Rewriting History: O. M. Ungers’ Radical Visions for Future Cities

Ungers’ radical vision of future cities far exceeded the rational approach to form, morphology and urban transformation to which his work is too often reduced, despite his multifarious activities as a visionary architect, farsighted planner and scrupulous intellectual. Can Ungers’ radicality be fruitful to the solution of today’s problems? The question is whether and how we can learn from Ungers today, how rele-vant is Ungers today, a good fifty years after the publication of The City in the City: Berlin Green Archipelago, the most original among the many groundbreak-ing investigations that Ungers undertook. When Ungers and his collaborators published this booklet, Berlin was a western outpost behind the Iron Curtain or an island in the archipelago of Soviet-dominated Eastern Bloc states. Berlin was still marked in an extreme way by the destruction of the war, it was economi-cally marginalised, whereas it had previously been the largest industrial city in Europe. Ungers’ original contribution to the practice and theory of architecture of his time was that he made this very city the testing ground for his visions of the new city. Written as a memorandum for the Internationale Building Exhibition (IBA), that took place in Berlin 1987, it contains eleven theses on Berlin. In this text, one can read the essential differences between Ungers’ vision and what is practised; Ungers speaks of context and talks about the poeticization of place and has tried to explain what he means. The idea is to develop the new plans and pro-jects from what exists, from what Ungers calls “ontological”. He is of the opinion that reality is as it appears and cannot be derived solely from historical exam-ples, such as a loss or any utopia. At first everything appears destroyed and disconnected, so much so that it would almost be better to demolish everything because in reality there is no longer any internal connection, but a new reality can be created that re-establishes a new connection.