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deconstructionfantasies · 3 years

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* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * You were a sea once. You will be a sea again.

(Bodies, I)

Dear Berlin,

we are growing old together. Me, I am getting white hair. You, you are getting construction sites.

Wherever I look, you’re busy undoing your signs of aging. I cross the city by train passing by dusty construction landscapes. Skylines of cranes. Rising scaffolding. I walk through your streets navigating red and white barriers. Metal fences. Traffic cones. Security beacons with integrated LED lighting.

In the summer months your streets are opened up like bodies on a dissection table. I examine your organs. This invisible network of pipelines, cables, nodes, control centres, measuring devices. Dimensioned and classified according to DIN norms. Hierarchical structures for dividing resources: Stromleitung, Gasleitung, Wasserleitung, Fernmelde- und Signalkabel, Nachrichtenkabel für Polizei und Feuerwehr, Mischwasserkanal, Schmutzwasserkanal, Regenwasserkanal, Abwasserdruckleitung, Fernwärmeleitung.

I walk along your open wounds like a construction site voyeur, stealing glimpses of the invisible with a certain obsession. My whole body is ecstatic, tracing the paths of what keeps the city alive.

What keeps me alive. Your infrastructure of sewage. My digestive system. Your network of telecommunications. My nervous system. Your electric cables. My veins. Your power plants. My heart. You are repairing yourself through urban renewal projects. I am repairing myself with rituals of self-care.

Berlin, the density of your networks astounds me. The accuracy with which they are organised, the diligence with which they are maintained. How can we be so ignorant of them? We only remember them upon their failure. As you only notice the function of your organs when your tissues are failing, your cells are mutating, your body systems refuse to work.

Our bodies are fragile, Berlin. I trace them with tenderness

(Places)

Dear Berlin,

how old are you actually? It is hard to tell these days, your appearances confuse me, and I keep discovering scattered traces of unidentified pasts. I am not sure, whether you are proud of them, or ashamed of your past selves.

I used to believe in the Romance of Nostalgia. I liked living in your Gründerzeit Altbauten. Architectural History taught me about their ceiling ornaments, the wooden wing doors and the typological error of the dark Berliner Zimmer marking the passage from the front building to the side wing. I have fantasized a million times about the inhabitants of this period. I have fantasized their haircut, their clothes, their wallpapers as a total work of art. What was the context of their genesis, what was there before them, what came between them and me, a blind spot. Architectural History lacked vocabulary: Representation, gentrification, rewriting of a map.

There was a time when your Gründerzeit Altbauten counted broken windows and bullet holes. And people still lived inside of them. Slept inside of them. Made love inside of them. Do their current inhabitants dream the same dreams, now that the holes are plastered, the wallpapers removed and the windows triple glazed? Or do they dream the dreams of the offshore companies who have bought all buildings in the street?

There was a time when your Gründerzeit Altbauten were actually constructed. When an engineer calculated the first steel beams of Architectural History, a mason mixed the mortar for the brick-wall and a carpenter placed the wooden floorboards which are still creaking under my feet. And there was a time when none of that existed, when the plan was the lines dividing the properties belonging to merchants, knights and cardinals. There was a time when all of this was swamp, all of this was forest, all of this was sea. There was a time when no humans lived here, maybe amoebas were swimming or trees were growing on the Tempelhofer Feld. Maybe it was even fig trees, my favourite trees, and maybe you can still smell them when you close your eyes, on the Tempelhofer Feld, and try to see beyond the airport runway, beyond the sunbathing crowds, beyond the control tower and the fascist marbles, beyond the gates and the gate controls and the refugee camp, beyond the air bridge and the air brigade, beyond the young American soldiers smiling for their victory – victory of whom, against whom?

Dear Berlin, there is no smell of fig trees on the Tempelhofer Feld now, no traces of the construction workers of your Altbauten left. The active unwriting of history has become our collective effort. We move forward, too busy with constructing, reconstructing, deconstructing. Too busy with forgetting. Even I am forgetting, struggling to hold all histories, give space to all your pasts. To the ballistic curves of the candies thrown by American airplanes in the Park of Humboldthain during the Russian blockade. To the names of the women who were found dead in the Landwehrkanal, before and after Rosa Luxemburg. To the 700 meters distance between the Sony Centre and the Führerbunker where Adolf Hitler committed suicide, both constructed by the same company within less than a century.

It is September 2021. I am watching the press release for the development of Alexanderplatz. Generic skyscrapers. Am I allowed to even silently cry?

It is March 1996. I am watching videos of the biggest construction site of Europe at Potsdamer Platz. Groundwater floodings. Am I allowed to even silently cry?

It is February 2008. 1945. 1443. I am standing in front of what was once known as Palast der Republik, Königliches Schloss, Sloss zu Cöln. Am I allowed to even silently cry? Was ist die Befindlichkeit des Landes?

Die Befindlichkeit des Landes is the unassailable fantasy of urban developers, the investment and return calculated upon square meters, a plan without contingencies, lifestyle advertisements, “Buy Berlin”. Each architectural project: both an instrument and a monument. Each construction site: a promise renewed. Foreign workers constructing national narratives. Reinforced concrete reassuring our identity until it is discarded again.

Die Befindlichkeit des Landes is the self-proclaimed architecture “for” – never “against”. As if making space for something new never supposes taking space away from the old. As if each four walls which include someone don’t exclude someone as well. As if each story we are writing isn’t unwriting other stories. Where is the site of the eradicated? Which is the story of the silenced? If they don’t exist in space, do they keep on living in time, or do they disappear with the buildings they inhabited?

Could architecture ever be… about… holding space… for each other?

Berlin, you teach me that if a building can hold both material as well as symbolic affordances, it can also hold the blame for our failures, the shame of our self-reproach. Just find asbestos in every building which annoys, erase it from collective memory. A group of architects will soon be designing a brand new edifice, a glass tower where you only see the reflection of your own image.

(Bodies, II)

Dear Berlin,

I’ve been trying to reach you for some time. I am craving dust, I am craving earth, I am craving water. In my fantasies I am licking your brick walls, their sandy mortar is slowly melting in my mouth. I am dreaming of this slow deconstruction of your architecture like a ritual: I am savouring your history, and together with your brick walls I am savouring the histories of the people who built them, the people who maintained them, the people who inhabited them. I am slowly devouring the Gründerzeit Altbauten, the working-class Plattenbauten, the Nazi ornaments, Palast der Republik, Königliches Schloss, Führerbunker, and together with them I am devouring my Nostalgia, my anger and my sadness. I taste their sweetness and their bitterness. I turn their sandy texture around my mouth, I let them melt on my tongue, enter my body, my digestive system, my blood flow, I let them become me. I become you, Berlin. I imagine all your history turning backwards, I imagine each building being dismantled, each construction site rewinding. I imagine your architectural elements disassembling, becoming construction materials again, breaking open into their chemical components. I imagine the raw materials returning through the same supply chains back to their original site of extraction: to the limestone quarries, to the iron ore mines, to the seabed excavation pits. I am fantasizing your inorganic architecture turning into organic matter again. I am fantasizing your compounds, Berlin, as living organisms, as the ones who make you into what you are, who you are, who I am. I am making peace with us growing old together.

You were a sea once. You will be a sea again.

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