Stanislaus von Moos discusses the recent symposium that took place at the Yale School of Architecture, which focused on Berlin as an experimental workshop of the history of architecture between 1945 and the present day. An interview from New Haven by Paola Nicolin

The Achtung: Berlin symposium held by the Yale School of Architecture in February 2013 gathered architectural historians, artists, architects, editors and critics of international standing to discuss the topic of Berlin as an experimental workshop of the history of architecture between 1945 and the present day. Focusing on the spectacularisation of power, urban utopias and international exhibitions, the three days of encounters used a historical period spanning more than 50 years to explore the problems of a city and European capital. Domus returns to some of the issues that emerged at the symposium in an interview with its organiser, Stanislaus von Moos. 

Paola Nicolin: How did the idea of holding an international symposium on Berlin come about?

Stanislaus von Moos: By coincidence, as is perhaps typical in such cases. The idea cropped up in a discussion with our Dean, Robert A.M. Stern about subjects that would deserve to be looked into in terms of seminars and excursions. When I suggested Berlin he suddenly came up with the idea to organize a symposium.

Since the second half of the 1970s, the demand for architecture as a communication tool has often been the focus of debates, talks and studies. How did the programme of the Yale symposium develop? How did you create the themes — Images of the Metropolis, The Life and Afterlife of Ruins, Re-inventing Berlin, poisoned Utopias and Dialectic of the Archipelago and Building the capital city: Missed Opportunities? And what selection criteria did you adopt for the speakers?
It came almost by itself. The original idea was to focus on the IBA (1984-88) and the success and failure of the strategy of "Critical Reconstruction" that was subsequently put to work under Senatsbaudirektor Hans Stimmann, a story that encapsulates many core issues of post-modern architecture and urbanism in Europe and that is still relatively little known in the US. As we began working on the program, it seemed to me that Berlin deserved to be envisioned in a broader perspective, one that would involve the legacy of National Socialism, the trauma of World War II, and the world wide neurosis of the East-West conflict. Berlin, after all, was one of the key stages, if not thekey stage in all these contexts.

Thomas Demand at the Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 2009

In the humanities, and in particular in literature and film studies, even in design history, these cultural and political contexts have been looked into more thoroughly than in architecture. Furthermore, the studies that exist in the field of architecture in Berlin are almost exclusively written in German or Italian and thus relatively inaccessible in the US — thus we wanted to have a situation where students, scholars and architects could get a live experience of (and establish a personal contact with) their European colleagues.

The focus on Berlin is also a focus on a city that is constantly being rebuilt via the relationship between art and architecture, seen as disciplines that are not at all rigid but contaminated by the link with the economic capital as well as the mix of languages. In the panel entitled "Re-Inventing Berlin", the writer and editor Elisabeth Ruge spoke of Berlin as a city of allegory and the artist Thomas Demand talked of attention to places that have stories. Are there any chapters in Berlin's modern history that you believe explain the relationship between art and architecture more significantly than others?
I really don't know if that interest in the relationship between art and architecture is more intense in Berlin than elsewhere. I couldn't tell and have never thought about it. But then, yes, it is intriguing that some important contemporary artists working in Berlin — apart from Thomas Demand one might think of Olafur Eliasson — are fascinated with the interaction of art and architecture. Maybe Berlin with its many random spaces encourages such experiments. Also, the Berlin art boom of the Cold War years, when Berlin's cultural scene was so generously subsidized from without, may have generated curiosities in that area among the people who go to museums and art galleries.

Thomas Demand at the Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 2009

On the subject of ruin and the life of the ruin, Berlin is often mentioned as a city that takes the concept of ruin and turns it into the inspiration for a project and perhaps transforms the ruin into an aesthetic choice. "Ruin" also applies to what is not built, such as Eisenman's ideas for Berlin. In this sense, the venue of the symposium, the Paul Rudolph Hall — a treasure chest that is a modern take on the classical Greek ruin — was the perfect place for a debate on the relationship between fragment and city, between history and project and between image and its popularisation. To what degree do you think the presence and absence of the Wall have helped forge the city's imagery?
I also think the "bomb shelter" of Hastings Hall, sunken into in Paul Rudolph's Art and Architecture Building at Yale, where the conference was held, is a place that triggers memories of war and of ruination, granted that Rudolph's architecture as a "bunker" celebrates the prevention of war damage while its rugged concrete surfaces are a variation on the theme of Brutalist ruin aesthetic…

Thomas Demand at the Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 2009

Interestingly, however, what is striking about architecture in Berlin is the near total absence of ruin aesthetic. Yes, of course, there is the Gedächtniskirche, a latecomer in the Post World War II history of ruin monuments; but note that Eisenman only grudgingly accepted to incorporate the ruin as part of his church. West Berlin's romance with the International Style had no room for ruins. Nor did the neo-classical triumphalism of the DDR allow for such things. Remember that the Schloss was made to disappear at the very moment the Stalinallee went up. If Berlin is uferstanden aus Ruinen, as the DDR's national anthem has it, that also means that those ruins have disappeared.
Ruin exorcism of a perhaps even more radical kind dominated the post 1989 attitude to the Wall. By now, there is no single physical trace of the Wall to be found in Berlin. The authorities have handled the problem in the way police deals with a crime site. When the case is closed, the bulldozers come and clean up.

Thomas Demand at the Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 2009

People still have to ask "permission" to address certain chapters in Berlin's history. I am thinking of what Léon Krier said about Albert Speer, for instance, but also the "domestic" permutation of Greg Castillo's study "Cold War on the Home Front", translated into "West Berlin and the American Way of Life" for the symposium. When do you think the symposium got it right about the role played by politics in Berlin's urban history?
Berlin was the capital of the Third Reich. Because of this, after the liberation both by the Allied and Soviet forces it ended up becoming the very frontier town between the Capitalist and the Communist world. Needless to say, that anything that happened in Berlin could not be seen otherwise than as forming part of politics. 
Hence I believe Léon Krier is right when he thinks that Albert Speer's architecture is not adequately understood if seen only as part of his agenda as a war criminal. And Greg Castillo is also right when he insists that the Gute Form of Western Design in the 1950s is not only a step towards the fulfilment of the Enlightenment, but part of the logic of Western imperialism... Historians are thus confronted with a double task: to de-politicise those subjects that during decades have been taken hostage by politics and political rhetoric and polemic — and to re-politicise those subjects that continue to be surrounded by a halo of political chastity.

Thomas Demand at the Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 2009