Shifting Agency in Berlin: a Critical Decade

Abstract

There is a reciprocity between architecture production and urban publics, especially clear in times of professional crisis. For O.M.Ungers, Berlin served as a model for novel themes in a period when representations and demands of social groups were appearing in the urban realm. These challenged the Welfare State and the architecture production enmeshed with it. In a fragmented urban landscape, the urban villa introduced customized objects as “prototypes for inner city residences” (Ungers at al., 1978). Together with the more notorious Green Archipelago in the same year, the urban villa was the product of a Cornell Summer Academy that was premised on the manifest shortcomings of mass housing. Its participants in 1978 were avid observers of the material evidence that contemporary Berlin presented. Ungers was himself eager to re-legitimize his architectural practice after the crisis of mass housing in the same city during the late 1960s. The accompanying text, The Urban Villa, refers to a “personalization of lifestyle” and the “shift from the dependant tenant to the independant home owner”: a suburbanization of the already insular, provincial city? an early vehicle for Postmodernism? The interpretation of Berlin’s distressed urban condition certainly owes to experiences that Ungers had made in a geographical and a professional distance over the past decade. His gaze was conditioned by a distinctly different professional, social and cultural context that Cornell University and New York City had exposed him to since leaving Berlin to teach abroad. Yet structural changes affected cities and urban governance on both sides of the North Atlantic. In Ungers’s case, the ‘American’ experience can be argued as informing a novel reading of the fragmented Berlin. Which architectural agency can be related to knowledge derived from an urban realm that is itself changing? If anything, the two Summer Academies organized by Ungers and his colleagues from Cornell University offer a lens to look at how external forces condition the knowledge acquired by architects.