For the morning, we went to the Mauer Museum (Wall Museum), a private museum of anything and everything relating to the wall. It started in an apartment not long after the first wall went up, and has just kept going and growing. Now it is about 20,000 sq. ft. no pictures allowed.
Afternoon, a walking tour of the area, seeing some notable buildings of the IBA (International Building Association), a 1987 attempt at housing in the spirit of the Hansaviertel we saw a few days ago. Several noteworthy architects had early buildings done for this: Rem Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman, Daniel Libeskind (unbuilt), Zaha Hadid, John Hejduk, Aldo Rossi, etc.)
Also, saw the GSW Building by Sauerbruch + Hutton. (see the fire/police station from early in our trip)
Berlin Wall Memorial:
Reconciliation Chapel:
Just down from the memorial is this chapel.
The original church stood behind the wall for many years...
Until the communist government finally blew it up in 1985.
The church has an egg-shaped, rammed-earth sanctuary surrounded by an oval of wooden slats. Inside, there are views down into the original basement. Quite a nice response to the issue of destroyed history. I am glad they did not rebuild the old church and pretend.
I'm a fan of the rammed earth wall, especially when I found out that it reused pieces from the old church. That to me is an ingenious way to memorialize a building while resurrecting the space into a higher state of being.
ReplyDeleteI'm trying to understand the distaste for building a replica. Instead of "pretend" could the replica be a defiance to what should not have happened?
ReplyDeleteIf an asteroid (or an evil possum) crushes my new German-Rock-Pile-Art-Thing, am I pretending if I erect a new one as similar to the old one as I can?
Or, is this more on the level of, say, you lose a child to an illness, then, have a new one cloned while you pretend the previous one never left?
I have always felt buildings should be built in the "language" of it's time period. Many of the replica buildings we saw were in fact trying to pretend to be something that they were not. Ex. Brick texture painted over stucco. Assuming this building would be rebuilt in the same vain as the other reproductions throughout Berlin, i think we can agree a cheap facsimile would only lessen the memory of the structure that once stood.
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