Stadtlandschaft Lichterfelde Süd, Berlin

202 arq • V0I3 • nc>3 • 1999 design Time architecture: Stadtlandschaft Florian Beigel and Philip Christou Lichterfelde Slid, Berlin Authors' address This winning design in the 1998 Lichterfelde Sud International Architecture Research Unit University of North London Landscape and Urban Design Competition is forthe regeneration of 6-40 Holloway Road London N7 8JL a former military training ground on the southern boundary of United Kingdom Berlin. The brief was for a new urbanism of the periphery, with 3200 dwellings on a 115 hectare site. The design is a continuation of research embracing conditions of uncertainty and change on mainly post-industrial or former military sites. It could be described as a fragment of an infrastructural urbanism in preparation for an unpredictable diversity of architectures. Paul Klee's engraving '1928, N6 ein Blatt aus dem The contemporary city/landscape Stadtebuch' (N6: a Leaf from the Book of Cities, 1928) The city edge condition in Lichterfelde Slid can be is a scripture [Fig. 2]. It is a tabulation of city described as an archetypical metropolitan elements, similar to a textile, a texture. The ground peripheral site within the region of Berlin/Potsdam of the engraving appears to be a stone tablet. At [Fig. 3]. Here, one is really neither in the city nor the the bottom of this tablet the title is inscribed and open landscape. This region is increasingly signed by Klee. The leaf appears to be a parchment becoming a large-scale citylandscape, closely laid on this stone. The top third has a kind of connected to modern communication systems. chapter signum which could be an abstracted sun Lichterfelde Slid has the potential to become a with a strip of sky above and a horizon below. fragment of a new model of the in-between city. One Below a text of pictograms continues to the might also speak of an ecological urbanism. bottom of the leaf. It consists of an evolving city We are living at a time when the speed of typology. The pictograms are arranged in a series of transportation is rapidly increasing and exceedingly horizontal lines sometimes attached, sometimes powerful information systems are becoming detached, and there are detached and attached commonplace. It is a period of simultaneity of pictograms within the lines. Basic patterns in the experience and place. Our understanding of the texture have a high degree of formal repetition. meaning of place is undergoing change. An Some consist of a row of basic types with variations. increasing artificiality in the entire physical It is possible to associate building typologies with environment, from urban to rural, is occurring. the pictograms. It is a sophisticated and rich There is no longer a city and there is no longer a composition. landscape. We are living in an agglomerative space, a This is an interesting representation of the city. citylandscape. It evokes a sense of a time before literacy and In addition to this changing attitude towards writing. A record of a civilization, or the city, is place, we find ourselves in a multi-value society, written down rather than made into a picture where people are accepting a plurality of directions facing page as in a perspective description. This leaf is not a and aspirations. Diverse interpretations of reality 1 Collage plan showing finite description of the city, because it is only coexist, and viewpoints multiply. This is gradually an incremental field- by-field partial one page out of a book, a fact signalled by the 'N6' creating the possibility for simultaneous development of the in the title. The engraving somehow conveys an interpretations of various planes of reality. site. A number of grounds and field idea of a complex evenness and equality, like a Architecture is being presented with a wide diversity boundaries have been group of characters. It suggests a certain of forms, origins and intentions. Urban development given a new structure, and several exchangeability and encapsulates a strong sense is a patchwork. The idea of the urban masterplan is fields have new of relativity. finished. buildings on them design arq • V0I3 • no 3 • 1999 203 2O4 arq • V0I3 • no 3 • 1999 design 2 Paul Klee, Ein Blatt Photograph: 3 The site is a typical aus dem Stadtebuch, Oeffentliche city edge with 1928 (accession nr. Kunstsammlung several unplanned 1795). Engraving on Basel, Martin small-scale chalk on paper on Buhler). A tabulation industrial wood panel, 42.5 x of city elements settlements. Many 31.5cm, (Credit: conveying an idea of are low cost small , 7 •* Oeffentliche complex evenness businesses with Kunstsammlung and exchangeability temporary or illegal Basel, Kunstmuseum. tenure. X " y As architects, we are interested to discover new and and complexity of the site that have physical intelligent ways of working with these conditions of presence in the Lichterfelde landscape, and can be connectivity of place and plurality of lifestyle. Design used as a basis of the design proposal. strategies are needed to utilize processes of change, In this sense we have taken up the challenge made complexity and uncertainty as active ingredients in a by Rem Koolhaas in 'Bigness', (Koolhaas, R. and Mau, project. Masterplanning as an approach is now too B-1995) without assuming that the result will be a fixed and final for the formulation of architectural megabuilding or an isolated structure that is 'no futures for these complex situations. Design longer part of any urban tissue'. While Koolhaas expects strategies that work with the dimension of time are that the containment of the big building will make called for - an anticipatory architecture (Price, 1996) 'the parts remain committed to the whole', we are perhaps that allows and assumes change and is capable of doing the opposite to achieve this. The presence of continuous responsiveness to new conditions and the land and its accumulated physical culture - the unknown future needs. We are finding new ways of conditions that exist in the place - are intensified or using diversity and uncertainty as active generators at least made visible, and therefore utilized for their of design. 'potential to reconstruct the Whole, resurrect the Real, 'Infrastructure, urbanism is flexible and anticipatory. reinventthe collective, reclaim maximum possibility... in a It works with time and is open to change. By specifying landscape of disarray, disassembly, dissociation, what must be fixed and what is subject to change, it disclamation..." Replacing the words 'landscape can be precise and indeterminate at the same time' infrastructure' for 'Bigness' in Koolhaas's text, 'A (Allen, S.1998). paradox o/[landscape infrastructure] is that in spite of the calculation that goes into its planning - in fact, through A spatial concept: architecture is individual, landscape its very rigidities - it is the one architecture that engineers is shared the unpredictable. Instead of enforcing coexistence, The point of departure for this research is the design (landscape infrastructure] depends on regimes of of a landscape infrastructure providing a framework freedoms, the assembly of maximum difference... It develops for a diversity of urban development to happen in strategies to organize both their independence and time. Landscape infrastructures are thought of as interdependence within a larger entity in a symbiosis that catalysts for architectural development (Desvigne, M. exacerbates rather than compromises specificity" and Dalnoky, C, 1995). We intend to introduce (Koolhaas, R. and Mau, B., 1995). landscape elements which make diversity enjoyable, creating a common ground for unknown futures. It Four landscapes is our premise that landscape infrastructures can be We have identified four landscapes on the site. This is generated from the existing landscape conditions. our own reading of the place [Fig 4]. We have We propose to identify specific aspects of the history discovered the geological landscape formed by sea Florian Beigel and Philip Christou ' Time architecture: Stadtlandschaft Lichterfelde Siid, Berlin design arq • V0I3 • no 3 • 1999 205 sedimentation; the agricultural field pattern of the 1997). It is a complex and rich phenomenon and a eighteenth century and its transformation into the safety net for a chaotic love affair with diversity in extensive cooperative farmlands of the German our time. It could make variety enjoyable. Democratic Republic; the military landscape theatre 'I believe we attach too much importance to art and with its artificial topographies, its east/west architecture in producing an awareness of our belonging conflicting stage sets and defensive structure; and to a city or a country, when what we actually share is a the wild landscape that has now taken over, bringing sense of time. What we commemorate is its passing; with it a new ecological diversity. and we thus establish a more universal historical bond These landscapes each have a powerful sense of and develop a deeper understanding of our society" time, and it is this temporal presence that is the most (Jackson, 1994). essential aspect of the architectural design and form In geological time this land was covered by the sea. of this project. The traces of history are the Brandenburg has a very flat, very open landscape, characteristics we want to expose, reveal and with a large sky [Fig. 5]. Historically it is a very wet develop. They are the substances and the values one and sandy land with large wooded areas standing can share with other people (Beigel, F. and Christou, underwater (for example, the Spreewald region 4 Aerial photo of 5 The flat, often sandy LichterfeldeSOd.The Brandenburg open lands to the farmland, seen from south are grain the southern part of farming fields the site. This (formerly collective horizontal landscape farms). The V- was formed by shaped line next to successive glaciers these fields is the line and shallow seas of the Berlin Wall, on the southern edge of West Berlin Time architecture: Stadtlandschaft Lichterfelde Slid, Berlin Florian Beigel and Philip Christou 206 arq - V0I3 • no 3 • 1999 design south-east of Berlin is a dense network of canals and by the German Railways to build a railway system wetland forests).

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