The Border City: Critical Views from Art and Architecture
(abstract)On August 13, 1961, the construction of a border began that would divide Berlin for twenty-eight years. The city was transformed into an urban landscape that was impassable from east to west, and the sudden end of free movement had dramatic effects on its inhabitants. The experience of the divided city remains present today in the collective memory and in an urban landscape where the material and symbolic traces of the former border still endure.
The historical and political phenomenon of the Berlin Wall, as well as the need to critically think about and reinterpret it, has not gone unnoticed in the realm of artistic practices and architectural theory. In the 1970s, Rem Koolhaas, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Allan Kaprow took the Berlin border as a central theme for developing critical proposals in various forms, ranging from Koolhaas's essayistic works "The Berlin Wall as Architecture" (1971) and "Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture" (1972) to Matta-Clark’s action on the Wall’s surface, documented in the film “The Wall” (1976-2007), and Allan Kaprow’s “Sweet Wall” (1970), in which he and his collaborators built and demolished a replica of the Wall. These works aimed to challenge the legitimacy of the division, critique the power of architecture, and question the ideological constructs of the border city.