Fourth Dimension Angie Door Advisor: Timothy Hyde Readers: Nicholas de Monchaux, Rania Ghosn, & Caroline Jones Like an ouroboros, buildings have been built and demolished on a site on The Spree River for at least four hundred years. Like its anthropogenic shift from swamp to infill, the metabolism of architectural construction affects an atmosphere of air, dust, moisture, and heat in all of its states. To (mis)use Fukuyama’s words, perhaps the end of history means that we are now allowed to leave linearity and enter the multiplicity of post-history. In this state of emerging time, used to describe the postcolony by Mbembe as an "interlocking of presents, pasts, and futures”, one can contend with this thick density of information through fragmentary encounters. As the German Federal Ministry of the Interior assesses lost revenue to colonial artifact repatriation, Preservation Agency LLC has been asked to find other uses for the Ethnological Museum's rooms. Agency conducts a meticulous survey to find what Boym calls Architectures of the Off-Modern, which already exists in the murky space parallel to the site's past. Agency presents three Acts in the site’s history as possible Off-Moderns: Act I shows the Palast Der Republik rehabilitated instead of dismantled, Act II rebuilds directly from the bombed rubble of the stadtschloss, and Act III visits a state of perpetual construction at the Humboldt Forum. Agency then proposes an epilogue where tactics from Acts I-III become an index to be used on the existing structure. Actors who have worked on the site use these to develop a gradient of conditions within its shoddy Prussian casting. Through this orchestration, history is no longer a survey but a specter of operations that direct the ouroboros of the site to savor its next material era as an indeterminate dance of humans, fauna, and material upon its surface.
Image: Model photo, by Angie Door.
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