Amsterdam : Water : Brick

Amsterdam : Water : Brick MAMC, July 2013 by Allen Pierce In marking, memorializing or commemorating places or events of historical importance, designers tend to adopt one of two strategies. The first is to freeze the place in time, tearing it out of the normal forward flow of life around it and rendering it hallowed ground to be visited but not inhabited. The second is more nuanced – finding a way to mark one point in time while allowing life to continue on the marked spot. As it does so, new layers of history are laid down upon the old, but a cut, a break, a sectioning mark is maintained so that all of the layers can be seen at once as strata of a living, rather than entombed memory. Perhaps no culture is as good at revealing its deeply stratified history while continuing to make more than the Germans, and no city better than Berlin. Near the center of the German capital lies a point of great significance in the cultural memory: the Memorial for the Victims of War and Tyranny, or the Neue Wache. The building, just north of Unter den Linden and just west of Museuminsel, was originally constructed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, master architect to the Hohenzollerns, as a guardhouse on the approach to the royal palace. After the fall of the Kaiser, the interior of the building was redesigned by architect Heinrich Tessenow as a memorial to the dead of the First World War. Following the second war the GDR used it as a tomb of the Unknown Soldier complete with an eternal flame until the subsequent fall of that regime when the Neue Wache took on its current title and the flame was replaced by a Käthe Kollwitz statue, a contemporary reflection of Michelangelo’s Pieta. As it stands now, the Neue Wache is presented as a literal cross-section through all of these strata of its own history as well as a metaphorical section through the larger ages that they have come to represent. Schinkel’s imperial façade, his classical portico and his pedimented Nike remain the public face of the building, but it now bears the scars of the bombing and fighting that marked the end of the Third Reich’s rule over the city. Tessenow’s memorial occulus remains, though it now brings rain and light and snow down upon Kollwitz’ memorial to the victims of all wars, not just the Empire’s last. The GDR’s perfectly jointed stone-clad walls still set the solemn mood of the place, though they have lost their hammer and sickle and now contrast with an irregular cobblestone floor. Each layer reflects on the other. All come together to form a continuum; a single cultural memory made material. And yet, each stands in and for its own time, layered one upon the next; distinct. Such a stratified-yet-united presentation is also present in David Chipperfield’s restoration of the Neues Museum, though the architect is far more explicit about it. The mid- 19th century building has been brought into the present while clearly maintaining layers of its past. Initially built to house cultural artifacts, the building’s program remains unchanged, creating a continuity between its current mission and its very foundations. At the same time, Chipperfield’s concrete insertions into the once-rubbled remains of the original differ significantly in material and visual weight from the classical-revival fabric. Standing between the two is the museum’s near total destruction by allied bombs at the end of the second world war. Here, as at the Neue Wache, these scars remain on display. In the former courtyards of the museum (now covered atria), the remains of frescoed plasterwork cling tenuously to brick high up the walls while further down the masonry is left bare by the dual assaults of explosives and neglect. Finally, concrete forms mark Sir David’s new incisions into the ground and the thick walls. Each stratum speaks of a moment in the life of the building and of the city and thereby memorializes itself as it continues to make new history. It stands, like the artifacts it was built to contain, as a physical memory of its makers and users, a slice through generations of Berliners’ lives, even as its restored totality allows them to continue its story. Though the strata model is typical of, and exemplified by Berlin, a significant example of the first model – the frozen place – exists within the city limits, built by Berliners (though not of their own will). The Soviet Memorial and Cemetery at Treptower Park is one of the least visited places in the city; many Russian tourists take the time to walk through it but it plays little role in the life of Berlin’s citizens. It has been said that when it was constructed, Stalin had the earth of Treptower entirely replaced with Russian soil, literally removing it from the entire terroir of Brandenburg. Likewise, he had the great axis of the memorial lined with tremendous, cold stone monuments commemorating the struggle of the Russian people to defeat the Nazi threat, transposing Russian memory onto a foreign land. Before construction began, the site had no history; it played no significant role in the “liberation” of Berlin by Soviet forces or in any other conflict. The entire memorial with all of its theatricality was completed in less than five years and served primarily as a propaganda theater for the GDR and its Warsaw Pact allies. The images of soldiers and workers and farmers displayed there are a concoction, a romantic representation of what a few powerful men would have liked to become the memory of an event. The place never had a living history; it remains as dead as the soldiers it watches over. In forgetting the true nature of memory – its complexity, its strata, its demand for some kind of larger truth - it has itself escaped the memory of Berliners, becoming a black hole amidst the streets of the living city and its people. As the example of the all-but-empty Russian monument attests, static memories are quickly forgotten. In the rest of Berlin, the living, changing, deepening memory is reaffirmed; the memory which sees every moment of its past in juxtaposition with all others, sweet or otherwise. By willingly exposing every layer of their own history, Berliners activate their collective memory for analysis and re- understanding. In so doing, they press memory through the barriers of dogmatism and quasi-religiosity. Berlin, today, is a city with all of its scars and all of its charms on full display, often one beside the other. Its citizens have no illusions about its past, nor do they flee from it. Rather, they take it all as one, a geologic timeline that runs right back the city’s earliest days and of which they are but the latest layer, informed by all that came before..

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