Rewriting History: O. M. Ungers’ Radical Visions for Future Cities
Sophia Ungers
Notes on Oswald Mathias Ungers
Oswald Mathias Ungers
The Urban Island in the Ocean of the Metropolis
André Bideau
Shifting Agency in Berlin: a Critical Decade
Ioanna Angelidou
The Possibility of an Island: Cold War Berlin as Charged Void, Landscape and Mirage
Chiara Ciambellotti
Rereading the Ungers: Utopian Realism as a Basis for Contemporary Urban Design
Simon Ganne, Benjamin Chavardès
Reviving Ungers’ Visions: Catalyst for Architectural Innovation at IBA 87 among Postmodern Architects
Michele Caja Islands, Blocks and Icons. Three Different Scales of Urban Design
Eva Sollgruber
Oswald Mathias Ungers and the Concept of the Open City Grünzug Süd and the Beginnings of Ungers’ Urban Thinking
Orsina Simona Pierini
Tiles of Space: Typology and Morphology in Action. Genealogy and Legacy of the Project for the Neue Stadt
Gerardo Brown-Manrique
Ungers, the Morphology of the City, and Trier
INTRODUCTION – Annalisa Trentin, Jörg H. Gleiter
Rewriting History: O. M. Ungers’ Radical Visions for Future Cities
Envisioning Tommorrow’s Cities: O. M. Ungers’ Urban Reflections poses the question of the innovative power of German architect O. M. Ungers (1926-2007) in the 21st century. The question concerns the significance of Ungers’ theory and practice under the changing conditions of climate-friendly development, the remodelling of the city, the problems of dealing with natural resources, global warming and changing models of living in general. The need to rethink the conception of architecture and the city calls for a review of possible orientation and especially for theoretical models as a basis for current practice.
To this end this issue of HPA proposes to turn once again to the work of Ungers and to investigate the visionary and experimental aspects that are hidden in his work and went unnoticed so far. The question is whether and how Ungers can serve as a starting point for new models and visions of the city of tomorrow. We asked our authors to unearth and bring to light those new aspects in the work of Ungers, that may serve as key concepts for the solutions in the current crises of the city.
We believe that Ungers’ radical vision of future cities far exceeded the rational approach to form, morphology and urban transformation to which his work is too often reduced, despite his multifarious activities as a visionary architect, farsighted planner and scrupulous intellectual. Can Ungers’ radicality be fruitful to the solution of today’s problems?
The question is whether and how we can learn from Ungers today, how relevant is Ungers today, a good fifty years after the publication of The City in the City: Berlin Green Archipelago, the most original among the many groundbreaking investigations that Ungers undertook. When Ungers and his collaborators published this booklet,
Towns and cities are places for the constant formation and transformation of concepts, ideas, realities and conditions which are reflected in sensual experiences. They are like figures undergoing a metamorphosis, which sometimes develop from some topographical chance or from a deliberate decision, following the laws of logical consequences or antithetical leaps.
The story of mankind is also the story of its built environment –its towns and cities. Towns are phenomena that cannot be comprehensively captured with scientific theories alone, even though many such attempts were made in the 19th and 20th centuries in particular. The complexity is obviously too multi-faceted to be compressed into a theory that cannot avoid being one-dimensional. Theories generally only explain facts that have already been isolated and are derived from quantitative criteria. A town is of course also defined by its land use, transport networks, locations, population figures, economic activity, social situations, productivity and all kinds of other quantifiable facts, but what actually characterises the town goes far beyond that. Just supposing we could capture all the measurable factors: even then, we would still not know what actually keeps the town alive.
Is it a place of commerce, of the exchange of goods and ideas, or is it a place of liberation, of protection and security, as in older times?
Towns are places where the traces of different cultural eras and architectural mindsets are preserved. They bear witness to people’s intellectual spirit and physical capacity to the extent to which political, social and aesthetic ideas, convictions and utopias coincide with the history of the local architecture and urban planning.
Such a town, in its dialectically opposing architectural elements and fragments, which exist side by side and are either mutually
Shifting Agency in Berlin: a Critical Decade
What kind of knowledge do cities yield, how do architects unpack and leverage this knowledge in a particular moment? Which kind of architectural agency can be related to knowledge produced in the urban realm? Such questions can be raised regarding the knowledge affecting the collective of authors surrounding Oswald Mathias Ungers in the late 1970s. Was it a particular moment in the history of Berlin when they released their manifestos The Urban Villa and The Green Archipelago? Produced by Ungers and his teaching assistants in 1977 and 1978,1 both texts hail from the decade of ‘learning from’: to attempts that all aimed at repositioning architectural research and practice.
To grasp of the connection between knowledge production to architectural agency one must turn to a lesser known research publication from a decade earlier. “Berliner Brandwände” [1], dedicated to fire and party walls, is certainly one of the more startling products in Ungers’s evolution. As a publication, Berliner Brandwände is evidence of the thematic openness of research during late 1960s and early 1970s.2 A sequence of grainy images taken by photographer Arthur Laskus is combined with cartographic information related to Berlin’s 19th century tenements. Their inner organization has been cracked open by the acts of destruction of the war which have randomly exposed party walls. This was the urban landscape such as Ungers would have experienced it upon his arrival from Cologne as a professor at Technische Universität Berlin in 1963. Countless exposed blank surfaces could still be experienced in 1960s and 1970s West Berlin–where Ungers taught, designed and built during various decades of his professional career.
Released in 1969 by collaborators Jürgen Sawade and Ulrike Pampe, the small publication was the result of a research survey
8. Aldo Rossi, Eraldo Consolascio, Bruno Reichlin, and Fabio Reinhart, La Città Analoga: Composizione Architettonica, (1976), reproduction of collage, print on paper. Image courtesy of Archivio Aldo Rossi, Collezione Architettura Collection, MAXXI Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo Rome.
The Possibility of an Island: Cold War Berlin as Charged Void, Landscape, and Mirage
3-6. Documents by the author. From upper left to lower right, axonometries of IBA 87 projects by Hejduk, Eisenman,
Oswald Mathias Ungers and the Concept of the Open City
Grünzug Süd and the Beginnings of Ungers’ Urban Thinking
[H]is architectural work nearly always functions on the level of urban design.1
Introduction
This quote by Italian architect Vittorio Gregotti is taken from a text published in 1976 in Lotus International introducing a series of projects which German architect Oswald Mathias Ungers and his team had conceived in prior years.2 As Gregotti implies, the projects presented3 are architectural and urban at the same time, foreshadowing Ungers’ design for The City in the City. Berlin: A Green Archipelago, published in Lotus International one year later, in the summer of 1977.4
In the issue of 1976, alongside his projects, Ungers himself delivers the text Planning Criteria5 in which he lays down five principles that are formative for his design methodology and which build the theoretical frame for the projects presented: (1) “the dialectical process with a reality as found”, (2) “the problem of planning and accident”, (3) “the plurality of solutions or the wide spectrum of the architectural interpretation of one and the same element”, (4) “the concept of architecture as an environment or […], the urban characteristics of architecture, (5) “the problem of choosing between precision and adaptability”.6
Elaborating on the fourth criterion, Ungers states: “The projects demonstrate in several cases how the object-character of architecture can be diminished in favor of an architecture
