Urban Memory and Visual Culture in Berlin

Urban Memory and Visual Culture in Berlin
Author: Simon Ward
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016
Genre: HISTORY
ISBN: 9789089648532

As sites of turbulence and transformation, cities are machines for forgetting. And yet archiving and exhibiting the presence of the past remains a key cultural, political and economic activity in many urban environments. This book takes the example of Berlin over the past four decades to chart how the memory culture of the city has responded to the challenges and transformations thrown up by the changing political, social and economic organization of the built environment. The book focuses on the visual culture of the city (architecture, memorials, photography and film). It argues that the recovery of the experience of time is central to the practices of an emergent memory culture in a contemporary 'overexposed' city, whose spatial and temporal boundaries have long since disintegrated.

Weimar Surfaces

Weimar Surfaces
Author: Janet Ward
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 380
Release: 2001-04-04
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780520924734

Germany of the 1920s offers a stunning moment in modernity, a time when surface values first became determinants of taste, activity, and occupation: modernity was still modern, spectacle was still spectacular. Janet Ward's luminous study revisits Weimar Germany via the lens of metropolitan visual culture, analyzing the power that 1920s Germany holds for today's visual codes of consumerism.

Structures of Memory

Structures of Memory
Author: Jennifer A. Jordan
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2006
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780804752770

Structures of Memory turns to the landscape of contemporary Berlin, particularly places marked by the presence of the Nazi regime, in order to understand how some places of great cruelty or great heroism are forgotten by all but eyewitnesses, while others become the site of public ceremonies, museums, or commemorative monuments.

Counterpreservation

Counterpreservation
Author: Daniela Sandler
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2016-12-15
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1501706802

In Berlin, decrepit structures do not always denote urban blight. Decayed buildings are incorporated into everyday life as residences, exhibition spaces, shops, offices, and as leisure space. As nodes of public dialogue, they serve as platforms for dissenting views about the future and past of Berlin. In this book, Daniela Sandler introduces the concept of counterpreservation as a way to understand this intentional appropriation of decrepitude. The embrace of decay is a sign of Berlin's iconoclastic rebelliousness, but it has also been incorporated into the mainstream economy of tourism and development as part of the city's countercultural cachet. Sandler presents the possibilities and shortcomings of counterpreservation as a dynamic force in Berlin and as a potential concept for other cities. Counterpreservation is part of Berlin's fabric: in the city's famed Hausprojekte (living projects) such as the Køpi, Tuntenhaus, and KA 86; in cultural centers such as the Haus Schwarzenberg, the Schokoladen, and the legendary, now defunct Tacheles; in memorials and museums; and even in commerce and residences. The appropriation of ruins is a way of carving out affordable spaces for housing, work, and cultural activities. It is also a visual statement against gentrification, and a complex representation of history, with the marks of different periods—the nineteenth century, World War II, postwar division, unification—on display for all to see. Counterpreservation exemplifies an everyday urbanism in which citizens shape private and public spaces with their own hands, but it also influences more formal designs, such as the Topography of Terror, the Berlin Wall Memorial, and Daniel Libeskind's unbuilt redevelopment proposal for a site peppered with ruins of Nazi barracks. By featuring these examples, Sandler questions conventional notions of architectural authorship and points toward the value of participatory environments.

The New Berlin

The New Berlin
Author: Karen E. Till
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 296
Release:
Genre:
ISBN: 1452905851

An innovative exploration of German memory, national identity, and modernity embodied in the public spaces of the new capital.

Beyond the Bauhaus

Beyond the Bauhaus
Author: Deborah Ascher Barnstone
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2016-06-28
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0472121944

Although the Breslau arts scene was one of the most vibrant in all of Weimar-era Germany, it has largely disappeared from memory. Studies of the influence of Weimar culture on modernism have focused almost exclusively on Berlin and the Dessau Bauhaus, yet the advances that occurred in Breslau affected nearly every intellectual field, forming the basis for aesthetic modernism internationally and having an enduring impact on visual art and architecture. Breslau boasted a thriving modern arts scene and one of the premier German arts academies of the day until the Nazis began their assault on so-called degenerate art. This book charts the cultural production of Breslau-based artists, architects, art collectors, urban designers, and arts educators who operated in the margins of Weimar-era cultural debates. Rather than accepting the radical position of the German avant-garde or the reactionary position of German conservatives, many Breslauers sought a middle ground. This richly illustrated volume is the first book in English to address this history, constituting an invaluable addition to the literature on the Weimar period. Its readership includes scholars of German history, art, architecture, urban design, planning, collecting, and exhibition history; of the avant-garde, and of the development of arts academies and arts pedagogy.

Present Pasts

Present Pasts
Author: Andreas Huyssen
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2003
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780804745611

This book analyzes the relation of public memory to history, forgetting, and selective memory in three late-twentieth-century cities that have confronted major social or political traumas—Berlin, Buenos Aires, and New York.

Urban Memory in City Transitions

Urban Memory in City Transitions
Author: Ali Cheshmehzangi
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2021-04-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9811610037

As a continuation of ‘Identity of Cities and City of Identities’, this book covers the arguments around the memory-experience-cognition nexus concerning palimpsests and urban places. As cities experience transitional phases of growth, development, decline, and decay, the author urges considering the notion of urban memory in place-making strategies and design decision-making processes. These explorations would add value to primary fields of architecture, architectural history, cognitive science, human geography, and urbanism. Divided into eight chapters, this book puts together a comprehensive knowledge of urban memory in city transitions. By studying urban memory, the author delves into conceptions of mental mapping, knowledge of environments, cognition of places, and the perceptual dimension of urbanism. Undoubtedly, urban memory plays a significant part in the future movements of humanistic urbanism. Given the significances of scale, pace, and mode of city transitions globally, we should remember who are the ultimate users of those living environments. Therefore, in this book, the author debates two contradictions of ‘memory of place vs. place of memory’, and ‘significance of place vs. place of significance’. Each of these is believed to be a paradox of its own, indicating places are significant through the systematic networks of cities, memories are meaningful through the neural information processing, and place memories are the essence of urban identities. The book's ultimate goal is to demonstrate the effectiveness of the space-time frame of place in making memorable places. Through the comprehensive explorations of many global examples, we can evaluate the significance of place in mind more carefully. This is narrated based on the recognition of nostalgia in cities, socio-temporal qualities in places, and the network of processes in our minds. In return, the aim is to provide new knowledge to make memorable cities, enhance social experiences, and capture and value the significance of place in mind.

Memory in Motion

Memory in Motion
Author: Ina Blom
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017
Genre: Archives
ISBN: 9789462982147

This collection offers a set of essays that discuss the new technology of memory from a variety of perspectives that explicitly investigate their impact on the very concept of the social.

Post-Wall Berlin

Post-Wall Berlin
Author: J. Ward
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2011-05-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780230276574

Written by a leading historian of urban visual culture, Janet Ward's Post-Wall Berlin: Borders, Space and Identity demonstrates how the reunified German capital, in its bid to overcome its legacy of Cold-War division, has faced many new frontiers and boundaries on social, economic, architectural and infrastructural levels.