Author: Emily Pugh Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press ISBN: 0822979578 Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 448
Book Description
On August 13, 1961, under the cover of darkness, East German authorities sealed the border between East and West Berlin using a hastily constructed barbed wire fence. Over the next twenty-eight years of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall grew to become an ever-present physical and psychological divider in this capital city and a powerful symbol of Cold War tensions. Similarly, stark polarities arose in nearly every aspect of public and private life, including the built environment. In Architecture, Politics, and Identity in Divided Berlin Emily Pugh provides an original comparative analysis of selected works of architecture and urban planning in both halves of Berlin during the Wall era, revealing the importance of these structures to the formation of political, cultural, and social identities. Pugh uncovers the roles played by organizations such as the Foundation for Prussian Cultural Heritage and the Building Academy in conveying the political narrative of their respective states through constructed spaces. She also provides an overview of earlier notable architectural works, to show the precursors for design aesthetics in Berlin at large, and considers projects in the post-Wall period, to demonstrate the ongoing effects of the Cold War. Overall, Pugh offers a compelling case study of a divided city poised between powerful contending political and ideological forces, and she highlights the effort expended by each side to influence public opinion in Europe and around the World through the manipulation of the built environment.
Author: Emily Pugh Publisher: Culture Politics & the Built E ISBN: 9780822963028 Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 440
Book Description
"On August 13, 1961, under the cover of darkness, East German authorities sealed the border between East and West Berlin using a hastily constructed barbed wire fence. Over the next twenty-eight years, the Berlin Wall served as an ever-present and seemingly permanent physical and psychological divider in this capital city, and between East and West during the Cold War. Similarly, stark polarities arose in nearly every aspect of public and private life, perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the built environment. In Architecture, Politics, and Identity in Divided Berlin, Emily Pugh provides an original comparative analysis of selected works of architecture and urban planning in East and West Berlin during the 'Wall era,' to reveal the importance of these structures to the formation of political, cultural, and social identities. Pugh uncovers the roles played by organizations such as the Foundation for Prussian Cultural Heritage in West Germany and the East German Building Academy in conveying the preferred political narrative of their respective states through constructed spaces. She also provides an overview of architectural works prior to the Wall era, to show the precursors for design aesthetics in Berlin at large, and also considers projects in the post-Wall period, to demonstrate the ongoing effects of the Cold War. Pugh examines representations of architectural works in exhibits, film, journals, magazines, newspapers, and other media, and discusses the effectiveness of planners' attempts to 'win the hearts and minds' of the public. Ideas of home, belonging, community, and nationalism were common underlying themes on both sides of the wall, and instrumental to the construction of cultural and physical landscapes. Overall, Architecture, Politics, and Identity in Divided Berlin offers a compelling case study of a divided city poised at the precipice between the world's most dominant political and ideological forces, and the effort expended by each side to sway the tide of public opinion through the built environment"
Author: Philip Broadbent Publisher: Berghahn Books ISBN: 9781845457556 Category : Berlin (Germany) Languages : en Pages : 228
Book Description
A great deal of attention continues to focus on Berlin’s cultural and political landscape after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but as yet, no single volume looks at the divided city through an interdisciplinary analysis. This volume examines how the city was conceived, perceived, and represented during the four decades preceding reunification and thereby offers a unique perspective on divided Berlin’s identities. German historians, art historians, architectural historians, and literary and cultural studies scholars explore the divisions and antagonisms that defined East and West Berlin; and by tracing the little studied similarities and extensive exchanges that occurred despite the presence of the Berlin Wall, they present an indispensible study on the politics and culture of the Cold War.
Author: Neil Mair Publisher: Springer Nature ISBN: 3030514498 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 76
Book Description
Political meaning in architecture has been a subject of interest to many critics and writers. The most notable of these include Charles T. Goodsell and Kenneth Frampton. In Goodsell's (1988) statement “Political places are not randomly or casually brought into existence” (ibid, p. 8), the stipulation is that architecture has been used very deliberately in the past to bolster connotations of power and strength in cities representative of larger nations and political movements. The question central to this book relates to how this can be achieved. Goodsell argues that any study of the interplay between political ideology, architecture, and identity, demands a place imbued with political ideas opposed to “cold concepts and lifeless abstractions” (Goodsell 1988, p. 1). As a means through which to examine and evaluate the ways in which the development of cities can be influenced by political and ideological tendencies, this book focuses on Berlin, as a political discourse, given its significant destruction and reorganisation to reinstate its identity in the context of geopolitics and the advent of globalisation.
Author: Hanno Hochmuth Publisher: Berghahn Books ISBN: 1789208750 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 364
Book Description
Located in the geographical center of Berlin, the neighboring boroughs of Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg shared a history and identity until their fortunes diverged dramatically following the construction of the Berlin Wall, which placed them within opposing political systems. This revealing account of the two municipal districts before, during and after the Cold War takes a microhistorical approach to investigate the broader historical trajectories of East and West Berlin, with particular attention to housing, religion, and leisure. Merged in 2001, they now comprise a single neighborhood that bears the traces of these complex histories and serves as an illuminating case study of urban renewal, gentrification, and other social processes that continue to reshape Berlin.
Author: Paul Stangl Publisher: Stanford University Press ISBN: 1503605507 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 511
Book Description
In the aftermath of the Second World War, Berliners grappled with how to rebuild their devastated city. In East Berlin, where the historic core of the city lay, decisions made by the socialist leadership about what should be restored, reconstructed, or entirely reimagined would have a tremendous and lasting impact on the urban landscape. Risen from Ruins examines the cultural politics of the rebuilding of East Berlin from the end of World War II until the construction of the Berlin Wall, combining political analysis with spatial and architectural history to examine how the political agenda of East German elites and the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) played out in the built environment. Following the destruction of World War II, the center of Berlin could have been completely restored and preserved, or razed in favor of a sanitized, modern city. The reality fell somewhere in between, as decision makers balanced historic preservation against the opportunity to model the Socialist future and reject the example of the Nazi dictatorship through architecture and urban design. Paul Stangl's analysis expands our understanding of urban planning, historic preservation, modernism, and Socialist Realism in East Berlin, shedding light on how the contemporary shape of the city was influenced by ideology and politics.
Author: Karsten Uhl Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1350053228 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 376
Book Description
People often associate postwar Germany with technology and with its products of mass consumption, such as luxury cars. Even pop music, most notably Kraftwerk (literally 'power station') with songs such as Autobahn, Radioactivity or We are the Robots, disseminates the stereotype of a close link between German culture and technology. Technology in Modern German History explores various forms of technology in 200 years of German history and explains how technology has been fundamental to the shaping of modern Germany. The book investigates the role technology played in transforming Germany's culture, society and politics during the 19th and 20th centuries. Key topics covered include the different stages of industrialization, the growth of networked cities, and the triumph of a teleological narrative of technology as progress. Moreover, it provides a critical revision of the history of high technology which reveals how high-tech euphoria determined certain paths in history regardless of whether the respective technology proved to be successful. In its second part, the volume introduces new avenues in scholarship. Karsten Uhl examines neglected areas, such as rural technologies or the often-overlooked importance of everyday technologies: How did consumers or workers use new technologies? How did they appropriate and modify them? Lastly, the book considers the final decades of the 20th century and asks if they provided a significant new quality of technological change: To what degree and effects did computerization transform professional and private life in Germany? In culture and politics, reinforced by the German variety of environmentalism, the idea of progress was challenged, as the once prevailing vision of progress gave way to new apprehensions of uncertainty evident to this day. Technology in Modern German History brings fascinating insight into a much neglected area of German history for students and scholars alike.
Author: Julia Walker Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA ISBN: 1501367544 Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 265
Book Description
For years following reunification, Berlin was the largest construction site in Europe, with striking new architecture proliferating throughout the city in the 1990s and early 2000s. Among the most visible and the most contested of the new projects were those designed for the national government and its related functions. Berlin Contemporary explores these buildings and plans, tracing their antecedents while also situating their iconic forms and influential designers within the spectacular world of global contemporary architecture. Close studies of these sites, including the Reichstag, the Chancellery, and the reconstruction of the Berlin Stadtschloss (now known as the Humboldt Forum), demonstrate the complexity of Berlin's political and architectural “rebuilding”-and reveal the intricate historical negotiations that architecture was summoned to perform.
Author: Mary Dellenbaugh-Losse Publisher: ISBN: 9783030297190 Category : Berlin (Germany) Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
This book comprehensively examines post-1989 changes to the symbolic landscape of Berlin - specifically, street names, architecture, urban planning and monuments - and links these changes to concepts of contested cultural memory and national identity in Berlin and Germany in the post-Wall period. The core of the book is made up of an analysis of built space changes in the eastern half of the city before and after the Berlin Wall, flanked by an introduction to the theoretical underpinnings of the topic and a wider interpretation of the events in Berlin in relation to other geographic and historical contexts. It furthermore offers an explanatory model for the phenomenon of the "symbolic foreigner" whereby former citizens of the GDR feel disenfranchised and excluded from today's German society. This book is a valuable resource for researchers, students, and also appeals to a wider, non-academic audience with an interest in both cultural memory and Berlin
Author: Briana J. Smith Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 0262370948 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 329
Book Description
An alternative history of art in Berlin, detaching artistic innovation from art world narratives and connecting it instead to collective creativity and social solidarity. In pre- and post-reunification Berlin, socially engaged artists championed collective art making and creativity over individual advancement, transforming urban space and civic life in the process. During the Cold War, the city’s state of exception invited artists on both sides of the Wall to detour from artistic tradition; post-Wall, art became a tool of resistance against the orthodoxy of economic growth. In Free Berlin, Briana Smith explores the everyday peculiarities, collective joys, and grassroots provocations of experimental artists in late Cold War Berlin and their legacy in today’s city. These artists worked intentionally outside the art market, believing that art should be everywhere, freed from its confinement in museums and galleries. They used art as a way to imagine new forms of social and creative life. Smith introduces little-known artists including West Berlin feminist collective Black Chocolate, the artist duo paint the town red (p.t.t.r), and the Office for Unusual Events, creators of satirical urban political theater, as well as East Berlin action art and urban interventionists Erhard Monden, Kurt Buchwald, and others. Artists and artist-led urban coalitions in 1990s Berlin carried on the participatory spirit of the late Cold War, with more overt forms of protest and collaboration at the neighborhood level. The temperament lives on in twenty-first century Berlin, animating artists’ resolve to work outside the market and citizens’ spirited defenses of green spaces, affordable housing, and collectivist projects. With Free Berlin, Smith offers an alternative history of art in Berlin, detaching artistic innovation from art world narratives and connecting it instead to Berliners’ historic embrace of care, solidarity, and cooperation.
Author: Emily Pugh
Author: Emily Pugh
Author: Philip Broadbent
Author: Neil Mair
Author: Hanno Hochmuth
Author: Paul Stangl
Author: Karsten Uhl
Author: Julia Walker
Author: Mary Dellenbaugh-Losse
Author: Briana J. Smith