Berlin Free University is an imagination of what a building might be - a building designed to function as a piece of the city, adapting to the needs of its users while generating opportunities for social interaction. The university offers a window onto the politicized and optimistic discourse of the Sixties and Seventies, but at the same time illuminates contemporary debates around large projects of infrastructure and public space. This extensive study of the building combines texts with a visual survey containing specifically commissioned photographs as well as archive material, plans and construction details.
"But this book is less concerned with a single utopian dream than with the complex stories of a great number of utopianist realities. It deals with the efforts as much as with the results, investigating the creation of institutions by charting the interaction of the diverse agendas of designers, educationalists, sociologists and politicians, tied, as they were, into each country's own traditions."--BOOK JACKET.
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.
KEYNOTE: This building monograph details the newest addition to one of Berlin's most important institutions, conceived and built by leading architect Norman Foster. Occupying a central role in the intellectual life of Berlin since the end of World War II, the Free University is one of the leading universities in Germany. Its long-awaited redevelopment includes the restoration of the campus' iconic Modernist buildings and the design of a new library for the Faculty of Philology. This volume documents the construction of that structure. Photographs, sketches, drawings, and plans, accompanied by brief essays, reveal how this sleek and handsome four-story structure employs the principles of radial geometry. Featuring many of the cutting-edge concepts of its acclaimed architect Norman Foster, this library's serpentine profile of floors generates a sequence of light-filled spaces that inspire learning as well as provide an optimal environment for reading and studying. AUTHOR: David Jenkins is an architect, editor, and writer based in the Foster Studio. He is the former buildings editor of the Architect's Journal and series editor of Norman Foster Works 1-5. Karl Kiem is a professor of architectural history and preservation at the University of Siegen in Germany. Norman Foster is Founder and Chairman of Foster + Partners. 90 illustrations
In this study of the newspaper page, Fritzsche analyzes how reading & writing dramatized Imperial Berlin & anticipated the modernist sensibility that celebrated discontinuity, instability, & transience.
Das Gebäude der Freien Universität Berlin (Candilis, Josic, Woods, Schiedhelm, 1963-73) ist ein bahnbrechendes Werk in der Tradition der heroischen Moderne. Dieses wird in der vorliegenden Untersuchung anhand einer Fülle bisher unpublizierten Quellenmaterials zum ersten Mal umfassend untersucht. So werden nicht nur die bei diesem Gebäude umgesetzten technischen Innovationen, sein utopischer Charakter und sein Einfluss auf die internationale Entwicklung im Hochschulbau der sechziger Jahre des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts untersucht, sondern auch die (personellen, politischen und mentalen) Ursachen für die Vielzahl der technischen Probleme, die die Ausführung des Gebäudes kompromittierten und schließlich einen dunklen Schatten auf seine Reputation legten. Das in jüngster Zeit wiedererwachte Interesse an der FU Berlin und den Architekten Candilis, Josic, Woods und Schiedhelm zeigt, wie die Relevanz dieses Gebäudes mit seiner kompakten Synthese von komplexer Konzeption und tektonischer Innovation in Verbindung mit differenzierten baugeschichtlichen Bezügen jenseits von nostalgischen Formen für Architekten, Lehrende, Studenten und Theoretiker fortdauert.
A leading expert on the 20th-century history of Berlin, employing new and little-known German sources to track Hitler's attitudes and plans for the city, presents a fascinating new account of Hitler's relationship with Berlin, a place filled with grandiose architecture and imperial ideals, which he used as a platform for his political agenda.
An expansive, lavishly illustrated portrait of the culture of Berlin from its medieval beginnings to the reunification of 1990 illuminates the cultural activities of each era and their relationship to the city's changing political and social life. UP.
The previously untold story of a Cold War spy unit, “one of the best examples of applied unconventional warfare in special operations history” (Small Wars Journal). It is a little-known fact that during the Cold War, two US Army Special Forces detachments were stationed far behind the Iron Curtain in West Berlin. The existence and missions of the two detachments were highly classified secrets. The massive armies of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies posed a huge threat to the nations of Western Europe. US military planners decided they needed a plan to slow the expected juggernaut, if and when a war began. This plan was Special Forces Berlin. Their mission—should hostilities commence—was to wreak havoc behind enemy lines and buy time for vastly outnumbered NATO forces to conduct a breakout from the city. In reality, it was an ambitious and extremely dangerous mission, even suicidal. Highly trained and fluent in German, each of these one hundred soldiers and their successors was allocated a specific area. They were skilled in clandestine operations, sabotage, and intelligence tradecraft, and were able to act, if necessary, as independent operators, blending into the local population and working unseen in a city awash with spies looking for information on their every move. Special Forces Berlin left a legacy of a new type of soldier, expert in unconventional warfare, that was sought after for other deployments, including the attempted rescue of American hostages from Tehran in 1979. With the US government officially acknowledging their existence in 2014, their incredible story can now be told—by one of their own.
