plating its future at a time of urban crisis and depopulation. Ungers realized that the center of the city could no longer be maintained by the conventional approach of restoration, and that a new model was needed as a response to population shrinkage in a walled-in island with definitive borders. But instead of viewing the post-war city as a crisis that needed rectification, Ungers radically treated the existing condition of the city as a projective model for Berlin’s future. After surveying the remains of the city, Ungers and his team selected parcels of the existing urban fabric that stood out for their historic, social, and environmental identities and their relevance for West Berlin. Through a process of demolition and infill, the enclaves were then defined, sculpted, and turned into archaeological artifacts—liberated from the anonymity of the city and transformed into quasi-islands. The empty spaces between the
“Berlin as Green Archipelago” In 1977, Ungers collaborated with a group of architects on an urban project for the city of West Berlin. Titled “Berlin as Green Archipelago,” the project consisted of approximately 60 isolated “urban islands” floating within the ocean of open spaces surrounded by the Berlin Wall. Characterized by the extreme spatial contrast between enclaves of densely urban fabric and the vast emptiness caused by wartime destruction, the city of West Berlin was contem-
islands were then to be filled in by forest over time, turning West Berlin into an archipelago of dense urban islands in a sea of greenery. While the green forest could be seen as mere infill compensation for Berlin’s former density—a placeholder for the city’s future growth—the islands containing Berlin’s quintessential DNA were preserved and embalmed by the forest to ensure the continuity of the city’s identity. Although generated as a temporal response to a specific geopolitical context, and often considered a transitional, purgatorial model for Berlin’s future growth, the “Berlin as Green
Left: figure-ground diagram of “Berlin as Green Archipelago.”
Right: redistributed figure-ground diagram of “Berlin as Green Archipelago.”
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Mark Lee
The first is O. M. Ungers’s “Berlin as Green Archipelago,” in which depopulation is treated as a future model for walled-in West Berlin. The second is John Hejduk’s “Victims,” in which anthropomorphic buildings wander within a walled camp. Although different in scale and intention, both models are composed of isolated, dense, and defined artifacts surrounded by residual and unprogrammed spaces and contained within a hard boundary. Both are paradigmatic models for the city; both rely on the amount of distance between islands for their efficacy; both are models of smaller islands within a larger island. They differ, however, when examined in light of Gilles Deleuze’s distinction between “continental” and “oceanic” islands—one model is the former and the other the latter. While both seemingly take an isolationist posture, each instigates new forms of connectivity through the introduction of hard boundaries.