Berlin Fragments

Per Rebecca

The author wishes to thank the following companies for their support:

www.c-b-a.net

conrad-bercah

Berlin Fragments A heterography of an architectural form

curated by Valerio Paolo Mosco afterword by Davide Tommaso Ferrando edited by Marlene Klein

ISBN 978-88-6242-343-4 First Italian edition June 2018 First English edition January 2019 © LetteraVentidue Edizioni © conrad-bercah No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, even for internal or educational use.

Italian legislation only allows reproduction for personal use and provided it does not damage the author. Therefore, reproduction is illegal when it replaces the actual purchase of a book as it threatens the survival of a way of transmitting knowledge. Photocopying a book, providing the means to photocopy, or facilitating this practice by any means is like committing theft and damaging culture.

Should any errors or omissions have been made regarding copyrights of the illustrations, we will be glad to correct them in the forthcoming reprint.

All drawings by conrad-bercah © All photos by Yasutaka Kojima © LetteraVentidue Edizioni Srl Via Luigi Spagna 50 P 96100 Siracusa, Italy Web: www.letteraventidue.com Facebook: LetteraVentidue Edizioni Twitter: @letteraventidue Instagram: letteraventidue_edizioni

Contents 7 Foreword to the English edition 9 Bearing Witness to Architecture: The (hi)story of a building Valerio Paolo Mosco

15 Bercahaus 29 Berlin Fragments 31 Ante-operam 173 Bibliographical and Personal Acknowledgments 181 The Mollusk’s Shell Davide Tommaso Ferrando

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Foreword to the English edition

A six-month gap separates the present English edition from the first Italian edition, even though the texts were written practically simultaneously. The main difference between these two moments is that the building that stimulated what follows is finally completed, despite the best efforts of the local firms involved to the contrary. It was a seemingly endless Kafkaesque odyssey that would on its own merit deserve another book, perhaps written by someone like Carlo Ginzburg, armed with the patience of a historian working, at the micro-scale, to extrapolate the cultural meaning of what it means to be an architect practicing in Berlin today, in times when the elimination of all distances (cf.

Aby Warburg) has left everyone permanently distracted and therein spectacularly inefficient.

This edition includes pictures of the built structure that are not part of the original Italian edition. A small number of sketches (images) have also been added without altering the main argument. I find this a positive reflection on the notion, discussed in fragment 14, that no work can ever be concluded but merely abandoned. But I also feel compelled to underline one important aspect of the entire undertaking that perhaps did not get the attention it deserved but strikes me now, as I proofread—the fact that the sketches (75 in total) and the fragments (111 in total) fed each other somewhat independently, influencing one another to a stunning degree. What I want to underline is how both the typing and the sketching stimulated an inner debate that was not planned and over which I had little control. Arguably, it was a way of trying to forget the intellectual misery brought about by the building process and the impenetrable layers of the Berlin working-class mindset, which seems to characterize all classes present in situ.

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Relying on the help of hand-drawn images to illuminate “philosophical” speculation/introspection has never been a popular strategy. Contrary to theology, images have never played a primary role in philosophical speculation, arguably as a result of their minor, if not negative, status decreed by Plato in his allegory of the cave, which, to be honest, remains one of the most powerful statements about the sheer force of shadow images (or phantasms) to which human beings are irresistibly attracted, like Pasolini's fireflies.

According to Plato, images are the basis for thinking and for our best actions but are troublesome in that they confuse reality. Plato feared that the power of images could threaten the well being of collective life, but he also acknowledged their positive value in personal growth, therein expressing the philosophical anxiety of finding himself in an uncharted territory he could not master.

As the reader will soon discover, what follows is an investigation (for personal growth) of the energy that lies at the root of (intimate) images.

It is a reaction to the madness of the “modern” project, which succeeded in making people stop wondering about the power of interior images on the process of subjectivization, which, if we are honest with ourselves, is dominated by ghosts, conscious and unconscious memories, dreams and re-awakenings. The book stands as a reaffirmation of the increasingly overlooked truth underlined by Kant two centuries ago: art remains indifferent to progress as it is confined within limits of scope reached long ago.

The image that opens this investigation appears (to the author) as a time in which time stands still, oscillating between what is unresolved and unexplainable. It is a moment of suspension that wraps the semantic void of imagination. The latter is brought about by the friction between the impersonal and the individual, by the random accumulation (which took place between the two edition) of personal bereavements and the sudden sentiments for the physician who unleashes the power of images to heal her patients and for the metaphysical town in which she lives: a town that keeps anachronizing my present.

Berlin, January 2019

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Valerio Paolo Mosco

Bearing Witness to Architecture: The (hi)story of a building We are normally accustomed to considering architecture through two channels: the existence of the architecture itself and the feelings built objects elicit in us, an operation that in its highest form of expression corresponds to criticism. Then there is history, but that is only for aficionados, for people who want to know more and rightfully stay within those confines. There are few alternatives to these forms of expression, and they are rarely put into practice. With this work, conrad-bercah has proposed one: the narration of his world through a building constructed in Berlin or, rather, through this building’s (hi)story, a story that does not begin with the project’s preliminary sketches and end with the building’s occupancy but transcends all of this in space and, especially, in time.

It is the story of any building deserving of the epithet “work of architecture,” a long, debated, contradictory story full of continua, references, and few flights forward. I am reminded of a well-known interview with Frank Lloyd Wright in which a journalist asked the famous architect how long it took him to design Fallingwater. Answer: a day and a life. Beyond the boutade, his reply reveals a fairly important truth. For Wright, as for any other self-respecting author, the chance to realize a work coincides with the moment its author is granted to make his/her poetics explicit. In the best of cases, the work becomes a moment in which a journey can be clarified and expressed and, as such, it represents this journey at the point in which it actually intercepts the work.

Narrating one’s journey through a work is nothing new. Emblematic of journeys-become-works is that of St Augustine who, with his Confessions, can be considered the precursor of the genre, followed

by Montaigne, Pascal, Rousseau, Proust, and so on. Yet even though this literary genre is well established, it has not been used much in our times. Our times—the last 20 years or so and maybe more—have

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background, even when it has a strong plasticity and figurative quality. conrad-bercah’s fragments and drawings and the building he has done in Berlin appear urban and respectively assertive—in the background.

But the background is not mute, as it endeavors to recount itself in search of its own origins.The absolute protagonist of conrad-bercah’s testimony, of his fragments and drawings, is time. Testimony, after all, is none other than a chronicle of our relationship with time: it cannot exist devoid of it. I am reminded of what, for me, is one of the wisest pages of twentieth-century literature. It is from Orlando, the masterpiece by Virginia Woolf, the author who made a delicate epic of time and her intimate mystery. Orlando has, as we know, traversed the centuries, from Elizabethan times in the company of the era’s great poets to those in which Woolf wrote her book. Over the centuries, he became a she but always with aim of finding what could be defined one’s own intimate emotional expressiveness or, in other words, one’s own poetics. Near the end of her amazing story Woolf writes: “And she heaved a deep sigh of relief, as, indeed, well she might, for the transaction between a writer and the spirit of the age is one of infinite delicacy, and upon a nice arrangement between the two the whole fortune of his works depends. Orlando had so ordered it that she was in an extremely happy position; she need neither fight her age, nor submit to it; she was of it, yet remained herself. Now, therefore, she could write, and write she did. She wrote. She wrote. She wrote.”

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Bercahaus Jahnstrasse 84, 12347 Berlin-Britz

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Berlin Fragments

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Ante-operam

“Eterografia” is the word Italians use to describe a curious phenomenon that occurs whenever a document is manually signed by proxy, by a subject other than the subject who has an interest in signing it but cannot. In English, the term “heterography” identifies the act of writing different words from those the writer intended or spelling words differently from current or standard usage. I have come to consider the pages that follow a heterography sui generis as they seem do design a workspace in which all of the above meanings intersect without apparent conflict. The very act of writing has forced me to face a disconcerting fact: it is as though I had unconsciously asked someone else to sign a document on my behalf. As if it were a mandate ad scribendum?

The facts are clear but need to be told. The “document” is a timber condominium building I designed and built in Berlin-Britz in 2017–18.

It appears, however, that a number of Warburg type phantasms may actually be the true “signatories” of this document. Traces of these restless ghosts are visible in the drawings submitted for inspection in the pages that follow. They reflect a force that “represented” me, by taking a series of poetic licenses of which I would have approved had I been aware of them and to which I now give tacit consent. This is nothing new for any practicing architect: one cannot avoid coming to terms with the work’s inescapable autonomy, operating perforce within the parameters of a heterographic field. As Virginia Woolf once wrote: “Do not dictate to your author, try to become him. Be his fellow-worker and accomplice.” This is valid in literature and in architecture. One writes to become impersonal even if, by writing, we assert our authorship over the work, pulling at one and the same time both toward and away from its hidden Genius.

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The import of a heterographic building, whose form was built “by proxy,” became apparent to me shortly after the project had been approved by the Neükolln planning department in 2016. At the beginning of August of that same year, I came across a sketch of my thesis project drawn 25 years earlier (on the left). The subject of the thesis, the influence of which I only recognized post litteram, was the redevelopment of an archaeological area in Turin or, more specifically, the area around Porta Palatina, commonly referred to in English as the Palatine Gate or the Palatine Towers, and the half-buried Roman Theater.

The serendipitous discovery of this sketch compelled me to think about the building I was about to start constructing in a new way.

I was obliged to see it in relation to a specific time frame (October 1992–February 1993) of my own personal Bildung, from my thesis work to the trip I took immediately after defending my thesis.

This trip began in Tuscany and Umbria, on the trail of the geometric spaces of Piero della Francesca on the 500th anniversary of his death, which was commemorated in 1992. From there I went to Rome to explore, in particular, Bramante’s architectural theory as inscribed in his built works. The third and final phase of these travels, not planned at the time of departure, was Berlin, where a series of intense emotions followed one after the other in rapid succession. They were provoked, in chronological order, by the amazing canopy of the Tempelhof Airport where planes still landed, by Bruno Taut’s Hufeisensiedlung in Neükolln-Britz, by the sensational gates conserved at the Pergamonmuseum, and finally by the numerous romantic brick churches by Schinkel and his disciples still dotting the landscape of the quintessential anti-city known as Berlin. Shortly after getting back to Milan, I learned—to my own amazment—that I was about to start working on a number of Berlin residential projects in Aldo Rossi’s office, with a particular focus on the Schutzenstrasse block, the one made of different fragments, including Palazzo Farnese.

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Agamben believes this tale, this fragment zero that in retrospect prompted all of what follow, can be read as an allegory of literature. He suggests that humanity—even if it has moved further and further from the sources of life’s mystery over the course of history, losing what tradition had taught it about fire, place, and formula—can still tell the story of its tradition.

I would like to underscore two things. First, Agamben uses the reflexive form of the Italian verb “raccontarsi” to convey that telling stories about one’s tradition is an act of reflexive consciousness, an act out of which something shared—literature—is born. Second, the fact that this “may be sufficient.”

This reflection leads me to think that a humanity now subjugated by digital giants might also profit from rediscovering the art of “storytelling.” Why? Because storytelling is an act that has always made it possible to be part of one’s tradition in a contemporary way and, at the same time, to challenge it in an intriguing game of chess.

What is certain is that we are living in a territory permeated by silent mists in which one often gets irretrievably lost. And within this largely unknown territory, there are still many traces of mystery.

Perhaps this condition makes it necessary to explore the latent potential of mystery by sharing stories. Perhaps sharing stories can lead to a willingness to open up a space for experiences that have been lived as well as those that have yet to be lived or identified or are simply yet to come.

And perhaps, just perhaps, this “may be sufficient.” Our times are quite different than those of the founder of Hasidic Judaism.

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“Genius” was the name the Latins gave to the angel that was to become the guardian of every infant: Genius meus nominatur, quia me geniut (I call him my genius because he is the one who generated me). The genius was thus in some sense the principle that governed and sustained an individual’s existence.

I am ready to accept the idea that even architectural works can have a genius and that their architects are allowed to indulgere genius, to abandon themselves to their genius and respond to its every request, even the most inopportune or inappropriate, without attempting to defraud it (genius suum defraud), because this would only mean cheating themselves. In doing so, I am also ready to accept that the genius of the building I designed in Berlin-Britz could be a sort of Nachleben, a remnant of life that appears and disappears but bears the imprint of multiple, intimate yet simultaneously impersonal lives.

Confronting and trying to understand a building’s genius means accepting the personal and impersonal side of a time that is both familiar and alien, a time produced by the complex dialectics of experiences that have been lived and experiences that have not as yet unidentified or silently await us in mysterious encounters yet to come. In this regard, the genius of the work always preserves what Maurice Blanchot calls the “presence of midnight” between the work itself and the literary space they appear to share. It is there that they come together and apart ad infinitum without being able to either free themselves from one another or identify with each other. But there is one thing of which I am sure: the author perceives the presence of the genius; it stimulates his/her desire to begin working, without knowing that an explanation has already been found. Indulgere genius, therefore, cannot mean anything but abandoning oneself to it, allowing it to make itself heard because its need to do so is also ours.

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In Berlin-Britz, I came to understand that language has the capacity to combine architectural form and its anthropogenesis in a mystery. This mystery, which is in some ways relatable to that of Baal Schem, weaves gestures, words, and deeds tightly together. I also note that architectural form can be more autobiographical than we are willing to admit, as “if our memory [were] like a labourer who toils at the laying down of firm foundations beneath the tumult of the waves” (M. Proust).

There are forms that simultaneously inhabit our mind and our gut. They feed on our subconscious memory, a memory composed primarily of things we did not know we loved or had perhaps forgotten to have loved, things and forms so embedded in our existence they are difficult to recognize.

One way to recollect them is to tell ourselves their story.

An image of undisciplined shadows resembling crosses crosses my mind. They remind me of the crosses in Piero della Francesca’s Ritrovamento delle tre croci e verifica della Croce in Arezzo, a painting I saw right after I discussed my thesis. The painting made such a deep impression on me, it found its way in my subconscious.

Piero’s painting is divided into two parts: the discovery of the cross on the left; its recognition on the right. The scenes take place at different times but are represented simultaneously, and some of the same figures are depicted in both parts. But there is only one Cross of Christ, on the left, because Christ, who is symbolized by the Cross, was believed to be unique and inimitable.

The double or, better yet, the uniqueness of the double is a theme that has appeared on the gates of European cities since the dawn of time. I recall my fascination with this double nature, with how Piero’s two images seem to fix the very concept of potentiality, allowing the same men to participate in or just observe different events at the same time. I have always thought that this fresco captures Aby Warburg’s “law of the good neighbor,” the principle of classifying books in relation to their ability to “converse” or to “engage with one another.” Yet it also seems to reflect a dream that can reveal the alterations we ourselves impose on the passing of time, breaking its linearity.

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Beyond their latent melancholia, these last few drawings seem to have an optimistic role. They remind one that it is still possible to experience things and to do so even if the twenty-first century seems to have at least partially precluded this possibility. Days that hold something close to human experience have grown increasingly rare. There is no experience in the repeated, repetitive movements inside urban conurbations; there is no experience in reading newspapers filled with non-news; there is no experience in the many boring or even sometimes fun but still banal events that oppress our days, like the constant updates of smart phone digital applications. The success of the digital revolution leads us to believe that it is more rewarding to give up the possibility of experiencing something to digital devices. It is a bit like what happened with the camera. The authority of smart phone and tablet photo albums has replaced the authority of daily life, which, until a century ago, was the raw material of experience and its transmissibility. The fact that people no longer really experience things is a major problem for life in general and for the role of architectural form.

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Benjamin again: “Citations in my works are like armed thieves who emerge suddenly and rob leisurely strollers of their convictions.” Living in the anti-city known to most as Berlin, I find it impossible to resist the disruptive force of Benjamin's theory of “the art of citing without quotation marks.” Benjamin's notion conceals a basic intuition few have dwelt upon: the fundamental change in the transmissibility of culture and the consequent new relationship with the past or with traditional forms, in architecture as in other fields. Benjamin was probably the first to realize that the quotation’s authority is based on destroying the authority to which a document is subjected because its role in cultural history has changed.

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Many philosophers sagaciously agree that the digital revolution has generated a series of ideological distortions of what can be considered the thought we inherited from the past, especially from the modern. An example is the absurd assertion that the use of digital devices would separate architecture from its own language and would finally free it from historical qualms, as the most foolish and the modernists had hoped. Another distortion is the claim that calculation itself or technical procedure is the only tool available to the most advanced project strategies and in and of itself represents the embodiment of progress.

These distortions, to which others may be summed, refer to a real ideology founded on the cult of computation, on the cult of quantity and technical management as opposed to that of humanism, which is based on the relationship between the parties and the management of their hierarchies. As in the past and in the modernist creed, the cult of computation tends to naively and uncritically equate technology with progress. This naivety is the reason why the ideology of computation seems destined to fail, in that it confuses the means with the ends, making digital code—a binary tool—semantically sufficient in itself. However important it may be in the practice of contemporary architecture, computation alone cannot define the theory and practice of architecture or its aesthetics. Only formal, spatial, structural, and tectonic ideas and their interrelation can do this: the medium, be it digital or analog, cannot. Ultimately, this is logical, not ideological.

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The timber house in Jahnstrasse functions as a city gate from both a practical and figurative point of view because it breaks the continuity of the street front.

This pause is very apparent in situ. The street front is a sort of continuous urban wall. Choosing to set the main body back with respect to the side towers appears to create a tension that draws one into the courtyard.

Today, after seeing the building without scaffolding for the first time, I read this gate fragment as part of a much larger series. It

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seemed as if the whole street had become a series of fragments.

What I felt is expressed in the drawing below, which highlights the role balconies, bow windows, and cornices play in typical Berlin buildings. There is an echo of these movements in the facade, which shift the border of the facade itself, in my timber house/gate too.

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Opening one’s eyes means learning how to close them: when the eye is continuously open, it tires out and one tends to see things blurred.

If I close my eyes and, once they are rested, think about the drawings aligned in these fragments, I become aware of the latent presence of a figure (Aby Warburg) that appears at various times and whose influence must be underscored. I am surprised and happy to admit that without having been aware of it, I have made an archeological excavation of an architectural form that has brought out, that has freed from their shadows, a series of Nachleben that had been foolishly thrown off the table of architectural discourse for exactly a century.

What do I want to say with this? Warburg’s research begins with the emergence of cinema and ends right after the first the CIAM congress held at La Sarraz (1928). In this time, Aby Warburg overturned the history of art, going beyond it to convincingly demonstrate the dynamic power of life in the constant movement of images, as Ernst H. Gombrich rightfully claimed.

Just as a director chooses and mounts frames in a theoretical montage, the art historian creates knowledge by assembling and reassembling images capable of creating a model of time, a new description of the world’s chaos.

Memory, desire, time without time: this is the perimeter in which research like Warburg’s unfolds, unhinging the dictates of modern rhetoric and the spirit of the time in no uncertain terms. Warburg demonstrates the absurdity of those who speak of proto- and postmodernism. The history of artistic events, says Warburg, is the history of the power of the transformation of phantasms, figures, and Nachleben, not of fake chronologies, like those made by modern movement, which, we know, made a real crusade out of destroying this power.

Many exponents of the early-twentieth-century avant-garde appear almost in line with Warburg’s research on artist’s need to embrace what, in a memorable book, Lionello Venturi defined as the taste of the primitive. In contrast, the apologists of modernism went all out to cancel this fundamental appointment once and for all.

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Perhaps his premature death prevented Aby Warburg from becoming a reference for the architectural intelligentsia. Or maybe the time of his message was from the very start very long, a time that would require a period of semi-darkness in before it could truly be developed after having been charged with its own time: “All memory, therefore, implies a time elapsed; consequently only those animals which perceive time remember, and the organ whereby they perceive time is also that whereby they remember,” wrote Aristotle (De Memoria 1.449b28–9).

Giordano Bruno said that the art of memory works in world of the shadows of ideas, presenting itself as an emulator of nature.

If worldly things take their shape from ideas inasmuch as ideas contain images of everything and things are manifested to our senses as shadows of the latter (ideas), then one could do the opposite through imagination, going back to the shadow of the ideas, from man to God. The art of memory is no longer an aid to rhetoric but a means for re-creating the world. From this perspective Warburg’s history of images is marked, as Agamben has noted, by an irregular but imaginative dance of phantasms,

by Pathosformel or formulas of pathos that contract memory’s energy within them. This dance seems to be led by the unconscious of time that, like the unseen but nonetheless existent movements of the earth’s crust that, in time, unravel genealogies.

It seems to me that these unravelments have a significant consequence in the world of architecture: they confine the architect’s work to an unverifiable world made of mystery and unobservable bonds. In the presence of this principle of uncertainty, what is to be done?

Claiming to deny this principle, as the modernists did, taking for granted that it is only possible to proceed on verifiable grounds, led to what we know. These answers make the substance of the question itself vanish, when asking questions is exactly what we need to do. Here, I have to admit that, today, the question that has become urgent appears to be this: What does it mean to be an architect in the age of anarchic capitalism?

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Perhaps an answer can be found in an exercise like this, in fathoming personal recollections like my Berlin recollections. In compiling fragments like these, a romantic world of primitive forms of which I was not aware seems to have emerged. It is a world in which the adjective “romantic” does not imply a state of nostalgia or one in which the arts dominate over a world dominated by all-consuming aesthetic models. It is, instead, a permanent state of mind, a state of melancholy that can fragment reality to create new mythologies.

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