Paola Nicolin: How did the idea of holding an international symposium on Berlin come about?
Stanislaus von Moos: By coincidence, as is perhaps typical in such cases. The idea cropped up in a discussion with our Dean, Robert A.M. Stern about subjects that would deserve to be looked into in terms of seminars and excursions. When I suggested Berlin he suddenly came up with the idea to organize a symposium.
Since the second half of the 1970s, the demand for architecture as a communication tool has often been the focus of debates, talks and studies. How did the programme of the Yale symposium develop? How did you create the themes — Images of the Metropolis, The Life and Afterlife of Ruins, Re-inventing Berlin, poisoned Utopias and Dialectic of the Archipelago and Building the capital city: Missed Opportunities? And what selection criteria did you adopt for the speakers?
It came almost by itself. The original idea was to focus on the IBA (1984-88) and the success and failure of the strategy of "Critical Reconstruction" that was subsequently put to work under Senatsbaudirektor Hans Stimmann, a story that encapsulates many core issues of post-modern architecture and urbanism in Europe and that is still relatively little known in the US. As we began working on the program, it seemed to me that Berlin deserved to be envisioned in a broader perspective, one that would involve the legacy of National Socialism, the trauma of World War II, and the world wide neurosis of the East-West conflict. Berlin, after all, was one of the key stages, if not the key stage in all these contexts.
I really don't know if that interest in the relationship between art and architecture is more intense in Berlin than elsewhere. I couldn't tell and have never thought about it. But then, yes, it is intriguing that some important contemporary artists working in Berlin — apart from Thomas Demand one might think of Olafur Eliasson — are fascinated with the interaction of art and architecture. Maybe Berlin with its many random spaces encourages such experiments. Also, the Berlin art boom of the Cold War years, when Berlin's cultural scene was so generously subsidized from without, may have generated curiosities in that area among the people who go to museums and art galleries.
The ways in which we shall henceforth talk about Berlin will possibly take off from the more inquisitive contributions to the conference, such as the short response from Rem Koolhaas that suggested that with the fall of the Wall there may no longer be any need to define Berlin as a battlefield of ideological confrontation
I also think the "bomb shelter" of Hastings Hall, sunken into in Paul Rudolph's Art and Architecture Building at Yale, where the conference was held, is a place that triggers memories of war and of ruination, granted that Rudolph's architecture as a "bunker" celebrates the prevention of war damage while its rugged concrete surfaces are a variation on the theme of Brutalist ruin aesthetic…
Ruin exorcism of a perhaps even more radical kind dominated the post 1989 attitude to the Wall. By now, there is no single physical trace of the Wall to be found in Berlin. The authorities have handled the problem in the way police deals with a crime site. When the case is closed, the bulldozers come and clean up.
Berlin was the capital of the Third Reich. Because of this, after the liberation both by the Allied and Soviet forces it ended up becoming the very frontier town between the Capitalist and the Communist world. Needless to say, that anything that happened in Berlin could not be seen otherwise than as forming part of politics.
Hence I believe Léon Krier is right when he thinks that Albert Speer's architecture is not adequately understood if seen only as part of his agenda as a war criminal. And Greg Castillo is also right when he insists that the Gute Form of Western Design in the 1950s is not only a step towards the fulfilment of the Enlightenment, but part of the logic of Western imperialism... Historians are thus confronted with a double task: to de-politicise those subjects that during decades have been taken hostage by politics and political rhetoric and polemic — and to re-politicise those subjects that continue to be surrounded by a halo of political chastity.
To the degree that exhibitions and symposia in the way they are set up reflect points of view, they will necessarily be seen as a "success" by one party, and as a "missed opportunity" by the other. Now, the Interbau in Berlin (1957) was set up to promote a particular attitude to urbanism, while the IBA (1984—88) was set up to undo the evil caused by the previous event. Our symposium did not have the ambition to promote a certain kind of architecture or urbanism as opposed to another. It wanted, first, to document and to inform, and, second, to re-discuss architecture in a framework that was larger and more open than the simple opposition of "Modern" vs. "Reactionary" or "Totalitarian" vs. "Democratic", etc...
For me, personally, to listen to Peter Eisenman and to the "bad guy" Hans Stimmann as they outlined in their own words the positions that defined the Berlin discourse for decades was a memorable piece of first hand history and theory. Even though, the ways in which we shall henceforth talk about Berlin will possibly take off from the more inquisitive contributions to the conference, such as the short response from Rem Koolhaas, that reached the "bunker" via video-conference, and that suggested that with the fall of the Wall there may no longer be any need to define Berlin as a battlefield of ideological confrontation. In fact, the bottom line of the conference may well be that Berlin in 2013 is not more unique a city than hundred others.