Archilectures | Stefan Vieths, Großstadt Berlin: stratificazioni e luoghi complementari

Berlin was in these years in the center of a wide process of urban transformation: with the fall of the wall, the end of the separation between two Germanies and the comeback to the role of capital city, in the beginning of 90s, almost overnight, new policy goals are formulated, deeply modifying the character and the structure of the city. At first, the reconstruction of Großstadt Berlin and mainly the link between those fragments of the city which have been developing far away one from each other for about thirty years, in the East as in the West. The lecture presents three projects for strategical points in the structure of the new Berlin – the Spreeinsel, the Humboldthafen and the Potsdamer Platz – based on a way to intend the city as dialectic city, not as a single and regular entity but as a complex and discontinuous ensemble, composed of complementary elements. Applying strategies as assembling and stratification, they are aimed to the construction of the urban place, a place with a concrete and specific identity, able to find the continuity of the city in space and time.

Stefan Vieths (Hamburg 1963), architect, is co-author of several projects and works realized by Oswald Mathias Ungers office, among the others the Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne and the renovation and extension of Pergamonmuseum in Berlin. The design activity in Ungers office has nourished a theoretical research path, producing several publications as “The Dialectic City” (O.M. Ungers, S. Vieths, 1997) and “Assembled Forms” (S. Vieths, 2012). Since 2012 he is Visiting Professor in Architectural and Urban Composition at Politecnico di Milano.