![]() ![]() ![]() Nostalgia for a bygone utopia with inexhaustible natural resources serves as the backdrop, but other, new voices enter, some of them not human. Demolition is off the table,” says Brandlhuber on a clear December afternoon, visibly content with his Occam’s razor-like argument.Ī polyphonic debate ensued, and it is still unclear who will own the structure. “This proves that further use is possible. Brandlhuber, who has made his name with austere designs based on reused ruins, sits with me in a low-ceilinged room at the top of an old industrial silo in East Berlin, where his architecture collective has recently moved. They stated their willingness to buy and reuse it. Then, in the early summer of 2020, Arno Brandlhuber stepped in with an art dealer at his side. Nothing will be listed, went the policy in notoriously cash-strapped Berlin, that cannot be reused. The hospital president wanted it gone immediately, as did many politicians. The Charité, the Berlin medical science institution complex that houses the Brutalist gem, objected. Klack and Torkar started a petition to save the edifice and get it listed as a cultural heritage site. While its specific use dictated the design - hermetic separation of inside and outside - the architects created something beyond mere functionality. It is a fantastic, large-scale sculpture,” he says. You cannot walk past it and remain indifferent. “Its sculptural quality evokes a reaction. “The building is spectacular,” Torkar tells me over coffee. The architect and conservationist Gunnar Klack collaborated with the art historian Felix Torkar once they heard that Mäusebunker was endangered. Consider the initiative #SOSBrutalism, an international documentary project started in 2015, which resulted in an exhibition and a book. Berlin’s senate decided to reconstruct the old Prussian palace, and history - cleansed of its socialist past - was reinvented to cater to imperial nostalgia and conservative sensibilities.ĭecades later, a new awareness for the built heritage of post-war Europe arises. The glassy socialist behemoth was in the way. Better to tear down than to renovate, and Berlin needed a new centre, ran the government’s claim in the 1990s, which seemed like an assertion of nationhood in the post-reunification era. Like many old buildings, Mäusebunker was contaminated with asbestos, which echoes the story of Palast der Republik, the former GDR parliament. A 280-thousand square feet structure left unused seemed absurd amidst rapidly expanding urban development, so the hospital directors decided to tear it down. Like an enigmatic piece of space junk, the bunker sits in the residential western part of the city. One environmentalist hurled a molotov cocktail.įorty years later, techno-utopian dreams of progress are dreamt elsewhere, and medical experiments are relegated to a more inconspicuous building at the outskirts of Berlin. Built next to the city’s hospital, it was part of a cybernetic complex where scientists could develop drugs and detect diseases by testing and experimenting on animals Berliners immediately protested. German architect couple Gerd and Magdalena Hänska started designing Mäusebunker in the 1960s. If it’s not going to be destroyed, who has a right to the space? Humans, non-humans, or both? Over the past couple of years, this former symbol of humanity’s unwavering belief in progress has become the unlikely axis of a transhumanist debate. Berliners affectionately refer to this former research facility for experimental medicine as Mäusebunker (which translates to “Mouse Bunker”), a nod to both its imposing, futuristic architecture and its thorny past: scientists bred and experimented on over 45,000 mice and 20,000 rats since it opened in 1981. Photography courtesy of Neue Langeweile.Ī massive, concrete-clad building with a pyramid-like skeleton has been sitting vacant in the middle of Berlin for eleven years. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |