La Berlino di Oswald Mathias Ungers

With this text I want to draw the attention to the iconography concerning the city of Berlin, with an emphasis on the urban visions imposed by Oswald Mathias Ungers to the city, as an antidote to the loss of identity. In recent years there has been much talks about the invention of the “city archipelago” given by O.M.Ungers and Rem Koolhaas at the seminar in Berlin Summer School (1977). This “City archipelago” consisted of large scale, big architectural fragments at intervals in the city fabric, "cities within cities", distinguished by their giant ladders and rigid geometry. But the “archipelago city” is an old concept, many famous cities has been built on archipelagos of small islands, connected by boats and ferries like european examples of Venice, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Copenhagen, Stockholm. The real interest is in how Koolhaas and Ungers believed in "big architecture" as the antidote to the low-rise suburban sprawl of the Megalopolis embraced by contemporary theorists such as Reyner Banham in his “Los Angeles: the Architecture of the 4 Ecologies” (1971), or the Venturi, Scott-Brown and Isenour team's “Learning from Las Vegas” (1972). In contrast to this regional dispersed city model, Ungers adopted his german term for these islands "Grossformen" (previously adopted in 1965), as megaforms, echoing the Japanese metabolists architects. But before the city archipelago concept, OMU defined the even more radical vision of “Berlin 1995” (1968), where after speaking about the plans for the Great Berlin proposals by Hilbersemer, Maeckler, Speer, etc., he defined a radical mega-structure, able to solve problems of a city that at the end of the Sixties was still showing the marks of the World War II and the presence of the Berlin wall. Paradoxically these visions of islands and mega-structures approach, in an extraordinary way, the urban vision that Schinkel was structuring around the city, from Potsdam to Berlin, transforming the post-war Berlin in a new post-Schinkel Arcadia.