From the Urban Island to the Insula. Morphological Variations around a Theme

Abstract

Starting with The City in the City, the manifesto that Ungers wrote in 1977 together with Rem Koolhaas during the Berlin Summer School on the Urban Villa, the article analyses its critical influence on the theorization of the city, referring to its recent critical reissue (Hertweck, Marot 2013). In an in-depth analysis of the various versions of this text, common elements in the two authors’ thinking – Ungers and Koolhaas – emerge, but also differences, particularly on the notions of city within the city, green archipelago and urban island. Through interviews made with Ungers’ collaborators, come out different impressions of this experience: for Koolhaas, “the most fascinating aspect of that undertaking was its site-specificity, the simple fact that Ungers had taken Berlin, West Berlin, as a laboratory”; for Hans Kollhoff, it was “an interesting exercise, but it was clear to him [Ungers] that it had no chance of being converted into reality.” Considering other parallel design and theoretical experiences carried out by Ungers at almost the same time, it emerges how the radical nature of this manifesto – which sought to provide a solution to Berlin’s shrinking condition through a green archipelago of formalized islands – had to confront the historic layout, which still existed despite its fragmented situation. The scale of the urban block is experimented with in different experiments, based on morphological variations. The urban island is slowly transformed into an urban insula, as practiced in the critical reconstruction introduced during the Berlin IBA by Kleihues, in which Ungers will be one of the main protagonists.