School of Architecture, Planning & Landscape, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
This paper explores how architecture can embody the past. In the context of Berlin—the site of much prominent contemporary memorial architecture—it examines one project in detail: Reitermann and Sassenroth’s widely overlooked Chapel of Reconciliation, completed in 2000. This building, I argue, demonstrates a distinctive and critically acute approach to memory. Unlike the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, designed by Peter Eisenmann, and the Jewish Museum, designed by Daniel Libeskind, which are projects that make worlds-unto-themselves—and unlike the work of Carlo Scarpa in Verona, or Sverre Fehn at Hamar, or Peter Zumthor in Cologne, where layers of history are conspicuously displayed one-on-top-of-the-next—the Chapel displays a sedimentary approach to the past. This sedimentation is not an outright rejection of history; nor does it suggest that history proceeds as a single, linear narrative. While the Chapel’s architecture may not have immediate visceral impact, its thoughtfulness and subtlety repay careful scrutiny. The chapel is read here as a cultural artefact, its organisation and details examined in relation to its specific historical, physical and intellectual contexts.
Introduction
Arguably, Berlin is the capital of memorials.FN1 Its streets contain many prominent commemorations of the city’s violent and divided past, including the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe designed by Peter Eisenmann, the reworking of Schinkel’s Neue Wache by a sequence of architects including Heinrich Tessenow, and the Jewish Museum by Daniel Libeskind. Just as these statements of civic atonement are important to the contemporary fabric of Berlin, so is the erasure of its East German (GDR) architecture:
Figure 1. The Chapel of Reconciliation standing in what was once the ‘death strip’ between the two leaves of the Berlin wall. (Photograph: Adam Sharr.)
exemplified by the contentious recent demolition of the 1976 Palace of the Republic designed by Grafunda and Swora.FN2 GDR buildings are being replaced by new edifices which, in many instances, employ an architectural vocabulary seemingly older than that of the buildings they replace.3 Like the famous memorial projects, this reconstruction serves to record in city fabric the particular hierarchies of memory promoted by Berlin’s governing authorities. This paper considers a building which is hardly discussed in the extensive literature about Berlin and its memorials but which, I will argue, seems the most critically acute of the post-war projects there that deal conspicuously with the past. The Chapel of Reconciliation, in the district of Wedding near the old Nordbahnhof, is located in what was once ‘no man’s land’ between the two leaves of the Berlin wall (Fig. 1). Opened in 2000, it replaced a church which was spectacularly detonated in 1985 by the GDR border guards because it obstructed their lines of fire. The Chapel stands over the foundations of its predecessor but is strikingly different in plan, section and architectural expression. While its architecture may not have the immediate impact of some of its contemporaries, its thoughtfulness and subtlety repay careful scrutiny. I will read the Chapel and its details in order to examine what the building stands for, considering in particular the tactics for evoking memory which are evident there.4 Rather than post-rationalising the architects’ intentions, I will examine the ideas embodied in the layout and fabric of the building, studying it in the context of its historical, physical and intellectual cultures.
The Chapel of Reconciliation
The first church on the site was completed in 1895, designed by architect Gotthilf Ludwig Moeckel in neo-Gothic style with polychromatic brickwork.FN5 Constructed to serve immigrant communities seeking work in the district, it was named the Church of Reconciliation to reflect contemporary social tensions. Damaged by the Allies in their bombardment of the city in 1943, the church reopened in 1950 in no-less-troubled times. Bernauer Strasse, onto which it faced, had become the border between Russian and French
Figure 2. The Church of Reconciliation in 1961 sealed into the Berlin Wall. (Photograph: http://www.kapelleversoehnung. de/bin/englisch/history/history.php [accessed 12.04.10]).
administered sectors of Berlin at the end of hostilities in 1945. As Cold War tensions escalated and the city was partitioned according to sector boundaries in August, 1961, the church became effectively stranded in the no-man’s-land between the walls (Fig. 2). Buildings around it were removed but the church was sealed-up, standing empty and awkward for over twenty years until its demolition in January, 1985. The steeple’s detonation came as a surprise to the West and film footage of the event was broadcast worldwide (Fig. 3). The West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl described the detonation as a symbol of the distance between East and West which was yet to be overcome.FN6
Following the literal and metaphorical fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the congregation discovered the foundations of their church intact and traced its relics, including communion vessels, the baptismal font, the altar bible, the damaged reredos and the bells.FN7 An architectural competition was organised for a replacement, for a small modern chapel in the spirit of reconciliation in which the church was first founded. The building was intended both as a practical place of worship for the rejoined parish and as a commemoration of all that the lost church stood and fell for.FN8
Reconciliation was to have at least two meanings here: in reference to the rejoining of a community; and to the reunification of a city and two Germanys.
Figure 3. An information board adjacent to the chapel shows a film still capturing the moment of the steeple’s demolition. (Photograph: Adam Sharr.)
The competition was won by the young Berlin architects Rudolf Reitermann and Peter Sassenroth, who formed a partnership specifically for the project. Their building is laid over part of the remaining foundations (Fig. 4), organised as two ovaloids in plan, one contained by the other, like a baby in the womb (Fig. 5). The sanctuary, the inner ovaloid, is enclosed by massively thick walls and is lit only from above. The outer ovaloid is twisted in geometry with respect to the inner one, providing a transition space between the entrance and the sanctuary which delays the entrance sequence (Fig. 6). This space is open to the air, separated from the ground beyond by closely-spaced vertical louvers (Fig. 7). It has a slightly provisional feel, neither outside nor inside, and its purpose is not entirely clear: small meetings take place here but not in a particularly satisfactory manner. It is ambiguously colonnade, cloister and ambulatory; all of these at once and yet none of them.
Like the outer space, the inner sanctuary is more complex than its size would first suggest. It is reached through a metal box, a kind of airlock in the thick enclosing wall, which projects so that it is visible from the entrance to the ambulatory (Fig. 8). Passing through this box, visitors turn to face two altars, or rather a new altar and the memory of an old one: a simple stone cube placed at forty-five degrees to the entrance; and at ninety degrees the salvaged reredos from the first church hung in a niche (Fig. 9). The cube and the reredos imply two axes within the asymmetrical oval.FN9 Care is taken to ensure that these axes have an equivalent presence in the building: the dominance of the axis implied by the niche is subverted by the laying-out of chairs parallel to the altar cube, by the placement of the square roof light and by the line of the organ loft which is expressed as a mezzanine at the rear of the chapel. Study of the plan shows that the reredos and its niche are placed directly on the axis of the first church, which was conventionally oriented to the east. Their new location, however, was previously the site of the back of the nave. Glazed openings in the floor expose some of the old footings, and debris from the bombing of 1943.
An information booklet produced by the Chapel authorities reports that there were fierce discussions about materials between client and architects at design stage.FN10 The architects proposed that the massive enclosing wall of the
Figure 4. The architects’ axonometric showing how the chapel sits over the footprint of the former church (courtesy of Reitermann + Sassenroth Architects).
sanctuary be made of concrete, and the louvres enclosing the ambulatory be cut from glass. The congregation and their representatives felt that these materials were too harsh. They perceived them to be too militaristic, too close to the materials of the walls and watchtowers that once divided the site. After protracted debate, timber was substituted for glass and rammed-earth—a composite comprising compacted loam, stony aggregate and flax fibres—was substituted for concrete. These late changes added to the richness and subtlety of the project.
Four layers of presence and absence
Berlin’s most prominent contemporary memorials seek meaning by dealing in hiddenness and disclosure, in concealing and revealing.FN11 Specifically, they deal in presence and absence. This tactic exploits present fabric to reveal metaphorically what was once in existence, and exploits the idea of past fabric to imbue with significance that which now stands in its place. It involves a phenomenological appeal to material substance: to the tangible quiddity of something which is physically there and manifestly un-negotiable; and to the evocation of something or someone no longer present. Eisenmann’s Holocaust Memorial (first conceived in collaboration with the artist
Figure 5. Plan (courtesy of Reitermann and Sassenroth Architects)
Richard Serra) illustrates this approach (Fig. 10). It comprises a grid of 2711 concrete monoliths, named stelae, separated by narrow paths. The height of these stelae varies, sometimes subsuming visitors and sometimes exposing them to views across the monument. The monoliths describe a peculiar kind of disordered order; at once evocative of tombs, military installations and prehistoric structures. The absence of signage and the lack of explicit curatorial devices add enigmatic force to the square-cut presence of the stelae. The blocks are inscrutable companions, fellow mourners resolute in silence, their dense concrete reflecting back the acoustic traces of your own walk through the maze. The palpable presence of each of the blocks, the sense they give of preventing you occupying their space, serves to evoke lost presences: people, lives and buildings which were once part of this world. But the muteness of the blocks is also a kind of absence, inviting multiple interpretations. Similarly, Libeskind’ Jewish museum—in the voids which orientate its plan, in its staircase leading to a blank wall and its chilled (and chilling) Holocaust tower—draws from evocative absences and their corresponding presences in pursuit of meaning. The Chapel of Reconciliation also deals in concealing and revealing, sedimenting together layers of presence and absence. I will discuss four layers here.
Figure 6. Entering the chapel. (Photograph: Adam Sharr.)
Figure 7. The space of the outer ovaloid; ambiguously colonnade, cloister and ambulatory. (Photograph: Adam Sharr.)
The first layer involves axis and symmetry. A single central axis linking entrance and altar—the basic organising device of the familiar cruciform church plan—is conspicuously absent. Instead, the axis is broken and made multiple. The entrance to the sanctuary is not obvious as one enters the ambulatory; and visitors are presented not with one axis but two competing axes as they turn to enter the inner room, neither of which is dominant. The single axis is conventionally a centre of symmetry and, although the oval is a potentially symmetrical figure, symmetry is resisted in the design of the chapel. To start with, neither outer nor inner ovaloid is quite symmetrical. Then, when each is broken to make entrances and niches, these breaks are placed to resist symmetry and straightforward axiality. The lack of a single axis is somewhat disorientating and its residue remains a palpable absence for the visitor.
The possibility of symmetry and its denial are conspicuous here. On the one hand, these absences serve to highlight the loss, and the former presence, of the chapel’s conventionally organised predecessor. On the other, they stand as a clear critique of its architectural tradition. The argument that singularity has become questionable in the post-war world is a familiar one: the Holocaust—and the mechanised warfare of world wars and Cold War—might be recognised as the logical conclusion of European reason and progress; as the termination of the modernists’ quest for a unified truth.FN12 In this context, complexities and multiplicities offer more. Formal ambiguities at the Chapel are modest, but their power derives from subtlety. The potential of the single dominant axis as a formal device is not denied (the trace of the single axis is there as an absent presence) but it is relegated definitively to the past.
Secondly, the ambulatory is curiously enigmatic. It can be thought of as a substitute for the arcaded or colonnaded side aisles of a conventional church. Yet, unlike side aisles, it yields nothing of the interior of nave or sanctuary for the visitor because it is separated from the inner space by a thick wall. Instead, the ambulatory hints at old foundations
Figure 8. The lobby, a kind of airlock, which opens into the through glass panels (Fig. 11) and offers sanctuary. (Photograph: Adam Sharr.)
glimpses back to the street sliced by the louvered screen (Fig. 12). The ambulatory might also be thought of as a cloister. However, rather than an inward focus on a garden, it has an outward focus to the surrounding scrubland once lethally contained between two leaves of wall. Partly because it is open to the air and the noise of traffic on Bernauer Strasse, it is no easy place to linger. Its geometries are somewhat awkward, better suited to movement than to standing or sitting. Again, the presence of this space draws attention to absences: to the detonated church and its architectural traditions, to a lack of comfortable familiarity and to the once-charged void between the walls. Its outward orientation resists an easy introversion, configuring instead 360 degree contact with the surrounding landscape. The introspection of the sanctuary is heightened by the outward focus of the ambulatory. As with the single axis, the design of this space does not reject the architectural conventions of the side aisle so much as rework them, making something familiar and at once also curiously unfamiliar.
The third layer of presence and absence evident in the Chapel of Reconciliation involves the altar, and the lack of altar implied by the reredos in its niche. The altar is, of course, the centre of ritual in a conventionally ordered church. In this instance, it is doubled and then subtracted. The stone cube altar is the first object on view when entering the sanctuary, although visitors find it obliquely. It sits on a plinth of polished stone that is flush with the floor—no raised dais here—which sets out an aisle that is given form only through the placement of chairs. The platonic geometry of the cube, and its lack of decoration, lends an almost prehistoric quality to its knowing minimalism. This altar has a decisive presence in the space which is curiously undermined by its almost provisional placement in the room. Untypically, there are few supplementary architectural devices which serve to
Figure 9. The sanctuary, showing the stone cube altar to the left and the salvaged reredos in its niche to the right. (Photograph: Adam Sharr.)
anchor the cube in place, save one corner of the roof light which opens above at forty-five degrees from the centre of its forward edge (Fig. 13).
The presence of this altar is doubly undermined by its silent second. The reredos in the niche to its right, the only decorated object in an otherwise undecorated space, is an arresting presence. Beneath it, where the feet of a priest might once have stood before a tabernacle, a glass panel is fixed flush with the floor revealing the brickwork of old foundations beneath. The reredos, its symmetrical placement in the niche, its opening to the remains of the former church and its obvious origin as a backdrop to an altar, make the lack of altar in front of it all the more apparent. The central presence of the altar cube used for ceremonies is curiously rendered almost absent by its mute companion. And the absence of an altar in front of the niche, combined with the intricately worked relic of the salvaged reredos, manifest very presently the church that was. The historical artefact here becomes less a curated object than a residue, its role decisive in the evocation of absent presences.
Figure 10. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin; architect Peter Eisenmann. (Photograph: Adam Sharr.)
Fourthly, the rammed-earth walls of the sanctuary speak powerfully of the lost building and its resurrection. The building technique used—Lehmbau in German—involves compacting together loam, aggregate and fibres under high pressure within a temporary formwork. An environmentally sustainable material, walls are built up in successive layers or ‘pours’. Although the resulting wall appears substantial, it is instead rather delicate. When dry, its surface is prone to crumble. It has to be
Figure 11. One of the openings giving a glimpse of the foundations of the original church. (Photograph: Adam Sharr.)
protected from the elements as it will erode too quickly if exposed to their full force. And, because rammed earth cannot bear much structural load beyond its own self-weight, it is virtually impossible to make openings in walls. For these reasons, at the Chapel, the louvered ambulatory and airlock lobby serve to shelter the sanctuary wall and make a way through it. Their presences protect the wall, allow it to survive and allow it to be inhabited: their existence gives the sanctuary its chance of life.
Figure 12. Glimpses to the street from the ambulatory, sliced by the louvered screen. (Photograph: Adam Sharr.)
Figure 13. The primary sanctuary roof light. (Photograph: Adam Sharr.)
But most intriguing about the rammed-earth wall is its aggregate. Sifted from the site, it includes fragments of masonry, stone and tile from the original church (Fig. 14). On close examination, it is possible to make out glazed faces once part of that building’s decoration, and multiple colours of brick from its walls. Millions of small deposits of the detonated church are cast into the mud. The alluvial presence of these fragments reconstituted together in a new substance is a powerful token of the absent church as a whole, of the once singular assurance of its epoch’s worldview. Moreover, the rammed earth literally sediments together countless deposits of memory into built form. Each fragment, each member of the aggregate, is an individual with its own enigmatic presence. Where did it come from? What of the many stones now buried invisibly in the substance of the wall?
These four layers of presence and absence are sedimented together in the built form of the Chapel. Drawing on the idea of sedimentation, I will consider why these tactics comprise a distinctive way to evoke memory with respect to other approaches to memorial architecture.
Another archaeology
Eisenmann’s memorial and Libeskind’s Jewish Museum are both highly particular projects. They have their own internalised intellectual systems, their own schema. They tend to keep themselves to themselves. Partly because of the particular atrocity of the Holocaust that they memorialise in different ways, the projects’ intellectual reasoning serves to un-site their architectural fabric as much as to site it. But they are not so much fragments of apocalyptic worlds as experiences which diminish the forces of location, wrenching visitors away from the specifics of the site in the city, for a time.FN13
This deliberately runs counter to another, more widespread, tactic for making memory apparent in architectural form which recurs in canonical architectural projects of the post-war era.FN14 In Peter Zumthor’s recent reworking of a ruined church as part of the Kolumba Diocesan Museum in Cologne, new fabric is built onto old in such a way Figure 14. The rammed-earth wall, including fragments of masonry, stone and tile from the original church. (Photograph: Adam Sharr.)
as to make layers of history apparent; one on top of the next. Likewise Sverre Fehn’s Hamar Museum, and Carlo Scarpa’s famously opportunistic historical reconstruction of the Castelvecchio in Verona. This architectural tactic is manifestly archaeological. Each new layer is constructed on the previous one and each is made visible in order to present a linear story about a sequence of events—no matter whether that story is tidied-up or even fictitious in part, as in Scarpa’s case. In this tactic, the building serves to fulfil a teleological archaeology: each new layer is clearly shown as built on top of its predecessor, one thing after another.
I contend that the Chapel of Reconciliation does not stand as a teleological archaeology but rather as a sedimentary one. By which I mean that the building form sifts together the layers of presence and absence according to which memory is evoked there in a more compressed, more integral way than would be achieved by building explicitly layer-on-layer. There are moments that express an historical building sequence on the site, like the glass panels which open up glimpses of remains below, but for the most part the Chapel’s form embodies a more complex approach.
Walter Benjamin’s discussion of archaeology from his ‘Berlin Chronicle’ contributes here:
He who wishes to approach his own buried past must act like a man who digs [. . .] Facts of the matter are only deposits, layers which deliver only to the most meticulous examination what constitutes the true assets hidden within the earth: the images which, torn from all former contexts, stand—like ruins or torsos in the collector’s gallery—as the treasures in the sober chambers of our belated insights. And, in order to dig successfully, a plan is certainly required. Yet just as indispensable is the spade’s careful, probing penetration of the dark earthen realm; and he who only keeps the inventory of his finds, but not also this dark bliss of the finding itself, cheats himself of the best part. The unsuccessful search belongs to it as fully as the fortunate search. This is why memory must not proceed by way of narrative, much less by way of reports, but must, rather, assay [test the ingredients and quality of] its spade, epically and rhapsodically in the most rigorous sense, in ever new places and, in the old ones, to delve into ever deeper layers.FN15
Benjamin distinguishes artefacts from ideas attributed to them later, considering them to be talismans of insight whose authority derives from the reverence in which they are held. The value of archaeological finds, he argues, derives at least as much from the mystery of the things themselves as it does from the stories subsequently projected onto them. In the end, however, artefacts, as redolent objects or as the carriers of stories, are only as important as the search for them. Benjamin evokes the thrill of the chase, the excitement of find and loss. Each person, he implies, is at the centre of their own ongoing archaeology, where the act of pursuit is more significant than its goal. This pursuit becomes meaningful where the individual is able to weigh- up their own finds (or lack of them), where they are able to ground the value of their own memories in relation to present or imagined material remains.
These presences—whether they are actually found or not—are also earthen absences: they offer opportunities for individuals to project their memories onto them. They have the potential to indulge people in ideas of their own destiny, allowing people to locate themselves with respect to the past and to measure their memories against them. For Benjamin, this individual archaeology allows people, in conjunction with real or imagined artefacts, over time, to bring their own memories and shared stories together into a distinctive settlement.
This settling-out can be considered as a sedimentary process in relation to the Chapel of Reconciliation. The Chapel’s rammed-earth wall takes the earth and builds with it, reconstituting it, recharging it with aggregate artefacts. But these artefacts are ambiguous finds rather than curated objects, sifted and settled-out rather than explicitly ordered. Some are obvious to the eye; some are buried in the depth of the rammed earth. The wall is built in layers but it denies a simple layering of history, of one thing on top of the next. It invites attention, provokes curiosity and asks individuals to project their own memories and ideas onto it. But it does not yield any straightforward answers about the story of the site, or the building, or the people involved with the site’s destructions and reconstructions.
This wall represents the architectural tactics of the Chapel as a whole. It serves as a metaphor for the way in which the Chapel sediments together devices of presence and absence. Its sedimentation is that of the centrifuge, spinning-out and resettling, rather than that of geology. The multiplication of axis and denial of symmetry; the doubling and subtraction of altars; the opening of a reconstituted side aisle outward rather than inward; demonstrate neither an absolute rejection nor a clear acceptance of architectural traditions and all the connotations with which those traditions are loaded. Instead, the fabric of the chapel embodies a matrix of memorial residues. With the ambulatory, with the axes, with the altars, architectural traditions are disaggregated and re-aggregated, sedimented back together all-at-once in a new mixture. They are there, recognisable but changed, recombined and re-settled. Their order is not a neat one: it describes no teleological layering but instead a more ambivalent reconstitution, denying certainty.FN16 This reconstitution has the capacity to ask visitors to act as Benjaminian archaeologists; to allow the projections of individuals’ own memories— whether intuitively or more deliberately—onto the building’s conspicuously present and absent constituents. It has potential to ask people to sediment their memories anew.
Memory embodied in architecture
This sedimentary archaeology presents intriguing possibilities for the embodiment of memory in architectural form. The schema of the Chapel is not as internalised as that of the Libeskind museum or the Eisenmann memorial, both of which seek to make worlds-unto-themselves; an introspection which Andreas Huyssen has questioned in his book Present Pasts:
If the 1980s were the decade of a happy postmodern pluralism, the 1990s seemed to be haunted by trauma as the dark underside of neoliberal triumphalism [. . .] Surely the prevalence of the concern with trauma must be due to the fact that trauma as a psychic phenomenon is located on the threshold between remembering and forgetting, seeing and not seeing, transparency and occlusion, experience and its absence in repetition [. . .] But to collapse memory into trauma, I think, would unduly confine our understanding of memory, marking it too exclusively in terms of pain, suffering and loss. It would deny human agency and lock us into compulsive repetition. Memory, whether individual or generational, political or public, is always more than only the prison house of the past.FN17
For Huyssen, memorials which evoke trauma comprise a decisive mode of commemoration, but he implies that they can struggle to allow reconciliation. The Chapel offers a rich middle way between such an approach and the more teleological view of archaeology where one thing is rendered more or-less equivalent to the next, where such equivalence can mitigate against the possibility that trauma might require a re-evaluation of the past and its priorities. The Chapel’s form suggests a particular position: that the divisions of war and Cold War comprise an irreconcilable break with the past; that nothing can be the same afterwards; but that the break is not a total rupture; what went before should be acknowledged but questioned; traditions should be disaggregated but not dismissed; and a new settlement should be constituted. Its strength is in its constructive re-aggregation of artefacts, making them new, making them structural, and, in the spirit of Benjamin’s archaeology, making them ambivalent enough to allow for projections of memory.FN18
This position is distinctive with respect to the specific hierarchies of memory apparent in the fabric of post-reunification Berlin. City planning there at the end of the last millennium and at the beginning of the new has been marked by a debate between advocates of the traditional urban block—those in favour of reclaiming the dense 18m-high city fabric which was established around the turn of the last century—with those in favour of more contemporary architectural forms and urban spaces. Except for a few notable examples, the historicist approach won out.FN19 Karen Till summarises its motives:
Berlin’s planners and marketers both evoke historic images to imagine and represent the new city [even though] they have different understandings of the ‘new’ as a term that signifies the recent past. Planners [. . .] see their job as returning Berlin to its pre-1933 status as a classical European world city and do so by advocating a neo- traditional approach to urban density and contemporary social and spatial relations. They, with marketers and the city elite, promote the nostalgic concept of the Kiez: compact urban neighbourhoods that have a European vitality and are defined by distinctive Berlin architecture, density and street design. Unlike planners, however, city marketers celebrate the new as a signifier for a better future. They represent the New Berlin as a cosmopolitan, open, youthful city using terms that allude to Weimar Berlin of the 1920s [. . .].FN20
As Till suggests, the majority of new developments are characterised by a curious architectural neo-conservatism which is marketed with a vocabulary of novelty. Late-nineteenth century urban form, together with a stripped classicism derived closely from the architecture of the 1920s and 1930s, seems to comprise the favoured idiom. Its promoters have found in this idiom a schema which, from the outside, seems as exclusive as that of the Holocaust memorials: although its ethics and politics appear rather different. It is rolled-out across both vacant sites and sites where seemingly more modern buildings, especially those built under the GDR, are replaced without a trace by seemingly older ones. This is not so much the acknowledgement of a break, but the imposition of a selective continuity. For the planners, certain traditions are to be accepted while others are to be rejected as though they never existed. This is selective memory made architectural. The sedimentary archaeology of the Chapel of Reconciliation offers an alternative here, implying neither a refutation of tradition nor an easy resort to historicist revival, allowing instead the thoughtful reconstitution of traditions in a different time.
Rammed earth is sustainable, employing recycled materials whose constituents are largely found from the environment, low in embodied energy. I would argue that the rammed-earth wall of the Chapel, and the sedimentary approach to memory for which it stands, are also intellectually sustainable. New and old are compressed into a complex aggregation of past memory and present possibility whose massive but delicate structure depends on both in operation together.
Notes and references
1.) At least in European culture at the end of the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first: Andrew Webber, Berlin in the Twentieth Century: A Cultural Topography (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008).
2.) The proposed replacement for the Palast der Republik, whose demolition was completed in 2008, has three elevations which copy faithfully the Prussian Stadtschloss that formerly stood on the site. This historical replication was a requirement of the competition brief. The winning scheme and runners-up are catalogued in: Chris Foges, ‘Berlin’, Architecture Today, 196 (March, 2009), pp. 12–17.
3.) Andres Lepik and Anne Schmedding, Architektur in Berlin Das XX. Jahrhundert (Cologne, Dumont, 2005), pp. 84–85.
4.) By aiming to ‘read’ the building, I make no claim that architecture is text. Built fabric is too materially present for that analogy to stretch meaningfully. Rather, I suggest that the architect-authors of buildings, and critics awed by authorship, rarely offer the most reliable accounts of them. Architecture embodies the thinking involved in its inhabitation, construction, procurement and design. It displays the ethos of the individuals involved, their relationships and their involvement in the cultures in which they lived and worked. In this way, buildings and their details are cultural artefacts that can be read for the insights they embody. This position admits that the architect is only one of many involved in built form and that buildings are never finished, especially on opening day. This approach will be developed in a forthcoming edited book: Adam Sharr, ed., Architecture and Culture (London, Routledge, 2011).
5.) Ulrike Braun, Versöhnungskirche Kapelle der Versöhnung in Berlin (Berlin, Evangelische Versöhnungsgemeinde, 2007), p.27.
6.) http://www.kapelle-versoehnung.de/bin/englisch/history/history.php
[accessed 29.07. 08].
7.) Braun, Versöhnungskirche Kapelle der Versöhnung, op. cit., p.32.
8.) Churches—seen as a relatively safe place for peaceful dissent—were central to the popular protests in the GDR in 1989 that led in part to the fall of the Berlin wall. The Nikolaikirche in Leipzig was a particular centre. In this way, the church carried particular associations into post-unification Germany.
9.) An axis is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as an imaginary line through a body about which it might rotate; an imaginary line around which a regular figure is symmetrically arranged. The spaces here are not, strictly, symmetrical. However, the lines in question imply a balanced centre line to an asymmetrical space, enough to inscribe the presence of what can only be called an axis.
10.) Braun, Versöhnungskirche Kapelle der Versöhnung, op. cit., p.33.
11.) At first, it seems curious that these Heideggerian themes should be so pronounced in the architecture of these memorials. Heidegger’s notorious involvement with the Nazis has led to the commonplace portrayal of his thinking as standing in opposition to the decisive figures of memory theory such as Walter Benjamin, Maurice Halbwachs and Max Horkheimer. Yet Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, significant early voices in post-war memory debates, studied and collaborated with Heidegger. And the architects Daniel Libeskind and Peter Eisenmann both had connections to the school of architecture in Cambridge where Dalibor Vesely extended the reach of phenomenology, and Heideggerian phenomenology, in architecture. Vesely’s book, published as recently as 2006, summarises the phenomenological position which guided teaching there for many years: Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 2006).
12.) Andreas Huyssen outlines the parameters of this debate: ‘The critique of historiography as a tool of domination and ideology, forcefully articulated by such socialist historians of the late nineteenth century as Walter Mehring in Germany, and later by Walter Benjamin in his radical, although overstated, political critique of all historicism; the post-Nietzschean attacks on linearity, on causality, and on the myths of origin or telos as articulated in the work of Foucault, Lyotard and Derrida; the postcolonial critique of Western history as fundamentally implicated in an imperialist and racist Western modernity—these arguments are too well known to bear repeating here in detail. The attack on the history-modernity linkage has become such an idee recue in certain intellectual circles today that one may well want to come to the defence of the embattled enterprise of writing history that, to my mind, remains an essential component of the power of memory discourse itself.’ Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2003), p.5. Anson Rabinbach also addresses the intellectual context of these ideas—In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Environment (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997), p.6.
13.) Martin Jay, ‘The Apocalyptic Imagination and the Ability to Mourn’, in Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique (London, Routledge, 2003); Saul Friedländer, Gerald Holton, Leo Marx and Eugene Skolnikoff, eds, Visions of Apocalypse: End or Rebirth (New York, Holmes and Meier, 1985).
14.) This idea that a building might be an accumulation of the traces of a long past echoes Anson Rabinbach’s suggestion that: ‘[. . .] since World War II, historians have been more profoundly sceptical of the “eventness” of the past than their predecessors, preferring instead to focus on long term social and cultural transformations rather than on superficial and ephemeral political occurrences.’; Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe, op. cit., p.19.
15.) Walter Benjamin, Berliner Chronik: Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1972), pp.486–87; ‘A Berlin Chronicle’, trs., Edmund Jephcott, in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (New York, Harcourt Brace, 1978), pp.25–26; and ‘A Berlin Chronicle’ and ‘Excavation and Memory’, in Selected Writings, Volume 2, 1927– 1934 (Cambridge, Belknap, 1999), 611, 576. Also discussed in Karen Till, The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
16.) Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1991), p.233.
17.) Huyssen, Present Pasts, op. cit., p.8.
18.) Here it seems to fulfil Andreas Huyssen’s provocation to the use of memory at the end of his ‘Introduction’ to Present Pasts: ‘The paradox is that memory discourses themselves participate in the detemporalising processes that characterise a culture of consumption and obsolescence. Memory as re-presentation, as making present, is always in danger of collapsing the constitutive tension between past and present, especially when the imagined past is sucked into the timeless present of the all pervasive virtual space of consumer culture.’; Huyssen, Present Pasts, op. cit., p.10.
19.) This approach made manifest in ‘ordinary’ Berlin building has been countered by the approaches of certain ‘special’ projects; notably the ideology of transparency manifest in certain governmental projects, especially the reworked Reichstag: Deborah Ascher Barnstone, The Transparent State: Architecture and Politics in Post-War Germany (London, Routledge, 2005).
20.) Till, The New Berlin, op. cit., pp.44–45.