nothing,
ts possible; where there is architecture, nothing
(else) IS posstble .... To imagine nothingness is Pompeii,
the Manhattan grid, . .. the Berlin Wall. They all
reveal that the emptiness of the metropolis is not empty;
that each votcl can be used for programs whose insertion in
the ex1St111g texture is a Procrustean effort leading to the
mutilation. of both activity and texture. "
12
Consequently,
the potentials of the void transformed into the urban ambi-
tion "to invest the heart of the metropolis with the quality
of nothzngness. "13
Koolhaas has compared the strip of space along the Berlin
Wall , an urban landscape as a symbol of urban decay and
44
stagnation, with a desert: a "conceptual evacla" in which
all the laws of architecture are suspended. The cri is of the
city in the 1960s and the end of "progress" in the ea rl y
1970s provoked a change of climate that also steamed up
the windowpanes of the showcase city of West Berlin.
Declining population, aging, diminishing economic
strength became symptomatic of the metropolitan invalid.
Its face was marked by the scars of history, the terrains
vagues bordering the wall, the vacant lots along railroad
lines that nourished its image of decay. House trailers in
front of scorched pediments, rusting tracks in the grass,
bunkers in open sandbanks opposite a half-burned-out Wil-
helminian (pre-World War I) luxury hotel - these were
the motifs of the old center around Potsclamer Platz, which
read like a sequence of pictures from a doomed civiliza-
tion. This fascinating "liberty zone" strikingly demonstrated
that the challenge for design lay in the key issue of con-
temporary urbanism: "More important than the design of
cities is the design of their decay. "
14
Urban Flight to the Center: Islands of Modernity
"Exodus or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture" took
up the threads of "The Berlin Wall as Architecture." A
case study based on the proposition "to invest the heart of
the metropolis with the quality of nothingnc s" through a
"design of decay," "Exodus" took the form of a kind of
photoreporting for an urbanistic fiction film that was about
Berlin, but which actually took place in London. Void and
decay were the central themes of the ruinous Berlin from
which Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis extracted mate-
rial for their metropolitan dreams. In the atmosphere of
both a torture chamber and a laboratory, OMA's "Exodus"
somewhat equalled a modern version of Piranesi 's Carceri.
In a crude organ transplant operation, OMA inserted a
new core into the weary city of London to provide it with
a new urban identity. The procedure for bringing the tired
metropolis back to its feet was as simple as it was mania-
cal. It transformed London into a kind of urban Franken-
stein. London had to be cliviclecl like Berlin so that
ultimately one could also erect a wall. "Once upon a time
a city was divided into two parts": so began the horror story
of "Exodus." The division of Berlin was recounted as in a
fast-motion film, this time, however, with a happy ending:
Neumeyer
13. Design of decay: Berlin
Wall
14. Design of decay: "Exodus"
45
1
"The wall was a masterpiece. Originally not more than
some pathetic strings of barbed wire, abruptly dropped on
the imaginary line of the border, its psychological and
symbolical effects were infinitely more powerful than its
physical appearance .... The inhabitants of this architec-
ture - those strong enough to love it - would, in a cer-
tain sense, be its voluntary prisoners. We only can envy
them. "
15
Koolhaas and Zenghelis transformed the no-
man's-land at the wall into a "strip of intense metropolitan
desirability." The new linear downtown of London was a
zone of architectural and social perfection. In the continu-
ing story, it was not long before the first inhabitants asked
for admission into this artificial paradise, setting in motion
an unstoppable onslaught on the protected enclave: "We
witness the Exodus of London. "
16
In the end, what
remained of the old city of London was nothing but a pile
of ruins.
"Exodus," which received first prize in the 1972 competi-
tion sponsored by Casabella on the theme of "a city with a
significant environment," told a parable of the decay of the
European metropolis signed by the commercial devastation
of the inner city and the urban flight to the periphery.
Koolhaas and Zenghelis simply converted the pessimism of
this real exodus: the urban flight to the periphery became a
flight into the city, depicted in fantastic scenes. The irony
of "pop" joyously celebrated its triumph over reality, taking
revenge against this reality by once more confronting it
with itself. "Exodus" held up a mirror, facing the metropo-
lis with its own consci@ce and memory. OMA's "architec-
ture of the city," however, did not take historical typology
as a prototypical model, but rather depended on a bizarre
multiplicity of forms of urban life, which desperately
demanded a new architectural and 1,1rban optimism for
their revival.
To the components of this metropolitan essence belonged
equally the ideology of the single-family house and the
ceremony of a public square, a public bathhouse, or even
an Institute for the Creation and Implementation of Fanta-
sies and a Park of Air, Fire, and Earth, as well as the
accommodation of concentrated intellect in the form of
museums, universities, and research institutions. Within
this system of differences was held the whole universe of
assemblage 11
values and ideologies that generates social and building
activity, from the archaic-mythical dream of the building
as a cellular unit to the cosmopolitan ideologies of modern
scientific knowledge. In this strip of no-man's-land, as on
Noah's ark, everything had its place. The new city of Lon-
don presented itself not as just another harmoniously laid
out ideal city, of which architectural history already con-
tains an excess, but as an active ideological field of associa-
tion, a kind of metaphysical strip, or "Freudian tableau,"17
representing the whole multiplicity of modes of metropoli-
tan life. From no more than a plain grid could be gener-
ated the minimum architectural framework for the
programmatic needs of a complex reality.
"Exodus" depicted a city as island. But unlike the ideal
cities of the past, which were situated within a green land-
scape, this occupied the center of the city. In this notion
of a "city within the city" lay the true polemic. Ludwig
Hilberseimer ventured nothing less when he established his
project for a high-rise city of 1926 at the coordinates of the
intersection of Unter den Linden and as
an island of modernity. Hilberseimer inserted a clearly
defined, multifunctional urban apparatus into the body of
the old city exactly in the manner of "Exodus," with the
most reduced architectural means. A kind of heart-lung
machine, it would supply to a "tired" old Berlin a healthy
dose of modernity, that is, light, air, and economic
efficiency.
The theme of the "island in the city" was addressed again
by the now-legendary Berlin Summer Academy of 1977,
which Rem Koolhaas prepared for 0. M. Ungers. Much
like "Exodus," Ungers's concept of Stadtarchipel, or urban
archipelago, employed a metaphor of the drying up of the
city.
18
Taken as a process of design, this concept meant to
recover a group of leftovers as given, essential urban pat-
terns rather than to populate a new artificial island. This
natural archipelago in the empty space of the city created
the departure point for the regeneration and recomposition
of the city.
19
Camillo Sitte, the protagonist of romanticism
in city planning, followed a similar path when trying to
conserve islands of tradition as sanctuaries in the cold sea
of the modern traffic-ruled city.
46
15. The urban strip as a city
within the city: "Exodus"
17. Ludwig Hilberseimer,
project for a high-rise city, 1926
Neumeyer
16. The urban strip as a city
within the city: no-man's-land
along the Berlin Wall, 1988
47
"The wall was a masterpiece. Originally not more than
some pathetic strings of barbed wire, abruptly dropped on
the imaginary line of the border, its psychological and
symbolical effects were infinitely more powerful than its
physical appearance .... The inhabitants of this architec-
ture - those strong enough to love it - would, in a cer-
tain sense, be its voluntary prisoners. We only can envy
them. "
15
Koolhaas and Zenghelis transformed the no-
man's-land at the wall into a "strip of intense metropolitan
desirability." The new linear downtown of London was a
zone of architectural and social perfection. In the continu-
ing story, it was not long before the first inhabitants asked
for admission into this artificial paradise, setting in motion
an unstoppable onslaught on the protected enclave: "We
witness the Exodus of London. "
16
In the end, what
remained of the old city of London was nothing but a pile
of ruins.
"Exodus," which received first prize in the 1972 competi-
tion sponsored by Casabella on the theme of "a city with a
significant environment," told a parable of the decay of the
European metropolis signed by the commercial devastation
of the inner city and the urban flight to the periphery.
Koolhaas and Zenghelis simply converted the pessimism of
this real exodus: the urban flight to the periphery became a
flight into the city, depicted in fantastic scenes. The irony
of "pop" joyously celebrated its triumph over reality, taking
revenge against this reality by once more confronting it
with itself. "Exodus" held up a mirror, facing the metropo-
lis with its own consci@ce and memory. OMA's "architec-
ture of the city," however, did not take historical typology
as a prototypical model, but rather depended on a bizarre
multiplicity of forms of urban life, which desperately
demanded a new architectural and 1,1rban optimism for
their revival.
To the components of this metropolitan essence belonged
equally the ideology of the single-family house and the
ceremony of a public square, a public bathhouse, or even
an Institute for the Creation and Implementation of Fanta-
sies and a Park of Air, Fire, and Earth, as well as the
accommodation of concentrated intellect in the form of
museums, universities, and research institutions. Within
this system of differences was held the whole universe of
assemblage 11
values and ideologies that generates social and building
activity, from the archaic-mythical dream of the building
as a cellular unit to the cosmopolitan ideologies of modern
scientific knowledge. In this strip of no-man's-land, as on
Noah's ark, everything had its place. The new city of Lon-
don presented itself not as just another harmoniously laid
out ideal city, of which architectural history already con-
tains an excess, but as an active ideological field of associa-
tion, a kind of metaphysical strip, or "Freudian tableau,"17
representing the whole multiplicity of modes of metropoli-
tan life. From no more than a plain grid could be gener-
ated the minimum architectural framework for the
programmatic needs of a complex reality.
"Exodus" depicted a city as island. But unlike the ideal
cities of the past, which were situated within a green land-
scape, this occupied the center of the city. In this notion
of a "city within the city" lay the true polemic. Ludwig
Hilberseimer ventured nothing less when he established his
project for a high-rise city of 1926 at the coordinates of the
intersection of Unter den Linden and as
an island of modernity. Hilberseimer inserted a clearly
defined, multifunctional urban apparatus into the body of
the old city exactly in the manner of "Exodus," with the
most reduced architectural means. A kind of heart-lung
machine, it would supply to a "tired" old Berlin a healthy
dose of modernity, that is, light, air, and economic
efficiency.
The theme of the "island in the city" was addressed again
by the now-legendary Berlin Summer Academy of 1977,
which Rem Koolhaas prepared for 0. M. Ungers. Much
like "Exodus," Ungers's concept of Stadtarchipel, or urban
archipelago, employed a metaphor of the drying up of the
city.
18
Taken as a process of design, this concept meant to
recover a group of leftovers as given, essential urban pat-
terns rather than to populate a new artificial island. This
natural archipelago in the empty space of the city created
the departure point for the regeneration and recomposition
of the city.
19
Camillo Sitte, the protagonist of romanticism
in city planning, followed a similar path when trying to
conserve islands of tradition as sanctuaries in the cold sea
of the modern traffic-ruled city.
46
15. The urban strip as a city
within the city: "Exodus"
17. Ludwig Hilberseimer,
project for a high-rise city, 1926
Neumeyer
16. The urban strip as a city
within the city: no-man's-land
along the Berlin Wall, 1988
47
The concept of an urban archipelago of architectural
i land floating in a larger context of "nothingness" as the
continuum of pace \\'as, for Koolhaa , "the absolute
model" of the European city
20
But in contrast to Ungers,
for whom the determination of a scholastic coincidentia
oppositorum in morphology relied on the Apollonian-
Platonic sphere of the world of architecture, Koolhaas
searched for an existential meaning, a psychology of differ-
ences that would bring light into the haze of delirium of
the modern world. Unger 's objccti\c idealism aimed at a
new assertion of the absolute idea existing out ide of sub-
jective reality beyond mind and matter. lie had found the
perfect symbol of its manifestation for all eternity in the
form of the quare, omnipresent in his design. 0 1A's sub-
jective ideali m aimed instead at a discO\cry of meta-
physical reality within the forms of life; present in the
"subcon cious of reality," these had to be called forth by
the projection of a hypothesis.
Through this manner of "rctroacti\e manifesto," Koolhaas
arrived at the phenomenon of "l\ 1anhattanism," which in
Delirious ew York he redirected to built reality. Kool-
haas' study of ew York drew attention to the particular
"paradox of ideology" expressed in the striking difference
between the built unconsciousness of America and the
unbuilt consciousness of Europe: Europe had written the
manifestos of modernism, but had failed to bring about
their correlate in reality. America embodied modern reality
par excellence, but this reality \\'as achieved without the-
ory.
21
Already at the beginning of the twentieth century, a
whole culturally weary generation bored \\'ith the official
art of historicism gazed with wonder and fascination at the
American phenomena of "positive Barbarism," as Adolf
Loos called the "radical nonculture" in his time. America
provided an impressive example of how modern civi li za-
tion, undeterred by artistic tradition, created a reality and
identity from its own resources for living. In the case of
America, utopia was served up again to a metropolis that
could already look back upon its realization. The condi-
tions of the European metropolis, such as Berlin, proved
to be different. Here the demand for a retroactive concept
was to awaken modernity's potential, which was cheated of
the present and lying dormant in history, and to grant it a
"second chance" to achie\e a ensc of rcality
21
assemblage 11
0\IA employed this strategy in the Kochstrassc/ Fricdrich-
strassc project for the competition sponsored in 1980-81 by
the International Building Exhibition (IBA). The first tcp
\\as to confront th site \\'ith its conceptual "memory." The
isometric site plan, which showed a much greater spatial
context than the actua l competition site, presented OMA's
\'Crsion of the "historic map" of this area of Berlin. In it,
the architectural utopias of the a\ant-gardc, in the form of
the unrealized projects of \1cndclsohn, Hilbcrscimcr, and
\ 1ics, became the actual landmarks of the cityscape.
tanding out against the rcdra\\'n schematic figure of the
baroque plan of the "Fricdrichstadt" district, they alone
emerged as three-dimensional objects. This site plan,
which made \'isiblc an imaginary city, revealed that these
project from the I920s, seen together for the first time,
\\'Crc literally projected onto the axis of the Friedrich-
trassc. This boubard, which around 1920 was the most
important business thoroughfare in the center of the city,
became the axis of the" C\\' Berlin" that crossed Untcr
den Linden, the via triumphalis of the feudal city, and was
tra\crsed by the U-Bahn underground. The Miesian glass
kyscrapcr in the north ga\'C this modernist \ersion of an
urban axis the appropriate accent. The projects of the
modern \\'ere suited to the sequence of historic public
squares (circle, octagon, square, triangle) that had assem-
bled in space like satell ites around the intersection of these
axes. The historical urban landscape was transformed into
the panoramic continuum of a modern metropolis con-
cci\cd upon a different notion of space. 1uch less radical
and antitraditional than the descriptions of history have led
us to believe, this strategy of the transformation of urban
space occur in the context brought to light by OMA's
project for Fricdrichstrassc.
It is perhaps worthwhile to mention in this regard that
even such an extremely polemical project as Hilberscimcr's
high-rise city, which belongs among the standard illu tra-
tions of the horrors of modern urban planning, anchored
itself as an island of modernity on Schinkel, so to speak,
by way of a direct association with his Schauspielhaus
(national theater) at the Gendarmcnmarkt square. That
historical links were sought and found can be demonstrated
by the comment "better from Schinkel to Schinkel" con-
tained in an unpublished manuscript of 1914 entitled
48
18. The imaginary city: OMA,
project for Kochstrasse and
Friedrichstrasse, 1980-81,
isometric of the overall city
building concept
Neumeyer
"Architecture of the Metropolis"; in it Hilber eimer criti-
cized the "erroneous and endless aberrations" of the nine-
teenth century.
23
Schinkel's conception of the urban
landscape as an association of freestanding cubes, although
corned by critics uch as Werner llcgemann as "romantic
degeneration" because the building denied the rigid order
of the baroque context,
24
in actuality, provided a model for
modern urban architecture in Berlin. Hilbcrseimer's 1928
competition drawings for the Alexandcrplatz project clearly
document that his design strove for a bond with Schinkel's
Altc Museum and his per pccti\e of the Packhof (ware-
house), with its freestanding structures, in order to com-
plete the panoramic conception of the modern city in the
spirit of "from Schinkel to Schinkel."
Mies IIilberseimer and their contemporaries did not
o n ~ i v e visionary ;rojects for universal u e and without
specific sites. OMA's plan for Friedrichstras e, which
reconstructed the "classical" polis of modernism, demon-
strated that the avant-garde did not, as postmodcrn criti-
ci m would have it, neglect its surroundings with an air of
ho tile uperiority.
25
The avant-garde did not simply break
with the past out of a pure obsession with the future. Otto
Wagner's remark that through the as ault of modernism
tradition had first attained its "true value," finally losing it
over-estimated value, places the often criticized attack on
tradition in its proper li ght.
26
Modernism's operation was a
difficult one: the attempt to rescue art from history, with-
out having history disappear from art, as ietzsche
expressed it- an equation whose oluti on seems more
remote today than it did sixty year ago.
To the particles of reality of the Berlin context belongs in
particular the residue of recent history: the ruinous blocks
left partially damaged by the war that present themselves
like an open history book, allowing in ight into the back-
yard of the city of the nineteenth century, and, of course,
the wall and its urban "flotsam. "r Berlin's urban form
"owes" to the destruction of recent history peculiar quali-
ties and modes of perception, such as diagonal views and
gradations of depth, never before experienced in the urban
fabric. Meanwhile, the type of patial division specific to
I950 and 1960s postwar architecture has also become part
of the residue. With the return to the urbanism of the
49
The concept of an urban archipelago of architectural
i land floating in a larger context of "nothingness" as the
continuum of pace \\'as, for Koolhaa , "the absolute
model" of the European city
20
But in contrast to Ungers,
for whom the determination of a scholastic coincidentia
oppositorum in morphology relied on the Apollonian-
Platonic sphere of the world of architecture, Koolhaas
searched for an existential meaning, a psychology of differ-
ences that would bring light into the haze of delirium of
the modern world. Unger 's objccti\c idealism aimed at a
new assertion of the absolute idea existing out ide of sub-
jective reality beyond mind and matter. lie had found the
perfect symbol of its manifestation for all eternity in the
form of the quare, omnipresent in his design. 0 1A's sub-
jective ideali m aimed instead at a discO\cry of meta-
physical reality within the forms of life; present in the
"subcon cious of reality," these had to be called forth by
the projection of a hypothesis.
Through this manner of "rctroacti\e manifesto," Koolhaas
arrived at the phenomenon of "l\ 1anhattanism," which in
Delirious ew York he redirected to built reality. Kool-
haas' study of ew York drew attention to the particular
"paradox of ideology" expressed in the striking difference
between the built unconsciousness of America and the
unbuilt consciousness of Europe: Europe had written the
manifestos of modernism, but had failed to bring about
their correlate in reality. America embodied modern reality
par excellence, but this reality \\'as achieved without the-
ory.
21
Already at the beginning of the twentieth century, a
whole culturally weary generation bored \\'ith the official
art of historicism gazed with wonder and fascination at the
American phenomena of "positive Barbarism," as Adolf
Loos called the "radical nonculture" in his time. America
provided an impressive example of how modern civi li za-
tion, undeterred by artistic tradition, created a reality and
identity from its own resources for living. In the case of
America, utopia was served up again to a metropolis that
could already look back upon its realization. The condi-
tions of the European metropolis, such as Berlin, proved
to be different. Here the demand for a retroactive concept
was to awaken modernity's potential, which was cheated of
the present and lying dormant in history, and to grant it a
"second chance" to achie\e a ensc of rcality
21
assemblage 11
0\IA employed this strategy in the Kochstrassc/ Fricdrich-
strassc project for the competition sponsored in 1980-81 by
the International Building Exhibition (IBA). The first tcp
\\as to confront th site \\'ith its conceptual "memory." The
isometric site plan, which showed a much greater spatial
context than the actua l competition site, presented OMA's
\'Crsion of the "historic map" of this area of Berlin. In it,
the architectural utopias of the a\ant-gardc, in the form of
the unrealized projects of \1cndclsohn, Hilbcrscimcr, and
\ 1ics, became the actual landmarks of the cityscape.
tanding out against the rcdra\\'n schematic figure of the
baroque plan of the "Fricdrichstadt" district, they alone
emerged as three-dimensional objects. This site plan,
which made \'isiblc an imaginary city, revealed that these
project from the I920s, seen together for the first time,
\\'Crc literally projected onto the axis of the Friedrich-
trassc. This boubard, which around 1920 was the most
important business thoroughfare in the center of the city,
became the axis of the" C\\' Berlin" that crossed Untcr
den Linden, the via triumphalis of the feudal city, and was
tra\crsed by the U-Bahn underground. The Miesian glass
kyscrapcr in the north ga\'C this modernist \ersion of an
urban axis the appropriate accent. The projects of the
modern \\'ere suited to the sequence of historic public
squares (circle, octagon, square, triangle) that had assem-
bled in space like satell ites around the intersection of these
axes. The historical urban landscape was transformed into
the panoramic continuum of a modern metropolis con-
cci\cd upon a different notion of space. 1uch less radical
and antitraditional than the descriptions of history have led
us to believe, this strategy of the transformation of urban
space occur in the context brought to light by OMA's
project for Fricdrichstrassc.
It is perhaps worthwhile to mention in this regard that
even such an extremely polemical project as Hilberscimcr's
high-rise city, which belongs among the standard illu tra-
tions of the horrors of modern urban planning, anchored
itself as an island of modernity on Schinkel, so to speak,
by way of a direct association with his Schauspielhaus
(national theater) at the Gendarmcnmarkt square. That
historical links were sought and found can be demonstrated
by the comment "better from Schinkel to Schinkel" con-
tained in an unpublished manuscript of 1914 entitled
48
18. The imaginary city: OMA,
project for Kochstrasse and
Friedrichstrasse, 1980-81,
isometric of the overall city
building concept
Neumeyer
"Architecture of the Metropolis"; in it Hilber eimer criti-
cized the "erroneous and endless aberrations" of the nine-
teenth century.
23
Schinkel's conception of the urban
landscape as an association of freestanding cubes, although
corned by critics uch as Werner llcgemann as "romantic
degeneration" because the building denied the rigid order
of the baroque context,
24
in actuality, provided a model for
modern urban architecture in Berlin. Hilbcrseimer's 1928
competition drawings for the Alexandcrplatz project clearly
document that his design strove for a bond with Schinkel's
Altc Museum and his per pccti\e of the Packhof (ware-
house), with its freestanding structures, in order to com-
plete the panoramic conception of the modern city in the
spirit of "from Schinkel to Schinkel."
Mies IIilberseimer and their contemporaries did not
o n ~ i v e visionary ;rojects for universal u e and without
specific sites. OMA's plan for Friedrichstras e, which
reconstructed the "classical" polis of modernism, demon-
strated that the avant-garde did not, as postmodcrn criti-
ci m would have it, neglect its surroundings with an air of
ho tile uperiority.
25
The avant-garde did not simply break
with the past out of a pure obsession with the future. Otto
Wagner's remark that through the as ault of modernism
tradition had first attained its "true value," finally losing it
over-estimated value, places the often criticized attack on
tradition in its proper li ght.
26
Modernism's operation was a
difficult one: the attempt to rescue art from history, with-
out having history disappear from art, as ietzsche
expressed it- an equation whose oluti on seems more
remote today than it did sixty year ago.
To the particles of reality of the Berlin context belongs in
particular the residue of recent history: the ruinous blocks
left partially damaged by the war that present themselves
like an open history book, allowing in ight into the back-
yard of the city of the nineteenth century, and, of course,
the wall and its urban "flotsam. "r Berlin's urban form
"owes" to the destruction of recent history peculiar quali-
ties and modes of perception, such as diagonal views and
gradations of depth, never before experienced in the urban
fabric. Meanwhile, the type of patial division specific to
I950 and 1960s postwar architecture has also become part
of the residue. With the return to the urbanism of the
49
19. A panoramic conception of
the cubical city: Karl Friedrich
Schinkel, view of the bridge to
the Altes Museum and the
Packhof
20. A panoramic conception of
the cubical city: Ludwig
Hilberseimer, sketch of the
Alexanderplatz project, 1928,
with a view of the museum (far
left), cathedral, and castle
21. OMA, project for Kochstrasse and
Friedrichstrasse, plan with isometric
projections of unrealized projects by
Mendelsohn, Hilberseimer, and Mies
assemblage 11
----------------
50
closed block, inscribed by the IBA on its banners in the
name of urban rene\val, it is precisely this special contex-
tual richness that i negated in the name of contextual-
ism.
2
8 In Wings of Desire, Wcnclcrs has memorialized this
mythically laden, damaged city with its own poetics of
space just in time, before the reconstruction and beautifi-
cation of the city claims all space.
29
OMA's recognition of the aesthetic of modernism displays
a far more sensible and intelligent reaction to the complex
reality of Berlin's context and its hi storic characteristic
than contcxtualist po tmoclcrn ideology can produce with
its return to classical typology. As an altcrnati\c, the design
propo al for Fricclrichstrasse outline possibilities for a
modernist \'a riation of urban reconstruction. It is an alter-
nati\'C that neither negates nor rccon titutcs the historically
broken reality of the "perimeter block, " but rather inscribes
it into the relations cstabli heel by a multibclccl dialogue
between history and the pre ent, between the open and
closed form of street pace and the voided interior of the
block.
Toward the recovery of an urban structure, OMA reani-
mates the typological repertoire of moderni sm on a broad
scale, as if the ta k were to develop a complex program of
building and housing types with enough to cover a build-
ing exposition of its own. All of the building types placed
at our disposal by the history of moderni sm are being taken
up and carried further, from row hou ing to high-rise slabs
and carpet courtyard housing as developed by Mies and
Hilberseimcr in the last clays of the Bauhaus. While the
IBA must be dutifully reminded of the instrumentality
of the twentieth century against its preoccupation with
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century urbanism, OMA has
masterfully unfolded and spread out this spectrum on the
terrain of the Frieclrichstrasse in a clear polemic display -
on a street in Berlin that has become a synecdoche for the
emergence of modern architecture in our century.
There are few precedents in the history of Berlin's modern
architecture for the level of independence and ensibility,
the strength of conviction and differentiated response
exhibited by OMA in the Frieclrichstras e project. One
thinks of Mendel ohn's urban projects, Mies van cler
Robe's Alexanclerplatz scheme, or his very modest apart-
Neumeyer
22. Project for Kochstrasse and
Friedrichstrasse, isometric of
single-family houses along the wall
23. OMA, project for
Lutzowstrasse, 1980
51
19. A panoramic conception of
the cubical city: Karl Friedrich
Schinkel, view of the bridge to
the Altes Museum and the
Packhof
20. A panoramic conception of
the cubical city: Ludwig
Hilberseimer, sketch of the
Alexanderplatz project, 1928,
with a view of the museum (far
left), cathedral, and castle
21. OMA, project for Kochstrasse and
Friedrichstrasse, plan with isometric
projections of unrealized projects by
Mendelsohn, Hilberseimer, and Mies
assemblage 11
----------------
50
closed block, inscribed by the IBA on its banners in the
name of urban rene\val, it is precisely this special contex-
tual richness that i negated in the name of contextual-
ism.
2
8 In Wings of Desire, Wcnclcrs has memorialized this
mythically laden, damaged city with its own poetics of
space just in time, before the reconstruction and beautifi-
cation of the city claims all space.
29
OMA's recognition of the aesthetic of modernism displays
a far more sensible and intelligent reaction to the complex
reality of Berlin's context and its hi storic characteristic
than contcxtualist po tmoclcrn ideology can produce with
its return to classical typology. As an altcrnati\c, the design
propo al for Fricclrichstrasse outline possibilities for a
modernist \'a riation of urban reconstruction. It is an alter-
nati\'C that neither negates nor rccon titutcs the historically
broken reality of the "perimeter block, " but rather inscribes
it into the relations cstabli heel by a multibclccl dialogue
between history and the pre ent, between the open and
closed form of street pace and the voided interior of the
block.
Toward the recovery of an urban structure, OMA reani-
mates the typological repertoire of moderni sm on a broad
scale, as if the ta k were to develop a complex program of
building and housing types with enough to cover a build-
ing exposition of its own. All of the building types placed
at our disposal by the history of moderni sm are being taken
up and carried further, from row hou ing to high-rise slabs
and carpet courtyard housing as developed by Mies and
Hilberseimcr in the last clays of the Bauhaus. While the
IBA must be dutifully reminded of the instrumentality
of the twentieth century against its preoccupation with
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century urbanism, OMA has
masterfully unfolded and spread out this spectrum on the
terrain of the Frieclrichstrasse in a clear polemic display -
on a street in Berlin that has become a synecdoche for the
emergence of modern architecture in our century.
There are few precedents in the history of Berlin's modern
architecture for the level of independence and ensibility,
the strength of conviction and differentiated response
exhibited by OMA in the Frieclrichstras e project. One
thinks of Mendel ohn's urban projects, Mies van cler
Robe's Alexanclerplatz scheme, or his very modest apart-
Neumeyer
22. Project for Kochstrasse and
Friedrichstrasse, isometric of
single-family houses along the wall
23. OMA, project for
Lutzowstrasse, 1980
51
24. To imagine nothingness:
Wings of Desire
ment blocks on Afrikani cher Strasse, in their restraint
equally close to the romantic spirit of Karl Friedrich
Schinkel as to the spirit of modernist Sachlichkeit.
The desperate self-reference of the contemporary acrobatics
of the sign has lost that peculiar combination of self-main-
tenance and respect, of abstraction and empathy, of pro-
spective fantasy and retroactive awarene . The crisis of
culture stems less from the impossibility of realizing his-
toric ideals than from the inability to attentively reinterpret
history from a suspended point of attention, independent
of the fascinations of the fashionable moment and from
the suggestions of so-called historical discernment. OMA's
Berlin projects, from "The Berlin Wall as Architecture" to
"Exodus" to the design for Friedrichstrasse, have translated
such an attempt into architectural ideas, stimulating the
discourse of a contemporary architectural culture.
otes
I. Rem Koolhaas, "Berlin," Zone
1-2 (1986): 4-f9. See also Rem
Koolhaas, "Urbanisme: lmaginer le
neant," L'Architecture d'aujourd'hui
238 (April 1985): 38.
2. Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New
York ( ew York: Museum of Mod-
ern Art, 1978).
3. See Rem Koolhaas and Zoe
Zenghelis, "The City of the Captil'e
Globe," project, I 972.
4. "Always bring a mixture of
seduction and repugnance into the
game" ("Ein Cesprach mit Rem
Koolhaas" a comersation ''ith Rem
Koolhaas Bauwelt 17-18 (1987):
633). "Since nothing remains and
el'erything changes -surely some-
times new meaning will be experi-
enced as painful, a psychological
trauma; our task must be the mod-
ern imprinting. What I mean by
psychological confrontation could
perhaps be explained through the
example of the Berlin Wall. For
me, it was extremely curious to dis-
cover what a bizarre, spontaneous,
meaning and sense of credibility
emanates from this place. In a way,
assemblage 11
the subconscious ha a penetrating
pm,cr- as much as '' e c,er like
to talk about" (ibid.).
5. "Die Erschrcckcndc Schonhcit
des 20. Jahrhundcrts" (Rem Kool-
haas in com-crsation with Patrice
Coulet and i'\icholas Kuhnert),
Arch + 86 (Augu t 1986): H. AI o,
in reference to the At\ and Super-
tudio: "[ ''as able to introduce
Supcrstudio because I organized a
lecture :'\atalini. lie had just
created the 'Continuous \ lonu-
ment,' a project that I really
thought was fantastic and that
reminded me of the rationalism of
Leonida," (ibid.).
6. " omc years later, when Rem
.. shm,ed me his Berlin, I ''as
amazed his interpretation of the
ideal city: I recognized there the
same intense desire to build an
cncJa,e where the inhabitants
\\Ould become the \'Oiuntary prison-
ers of architecture" ("Ou le debut
de Ia fin du reel" Ia COn\'Crsation
'' ith Eli a Zenghelis], L'Architecture
d'aujourd'hui 238 [April 1985]: II).
7. Koolhaas, Deliriou New York,
127-33.
8. Rem Koolhaas, "Die Illusion der
Architektur," Arch + 86 (August
1986): -+0.
9. Elia Zenghelis, "Arcadie: Le
52
Paradis transpose," L'Architecture
d'aujourd'hui 238 (1\pril 1985): 55.
I 0. August Endcll, Die Schonheit
der Crossen Stadt (Stuttgart, 1908),
59.
II. See Stanislaus \'On :'1-loos,
"Rotterdam ladt Leonidm' ein: Zu
ncucren Arbeiten des Office of
;\letropolitan Architecture,"
Archithese 5, no. I I (1981): 61.
12. Koolhaa "Urbanisme: !magi-
ncr lc ncant," 38.
13. Ibid.
H. Rem Koolhaas, "Ncl'ada," Zone
1-2 (1986): -f50.
15. Oi\IA, "Exodus," Casabella
378 (I 973): -f2; reprinted, in part,
in Architectural Design 5, no. -f7
( 1977): 328.
16. Ibid.
17. After Demitrios Porphyrios in
his lucid essay "Pandora's Box: An
Essay on i\1etropolitan Portraits,"
Architectural Design 5, no. 47
(1977): 357-62.
18. See 0. M. Ungers. Die Stadt
in der Stadt: Das Criine Stadtar-
chipel (Cologne, 1977). For more
about Ungers's ideas on the inter-
pretation of Berlin, see also Lise-
lotte and Oswald Matthias Ungers,
''The llumanist City," in The Forest
Edge I Post-War Berlin, Architec-
tural Design Profile (London: Acad-
em\' Editions. 19 2), -o--3. and
0. \1. Ungers, "Biographic einer
tadt," in lnternationale Bauaustel-
lung Berlin: Idee, Prozess. Ergebnis:
Die Reparatur und Rekonstruction
der Stadt (Berlin: Frolich & Kauf-
mann, 1984), 255-58.
I 9. For a similar metaphor, see
Alfred Doblin, "Der Ceist des
naturalisti chen Zeitaltcrs,'' Die
neue Rundschau (December 192-f),
where he characterizes the metrop-
olis as "aggregations of coral for the
collecti,ely existing people."
Quoted Frank \Verner, "Stadt in
der Stadt: A Transitory journey
from Delphi to Berlin,'' in lnterna-
tionale Bauaustellung Berlin, 2-+3-
51.
20. "Die Erschrcckcnde chonhcit
des 20. Jahrhundcrts," 36.
21. "0\IA, Urban lntcncntion,"
International Architect I, no. 3
( 1980): 50; sec also "La Dcu:-.icme
chance de !'architecture moderne"
(a comersation '' ith Rem Kool-
haas), L'Architecture d'aujourd'hui
238 (April I 985): 3.
ZZ. The reference here is to the
title of the interview" ith Koolhaas
in L'Architecture d'aujourd'hui, "La
Deuxiemc chance de !'architecture
modernc."
23. "Erroneous and endless aberra-
tions by the search for style in the
nineteenth century. Until Art lou-
veau ( jugendstil). Better from
Schinkel to Schinkel. Schinkel
never forgot to conceive the object
outside of convention. That made
him modern. Despite the references
to antiquity" (Ludwig 1-lilberseimer,
"Die Architektur der Crossstadt,"
1914, Hilberseimer Papers, Art
In titute of Chicago).
24. Werner llegemann, Das Stei-
nerne Berlin ( 1930; Berlin: Braun-
schweig 1963), 181.
25. See, in this regard, Rem Kool-
haas, "A Foundation of Amnesia,"
Design Quarter!)' 125 (198-f): 5-11.
On the contextual relationship of
i\1ies's glass tower ncar the Fricd-
richstrassc station, sec Fritz Neu-
meyer, (VI ies mn der Rohe: Das
kur;stlose \Vort (Berlin: Sicdler,
1986), 233.
26. Sec Otto Wagner, forcward,
Die Baukunst un erer Zeit, 2d ed.
(Vienna, 1898).
r. For his impressions of walking
along the wall, sec "Ein Cesprach
mit Rem Koolhaas," 633.
28. On the IB 's approach to the
citv block. sec "La Deuxiemc
de !'architecture modcrne,"
6: "This is a clear indication of the
paradox of an ideology that pretends
to be contextualist but is completely
opposed to the existing context! We
were frightened by this negation of
the real of conditions encoun-
tered and this incapacity to
interpret them in a positi'e manner.
We feel that one can al\\'ays find
the beginning of something better
in e\cn the ''orst conditions."
29. See the intcrl'icw by llans Kall-
hoff of Wim \Venders, "The City:
A Conl'ersation," Quaderns IT
( 1988): -+5-79.
Figure Credits
I. -f, -, 10. L'Architecture d'au-
jourd'lwi 238 (April I 985).
2. Vittorio Spinazzola, Pompei alia
/ucc scavi nuove, \'Ol. I (Rome.
1953).
3, 16. Photographs by Fritz
Neumeyer.
5, 24. Der 1/imme/ iiber Berlin:
Ein Filmbuch \'On Wim \Venders
und Peter 1/andke (Frankfurt am
i\lain, I 987).
6. Rem Koolhaas. Delirious J\'ew
York (Ne'' York: \luscum of l\lod-
ern Art, 1978).
Neumeyer
8. Ivan Leonrdov (Cambridge.
\lass.: \111 Press, 1981 ).
9, 15. Architectural Design 5, no.
47 ( 19-7).
II, 12. Fritz cumeyer, J\.lies van
der H.ohe: Das kunstlose Wort (Ber-
lin: Siccllcr, I 9 6).
13. Photograph by 1\ndreas
Rentsch.
H. Casabe/la 3-8 (1973).
1-. In the Shadow o( .\1ies (Chi-
cago: of Chicago Pre s,
1989).
18, 22. llcinrich Klotz, Die Revi-
sion der \lodeme (\lunich, 198-f).
I 9. Karl Friedrich Schinkel,
Sammlung architektonischer
Entwlir(e (reprint; Berlin and Chi-
cago, 1981 ).
20. Rassegna r ( 1988).
23. /Bt\ Architecture in Progress,
,\rchitcctural Design Profile (Lon-
don: ,\eadem' C.ditions. 19 -f).
53
24. To imagine nothingness:
Wings of Desire
ment blocks on Afrikani cher Strasse, in their restraint
equally close to the romantic spirit of Karl Friedrich
Schinkel as to the spirit of modernist Sachlichkeit.
The desperate self-reference of the contemporary acrobatics
of the sign has lost that peculiar combination of self-main-
tenance and respect, of abstraction and empathy, of pro-
spective fantasy and retroactive awarene . The crisis of
culture stems less from the impossibility of realizing his-
toric ideals than from the inability to attentively reinterpret
history from a suspended point of attention, independent
of the fascinations of the fashionable moment and from
the suggestions of so-called historical discernment. OMA's
Berlin projects, from "The Berlin Wall as Architecture" to
"Exodus" to the design for Friedrichstrasse, have translated
such an attempt into architectural ideas, stimulating the
discourse of a contemporary architectural culture.
otes
I. Rem Koolhaas, "Berlin," Zone
1-2 (1986): 4-f9. See also Rem
Koolhaas, "Urbanisme: lmaginer le
neant," L'Architecture d'aujourd'hui
238 (April 1985): 38.
2. Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New
York ( ew York: Museum of Mod-
ern Art, 1978).
3. See Rem Koolhaas and Zoe
Zenghelis, "The City of the Captil'e
Globe," project, I 972.
4. "Always bring a mixture of
seduction and repugnance into the
game" ("Ein Cesprach mit Rem
Koolhaas" a comersation ''ith Rem
Koolhaas Bauwelt 17-18 (1987):
633). "Since nothing remains and
el'erything changes -surely some-
times new meaning will be experi-
enced as painful, a psychological
trauma; our task must be the mod-
ern imprinting. What I mean by
psychological confrontation could
perhaps be explained through the
example of the Berlin Wall. For
me, it was extremely curious to dis-
cover what a bizarre, spontaneous,
meaning and sense of credibility
emanates from this place. In a way,
assemblage 11
the subconscious ha a penetrating
pm,cr- as much as '' e c,er like
to talk about" (ibid.).
5. "Die Erschrcckcndc Schonhcit
des 20. Jahrhundcrts" (Rem Kool-
haas in com-crsation with Patrice
Coulet and i'\icholas Kuhnert),
Arch + 86 (Augu t 1986): H. AI o,
in reference to the At\ and Super-
tudio: "[ ''as able to introduce
Supcrstudio because I organized a
lecture :'\atalini. lie had just
created the 'Continuous \ lonu-
ment,' a project that I really
thought was fantastic and that
reminded me of the rationalism of
Leonida," (ibid.).
6. " omc years later, when Rem
.. shm,ed me his Berlin, I ''as
amazed his interpretation of the
ideal city: I recognized there the
same intense desire to build an
cncJa,e where the inhabitants
\\Ould become the \'Oiuntary prison-
ers of architecture" ("Ou le debut
de Ia fin du reel" Ia COn\'Crsation
'' ith Eli a Zenghelis], L'Architecture
d'aujourd'hui 238 [April 1985]: II).
7. Koolhaas, Deliriou New York,
127-33.
8. Rem Koolhaas, "Die Illusion der
Architektur," Arch + 86 (August
1986): -+0.
9. Elia Zenghelis, "Arcadie: Le
52
Paradis transpose," L'Architecture
d'aujourd'hui 238 (1\pril 1985): 55.
I 0. August Endcll, Die Schonheit
der Crossen Stadt (Stuttgart, 1908),
59.
II. See Stanislaus \'On :'1-loos,
"Rotterdam ladt Leonidm' ein: Zu
ncucren Arbeiten des Office of
;\letropolitan Architecture,"
Archithese 5, no. I I (1981): 61.
12. Koolhaa "Urbanisme: !magi-
ncr lc ncant," 38.
13. Ibid.
H. Rem Koolhaas, "Ncl'ada," Zone
1-2 (1986): -f50.
15. Oi\IA, "Exodus," Casabella
378 (I 973): -f2; reprinted, in part,
in Architectural Design 5, no. -f7
( 1977): 328.
16. Ibid.
17. After Demitrios Porphyrios in
his lucid essay "Pandora's Box: An
Essay on i\1etropolitan Portraits,"
Architectural Design 5, no. 47
(1977): 357-62.
18. See 0. M. Ungers. Die Stadt
in der Stadt: Das Criine Stadtar-
chipel (Cologne, 1977). For more
about Ungers's ideas on the inter-
pretation of Berlin, see also Lise-
lotte and Oswald Matthias Ungers,
''The llumanist City," in The Forest
Edge I Post-War Berlin, Architec-
tural Design Profile (London: Acad-
em\' Editions. 19 2), -o--3. and
0. \1. Ungers, "Biographic einer
tadt," in lnternationale Bauaustel-
lung Berlin: Idee, Prozess. Ergebnis:
Die Reparatur und Rekonstruction
der Stadt (Berlin: Frolich & Kauf-
mann, 1984), 255-58.
I 9. For a similar metaphor, see
Alfred Doblin, "Der Ceist des
naturalisti chen Zeitaltcrs,'' Die
neue Rundschau (December 192-f),
where he characterizes the metrop-
olis as "aggregations of coral for the
collecti,ely existing people."
Quoted Frank \Verner, "Stadt in
der Stadt: A Transitory journey
from Delphi to Berlin,'' in lnterna-
tionale Bauaustellung Berlin, 2-+3-
51.
20. "Die Erschrcckcnde chonhcit
des 20. Jahrhundcrts," 36.
21. "0\IA, Urban lntcncntion,"
International Architect I, no. 3
( 1980): 50; sec also "La Dcu:-.icme
chance de !'architecture moderne"
(a comersation '' ith Rem Kool-
haas), L'Architecture d'aujourd'hui
238 (April I 985): 3.
ZZ. The reference here is to the
title of the interview" ith Koolhaas
in L'Architecture d'aujourd'hui, "La
Deuxiemc chance de !'architecture
modernc."
23. "Erroneous and endless aberra-
tions by the search for style in the
nineteenth century. Until Art lou-
veau ( jugendstil). Better from
Schinkel to Schinkel. Schinkel
never forgot to conceive the object
outside of convention. That made
him modern. Despite the references
to antiquity" (Ludwig 1-lilberseimer,
"Die Architektur der Crossstadt,"
1914, Hilberseimer Papers, Art
In titute of Chicago).
24. Werner llegemann, Das Stei-
nerne Berlin ( 1930; Berlin: Braun-
schweig 1963), 181.
25. See, in this regard, Rem Kool-
haas, "A Foundation of Amnesia,"
Design Quarter!)' 125 (198-f): 5-11.
On the contextual relationship of
i\1ies's glass tower ncar the Fricd-
richstrassc station, sec Fritz Neu-
meyer, (VI ies mn der Rohe: Das
kur;stlose \Vort (Berlin: Sicdler,
1986), 233.
26. Sec Otto Wagner, forcward,
Die Baukunst un erer Zeit, 2d ed.
(Vienna, 1898).
r. For his impressions of walking
along the wall, sec "Ein Cesprach
mit Rem Koolhaas," 633.
28. On the IB 's approach to the
citv block. sec "La Deuxiemc
de !'architecture modcrne,"
6: "This is a clear indication of the
paradox of an ideology that pretends
to be contextualist but is completely
opposed to the existing context! We
were frightened by this negation of
the real of conditions encoun-
tered and this incapacity to
interpret them in a positi'e manner.
We feel that one can al\\'ays find
the beginning of something better
in e\cn the ''orst conditions."
29. See the intcrl'icw by llans Kall-
hoff of Wim \Venders, "The City:
A Conl'ersation," Quaderns IT
( 1988): -+5-79.
Figure Credits
I. -f, -, 10. L'Architecture d'au-
jourd'lwi 238 (April I 985).
2. Vittorio Spinazzola, Pompei alia
/ucc scavi nuove, \'Ol. I (Rome.
1953).
3, 16. Photographs by Fritz
Neumeyer.
5, 24. Der 1/imme/ iiber Berlin:
Ein Filmbuch \'On Wim \Venders
und Peter 1/andke (Frankfurt am
i\lain, I 987).
6. Rem Koolhaas. Delirious J\'ew
York (Ne'' York: \luscum of l\lod-
ern Art, 1978).
Neumeyer
8. Ivan Leonrdov (Cambridge.
\lass.: \111 Press, 1981 ).
9, 15. Architectural Design 5, no.
47 ( 19-7).
II, 12. Fritz cumeyer, J\.lies van
der H.ohe: Das kunstlose Wort (Ber-
lin: Siccllcr, I 9 6).
13. Photograph by 1\ndreas
Rentsch.
H. Casabe/la 3-8 (1973).
1-. In the Shadow o( .\1ies (Chi-
cago: of Chicago Pre s,
1989).
18, 22. llcinrich Klotz, Die Revi-
sion der \lodeme (\lunich, 198-f).
I 9. Karl Friedrich Schinkel,
Sammlung architektonischer
Entwlir(e (reprint; Berlin and Chi-
cago, 1981 ).
20. Rassegna r ( 1988).
23. /Bt\ Architecture in Progress,
,\rchitcctural Design Profile (Lon-
don: ,\eadem' C.ditions. 19 -f).
53