Victims Hejduk began his theater masque series two years after Ungers’s “Berlin as Green Archipelago.” Named after Carnival rituals, the masque series advanced a theatrical model for the city whereby buildings were scripted as characters that played out their respective roles. Starting with the “Berlin Masque” of 1979, the series developed into the “Lancaster/Hanover
Hejduk defined and enclosed the site for “Victims” with two layers of tall hedges, between which a tram circulates. Not unlike the double-tiered Berlin Wall with limited checkpoints, the site is entered through a control point by way of a bus stop from which visitors proceed over a drawbridge and through a gatehouse. Within the hedges the site is colonized by a grid of young evergreens, which were to reach full maturity over the course of the first 30-year cycle. Over the second 30-year cycle, Hejduk offered the citizens of Berlin the opportunity to insert any number of his 67 anthropomorphic structures, or “Victims,” into the site, as well as the opportunity to decide upon the time sequence of their construction and their relationships with one another. As with his earlier “masques,” Hejduk emphasized the individual, discrete buildings by employing elemental biomorphism and typological variations to create the mytholo-
Masque” of 1982 and finally culminated in the 1984 project “Victims.” “Victims” was designed for the PrinzAlbrecht-Palais competition for a memorial park on an old Gestapo site in Berlin. Planned as an incremental piece to be created over two 30-year periods, the project tested the transferability of the islands-within-an-island model from the urban scale of Ungers’s “Green Archipelago” to an architectural scale and, in many ways, became a microcosm of Ungers’s project.
gized structures. Often situated on motorized wheels or limb-like supports, the structures are characterized by a lack of stability or permanence. Each structure is complete and figural; each structure is an island in its own right. But unlike Hejduk’s previous masques, in which the transient individual structures are isolated, most of the structures in “Victims” are precariously connected to one another, touching without interlocking. The “Victims” maintain their autonomy while implying a loosely held-together network.
Left: figure-ground diagram of “Victims.”
Right: redistributed figure-ground diagram of “Victims.”
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Two Deserted Islands
Archipelago” project produced a paradigmatic model for island organizations that transcended its origins. Unlike Colin Rowe’s “Collage City,” Ungers’s “Dialectical City” was achieved through the clear definition of the borders of each entity, separated by an abundance of space without overlap or collision. Instead of healing the wounds of the war, Ungers exacerbated the differences among the islands through definition and distance, turning Berlin into a Noah’s Ark of the city’s future.