A platform for research: civil engineering, architecture and urbanism
A platform for research: civil engineering, architecture and urbanism
Islands-in-the-City: Berlin's urban fragments
This essay examines a series of publications by Rem Koolhaas that de-naturalise the metropolitan growth presumed by the authors of many modern architectural books. In 1977, Koolhaas joined Oswald Matthias Ungers at the Berlin Summer Academy for Architecture, held at Cornell University. The following year, they published the results of the Academy in a special volume, entitled 'The City Within the City: Berlin as Green Archipelago', containing plans to reconfigure Berlin as what Ungers labelled 'islands-in-the-city'. In this green archipelago, depopulation and urban flight were taken as facts of city life in the late-twentieth century, not as problems to be fought. Koolhaas, Ungers and their colleagues proposed that cities should work with these tendencies rather than against them, and take measures to ensure that cities retained their most essential metropolitan qualities. To that end, they planned to identify and emphasise Berlin's 'urban islands', those areas that had remained vital and vibrant, allowing the rest of the city to go to pasture and become a 'natural lagoon'. Their case study, the divided city of Berlin, would thus become a group of enclaves (much in the way that West Berlin was itself an enclave), city fragments 'liberated'-Ungers' word-from the falsity of a unified urbanism. The book's treatment of the city is consistent with its post-modern contemporaries, such as Learning from Las Vegas and Collage City, in which the urban environment is offered as a disintegrated perceptual experience rather than a unitary image. Yet a closer look at the publications in Koolhaas's oeuvre that pre-figured it helps to clarify the book's unique stake in presenting the city as the result of a process of decay, a process that reveals architecture's most essential qualities.
Islands-in-the-City: Berlin's urban fragments
This essay examines a series of publications by Rem Koolhaas that de-naturalise the metropolitan growth presumed by the authors of many modern architectural books. In 1977, Koolhaas joined Oswald Matthias Ungers at the Berlin Summer Academy for Architecture, held at Cornell University. The following year, they published the results of the Academy in a special volume, entitled 'The City Within the City: Berlin as Green Archipelago', containing plans to reconfigure Berlin as what Ungers labelled 'islands-in-the-city'. In this green archipelago, depopulation and urban flight were taken as facts of city life in the late-twentieth century, not as problems to be fought. Koolhaas, Ungers and their colleagues proposed that cities should work with these tendencies rather than against them, and take measures to ensure that cities retained their most essential metropolitan qualities. To that end, they planned to identify and emphasise Berlin's 'urban islands', those areas that had remained vital and vibrant, allowing the rest of the city to go to pasture and become a 'natural lagoon'. Their case study, the divided city of Berlin, would thus become a group of enclaves (much in the way that West Berlin was itself an enclave), city fragments 'liberated'-Ungers' word-from the falsity of a unified urbanism. The book's treatment of the city is consistent with its post-modern contemporaries, such as Learning from Las Vegas and Collage City, in which the urban environment is offered as a disintegrated perceptual experience rather than a unitary image. Yet a closer look at the publications in Koolhaas's oeuvre that pre-figured it helps to clarify the book's unique stake in presenting the city as the result of a process of decay, a process that reveals architecture's most essential qualities.
Islands-in-the-City: Berlin's urban fragments
Walker, Julia (author)
2015
Article (Journal)
English
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