BERLIN ASIDE ARCHITECTURE

From Kenny Cuper's Spaces of Uncertainty : "To think about the identity of a city is to think about the collection of sites and spaces that together signify this city. It is at the opposite end from identifying the city with big stories, architects, historic characters, or any such clearly identifiable influences. The identities of a city lie in its struggle to administer its everyday activities. It is the very moment in which the institutionalized whole is overruled by the everyday, that immediate identities are born. Berlin demands that one thinks about the unconscious opposition between space and place, site and project. The latter is produced by the narrative practices in which architecture plays an important role. Architects like to foresee future identity. They rarely seem to look at the present nature of a site, of the city."

"An architectural plan or project is generally a projection of a site. It is a story about a space that thereby turns it into a place. In contrast, immediate identity is about the sense of the spaces that make up the city, not about all of the projections that try to tie its identity down for the sake of a singular story. Immediate identity seems to exist through the temporary use of ill-defined sites. Sites without projects. In this sense, Berlin's identity is merely a shadow of architecture, despite all attempts to construct its identity through architecture and ideological urbanism. Berlin shows how the identity of a city is not in its architecture, but next to it. Aside architecture, we can hear the whispering voice of societies, the memories and predictions differing from one another without categorization. They inhabit the vagueness of every future moment that does not exclude questions but allows for a multiplicity of immediate response."