The Bauhaus and Berlin Architecture
Berlin Architecture between Emphasis and Displacement. Discover a new perspective on Berlin's historic buildings and sites.
Download the timetable (PDF, 62 KB)
Course Content
Field trips on bikes, by foot and bus will give us the opportunity to visit the architectural highlights of Berlin and beyond. Our main focus will be the International Style of the 1920s, the city planning during the 1930s and the impact of the separation and unification of Germany and its capital.
Objectives
We will work on three different time periods – Weimar Republic, National Socialism and Post-War until Today. Our main focus will be to examine and compare Berlin's architecture and urban planning with regard to two considerations: emphasis and displacement. Referring to those terms, we will analyse the presentation of iconic buildings and sites and their significance as historic landmarks. Another main topic will be to look at the diverse historical concepts of how national memories have been implemented (or not) into public space. What does destroying, transforming, reconstruction, remodification, and new construction mean to our cultural identity? Comparing to the students’ own origins we will try to find out if our spatial experiences of Berlin can create today's social and political dynamics.
Who is this course addressed to?
The workshop is open to students with strong interest in architecture and urban planning.
Methodology
Learning by seeing and comparing: A mix of theoretical lessons, field trips and analytic discussions.
Course Coordinator
Sigrid Melchior, M.A. art historian and lecturer on History of Modern Art and Design at the berliner technische schule. Co-ordinator of international exhibition projects in Berlin, Hamburg and Venice. Publications on the history of art, architecture and design.
Team
Prof. Ralph Stern, architect and Dean Faculty of Architecture, University of Manitoba
Michael Carstens, Dipl-Ing., architect and lecturer at the berliner technische kunstschule
Detailed Course Description
The course THE BAUHAUS UND BERLIN ARCHITECTURE offers a mixture of architectural theory and a workshop on spatial definition of personal and subjective surroundings. The theoretical part will take place both in seminar discussions at btk with specific presentations from our lecturers, as well as during our field trips and exhibition visits. Exploring iconic buildings means comparing their emblematic and constructed images with the experience of their temporary conditions and surroundings. Berlin has undergone constant change and suffered large-scale destruction, much has been preserved, restored and modified. Some of this evidence from the past can still be experienced today.
First Week
Our first week will be devoted to discussing the terms of emphasis and displacement as they refer to iconic buildings, mostly constructed during the 1920s Weimarer Republic period, or influenced by the International Style. Our field trips will give us the opportunity to have a look at different city models at the Berlin Senate Department for Urban Development and the Environment, and to visit the Bauhaus-Archiv to see objects, architecture drawings and models from the former Bauhaus directors Walter Gropius, Hannes Meyer and Mies van der Rohe, and also from their students.
Of course most importantly, we will enjoy a critical look at different buildings, e.g. the Shell-House from Emil Fahrenkamp, the so called Horse shoe housing estate (Hufeisensiedlung) in Berlin-Britz of the 1920s, Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation, as well as museums and private villas designed by Mies van der Rohe, Erich Mendelsohn and the Brothers Luckhardt.
Furthermore we plan to venture beyond Berlin to Dessau, to see the Bauhaus building and the Dessau Masters’ houses.
Second Week
The focus of the second week will be the city center from 1933, the year that the National Socialists seized power, until the present. This trajectory will cover the spatial reorganization of the city under the National Socialists, the traumatic events of the Second World War and the Russian occupation at the end of close of the war, the Allied division of the city into four zones, the Cold War division of the city into East and West Berlin, and the dramatic reunification of the city after the “Fall of the Wall” in 1989. It is a remarkable trajectory, unique amongst global cities, and “reading” Berlin is concerned as much with discovering the traces of the vanished, the repressed, the buried, and the hidden as it is with interpreting the manner in which contemporary buildings are designed.
What you will learn over these days is the degree to which architecture and urban design can be instrumentalized and politicized: engaging the rationales behind particular “stylistic” choices such as modernism versus classicism, expressionism versus rationalism, the various International Building Exhibitions (IBAs) and the degree to which they influenced urban eradication or urban reclamation, the “European City” versus the “American City”. You will also become familiar with some of the major architectural actuers, starting with Albert Speer (who worked closely with Adolf Hitler) and continuing through the post-war projects of such luminaries as Hans Scharoun and Mies van der Rohe, through to important IBA contributors such as Aldo Rossi and Zaha Hadid and then to contemporary architects such as Norman Foster, Matthias Sauerbruch and the recent reconstruction of the Neues Museum on the Museumsinsel by David Chipperfield.
Third Week
In the third week Michael Carstens will offer a workshop about spatial definition of personal and subjective surroundings. Together you will read texts from Foucault and Augé to discuss the concept of personal/private and public space. With the central question in mind: How to react to the conception of personal space? You will jump on bikes to discover lost and hidden spaces in Berlin.
During the four days you can develop and create your own "urban intervention" design by drawing and taking photos. This material can be used for your presentation on the last day. The workshop includes an introduction to the software Cinema 4D if you prefer to work digitally. But if you prefer the physical, there will also be a model building session, where you can create a rendering of your own "urban intervention" design so you can take a piece of your own Berlin back home with you.
Requirements
Please bring a good old paper city map of the city you live in or the city/town you are from. It can be a historic one or a current one from the local tourist office. Compulsory reading: Brian Ladd – The Ghosts of Berlin, The University of Chicago Press, London 1997
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