berlin transfert. An atlas of aesthetic ideas

contents 7 berlin and its analogies Valerio Paolo Mosco

11 preliminary observations 19 bilderatlas ten aesthetic ideas for architectural form

45 berlin transfert 169 appendix notes on Purgatory and the power of images

173 glossary 185 bibliographic note

see glossary*

berlin and its analogies Valerio Paolo Mosco

“The idea is more than the thing, and the idea of the idea is more than the idea.”

Michel Tournier, Le Meteore

Images tell stories. Together they weave intertwining narratives, built on references and fast-forwards that go far beyond our will, fluctuating in an unstable atmosphere that is nothing more than the projection of our unconscious. This may be exactly what Baudelaire meant when he said he wanted “to glorify the cult of images,” urging us not to be afraid of this instability but to dive right in and enjoy the infinite correspondences images engender, correspondences so real as to be independent of the objects generating them. Baudelaire demonstrated this in his accounts of the Salon exhibiting the art of his time. In brief, jam-packed pieces of writing on each author, he played out all sorts of correspondences and analogies. Though no one remembers most of the painters he mentioned now, the correspondences still make these writings so relevant they are actually considered precursors of modern writing on art.

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bilderatlas ten aesthetic ideas for architectural form

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Nota bene The following atlas is composed of ten panels on which heterogeneous reproductions (drawings, sketches, photographs, collages, works of art, film frames, and so on) have been placed. These images come from books, their authors, the authors they discuss, and, above all, from the digital network in whose mare magnum they can be “fished out” by any dilettante much as they were by the author of this book. Every image is identified, by the following, in the following order: | title | year | author subject | source | credits the letter A the symbol -

means author unknown means missing or unknown

The first image of each panel identifies the panel’s theme.

The others interact with it both positively and negatively, as if to highlight the theme itself (and the aesthetic idea identified in it) by its opposite or through an inappropriate tone, as discussed in the text. The text provides direct references to the panels when each aesthetic idea is presented.

atlas ten aesthetic ideas for architectural form

1. Form as ruin p. 48 2. Form as surprise (front/back) p. 59 3. Form as ineffable Witz p. 64 4. Form as energy inversion p. 91 5. Form as a collage of temporalized fragments p. 94 6. Form as stimmung / sentiment of the time p. 113 7. Form as phantasm p. 122 8. Form as memory-trace p. 129 9. Form as aesthetic experience p. 136 10. The je-ne-sais-quoi of form p. 67

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1. Form as ruin 1a. The Tower of Babel | 1563 | Pieter Bruegel, the Elder | Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna | oil 1b. Berlin Ruin | 1945 | A | aerial photo 2a. The Monument | 1989 | Sibylle Bergemann | photo 2b. Berlin | 1989 | Sibylle Bergemann | photo 3. Lobe Block | 2018 | b+ | conrad-bercah

4a. Victory Column | 1945 | A | photo 4b. St. Nicholas Church, replacing the spire, 750th anniversary | 1987 | A | A 5a. Bauhaus Archive | 2015 | BFM | rendering 5b. An Imaginary View of the Bank of England in Ruins | 1830 | Joseph Michael Gandy | Sir John Soane’s Museum, London | oil 6. The Meeting | 2013 | Neo Rauch | Sammlung Hildebrand, Leipzig 7. The Slope | 2002 | Tim Eitel | oil

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1d 3a. Axel Springer Campus | 2013 | Kuehn Malvezzi | drawing 3b. House of One | 2020 | competition entry | Kuehn Malvezzi | rendering 3c. Axel Springer Campus | 2013 | Kuehn Malvezzi | drawing 5a. Berlin Morning | 1990 | O.M. Ungers | in Das Neue Berlin, 1980 5b. IBA 1980 | 1980 | OMA | drawing

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4. Form as energy inversion 1a. Palace of Charles V | 1526 | A | aerial view 1b. Alhambra, Granada | 1232 | - | drawing 1c. Great Mosque of Cordoba | - | A | aerial view 1d. Great Mosque of Cordoba | ca. 600 | A | drawing 2. The Empire of Light | 1954 | Renè Magritte | MoMA | oil

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8. Form as memory-trace 1a. Bauhaus Archive | 2015 | BFM | rendering 1b. Bauhaus Archive | 2015 | BFM | rendering 2. Walter Gropius House | 2015 | BFM | photo 3a. Berlin: Wall and Bunker | 1989 | A | photo

3b. The Olympic Torch | 1936 | A | photo 3c. Berlin Bunker | 2013 | conrad-bercah | photo 3d. Berlin Bunker | 1990 | A | photo 3e. No Wall | 1989 | A | photo 4. Romantic Ruin | - | A | drawing

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“Time, like the bird Opportunity, escapes us and takes flight. This intangible, this fugitive that attracts and at the same time escapes us, we can still touch it. If we’d expected to find something, we’d have been disappointed; time is nothing. But since it is also different from nothing, one has to conclude that it is presquerien. Time is je-ne-sai-quoi.”

Vladimir Jankélévitch, Le Je-ne-sais-quoi et le Presque-rien, 1957

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Most brandlhuber (b+)2 works are built in concrete, a reinforced concrete that has been treated in different ways, from rough to smooth. This concrete takes on an evident symbolic value: it expresses a sense of existential bareness and simultaneously appears as though it introjects the passage of time into itself, into its very textures and grains, presaging the building’s ruin. “Architecture,” Perret reminds us, “is what makes beautiful ruins” (see atlas, panel 1). Yet another more uncomfortable theory of ruins was promulgated by Albert Speer is his aesthetic guidelines for the new structures at the Berlin Olympics. The Ruinenwerttheorie suggested that national architecture was to convey its message long after the client’s eclipse or disappearance.3 This theory implied a nearly impossible task: architects were to design buildings that, when they collapsed, would become pleasing, paradoxically humble ruins, similar to those of the Roman Forum which have always fascinated German travelers, Goethe in primis. Some wanted to see Speer’s theory as an extension of Gottfried Semper’s ideas on the use of natural materials and therein his propensity for eliminating iron beams, but the theory sets itself apart now in two respects. First of all, it revived that aesthetic interest in the splendor of ruins that had held Western culture together from the Renaissance to Romanticism. Second, it is the only theory known to have been concerned with the life of architectural form after its death, the only one concerned with its Nachleben*. Considering this, it can be argued that the way in which Brandlhuber identifies reinforced concrete with ruins is as if he were trying to find the balance point between these two theories, revitalizing them in the contemporary world. But that is not all. It is also as if the bareness of the exposed reinforced concrete were stimulating the perception and comprehension of the work’s conceptual values, something Brandlhuber holds dear. Bareness, concept, and ruin define the vertices of a hypothetical triangle in which Brandlhuber’s work can be placed.4 This triangle is then seen, if you will, from the outside by the sophisticated ironic gaze that has always been this Berlin architect’s trademark.

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2. Brunnenstrasse, axonometric view, street front

7. Lobe Block, Handbuch

in a syncretic way. Put in other words, Brandlhuber does not really seem to be interested in giving form to contemporaneity understood as the immediate present. His real interest seems to lie in what can be defined an ethnography of architectural form, capable of weaving together what is recent and what can be defined as modern tradition and its history, what time has by now stabilized in shared icons that, adequately interpreted, reveal unexpected vitality. This is where the value of Brandlhuber’s work emerges, in the discovery of the new stripped of the fetishism of novelty. And this is why he can be considered one of the few antagonistic architects who have the strength and resources to counter the world and to envision an alternative that is both operational and a language.

The Antivilla (2010–2015) in Potsdam-Krampnitz is another Brandlhuber work that has to be considered. Here too, Brandlhuber was his own client (together with a group of artist friends) in setting in train what might be called a sophisticated provocation. Before becoming a media star, the Antivilla led an anonymous survival as a semi-abandoned GDR building, something similar to a “refuse of history.”8 For Brandlhuber, however, history knows no waste: everything is part of the tradition we inherit and the artist’s skill is that of taking its products (whatever they might be) and giving them new life. What, after all, have artists done with ruins? They have exalted history’s waste to turn it into new aesthetic material.

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Taking this reasoning to its extreme consequences, Brandlhuber bought, for himself, this GDR residue, a small factory that had produced women’s lingerie, and established an empathic relationship with it. He sensed its potential and would translate it into form by breaking into building’s body while almost completely respecting it as found. The Antivilla is, in fact, an example of the creative interpretation of the as found. Brandlhuber realized, for example, that it was not necessary to invent new perforations. He did nothing more than wield a jack-hammer and, haphazardly and almost without a project, widen the existed openings turning them into rough wall gashes through which the lake in front can be seen. But these openings also have a cultured soul that goes beyond their wild gestural expressiveness.

They recall Lucio Fontana’s deep slashes into canvas as well as Gordon Matta-Clark’s cuts into Paris buildings and Lina Bo Bardi’s intervention in the São Paulo Museum of Art. Brandlhuber himself, who never

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21. House of One, section, 2021 22. House of One, main floor plan, 2021

23. House of One, rendering, 2021

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a 27. a. Royal Palace, entrance, 1930s, Berlin b. Palazzo Madama, main facade, Rome c. Royal Palace, main facade, 1930s, Berlin d. Arch of Constantine, Rome

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27. e. Pantheon, Rome f. Catholic Cathedral, Berlin g. Opera House, Berlin h. Villa La Rotonda, Vicenza

41. Bauhaus Archive, axonometric views, 2015

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