The Poundbury experience, which I wrote about in the previous essay, was an attempt to live broadcast, in crystal clear form, a historical urban planning model into a modern city. It can be assumed that both Lyon Krieux and Prince Charles feel themselves to be people of the Renaissance and, in this case, their construction in the 21st century of a city with all the signs of the 16th century is justified. It can even be assumed that in time Poundbury will gather everyone who feels like people of the Renaissance, and it will be a semblance of a time machine, a kind of reservation outside the hustle and bustle of our millennium.
However, we see that attempts to replicate this experience lead to the construction of scenery villages. Just as an actor plays a historical hero in the scenery of costume films, a client who buys real estate in such a village may feel like an aristocrat of the same 16th century, but this place is no more adapted for a normal life than a film studio. Our client is still accustomed to not moving in a carriage, and even in an interior camouflaged under the palace chambers, he still has computerized household appliances hidden. Stylization for him is nothing more than an attraction, he is a man of our time.
But we also remember that out of all man-made models of organizing the urban environment, only one turned out to be viable and comfortable, and this is precisely the model of the historical city - since it was the only one that was not invented, but suffered through suffering. And that the search for another model began only when it could not cope with the challenges of hyper-urbanization, but this search ended in nothing. So, is it possible today to combine the merits of this model, "endured" for centuries, and the requirements of life in a modern metropolis? To create, on the basis of centuries of experience in urban planning, not a timeless reservation on the outskirts of a quiet town, but a lively, seething, but at the same time convenient for life city?
Perhaps the most ambitious attempt to combine historical experience with modern life and modern architecture is the reconstruction of Berlin after the fall of the Wall.
Berlin is the most long-suffering city of the 20th century. By the beginning of the Second World War, it was densely built up. According to the memoirs of contemporaries, in terms of architecture, Berlin was rather boring. In the 1940s, the city was to undergo a radical restructuring according to the reconstruction plan conceived by Hitler. The war thwarted these plans, but the destruction that it brought was much more serious than what could have happened as a result of reconstruction. 90% of buildings in the city were destroyed as a result of bombing and street fighting.
However, the city's troubles did not end there. After the war, in accordance with the Yalta agreements, it was divided into Soviet, American, British and French zones of occupation. Its eastern part was the capital of the German Democratic Republic, which was part of the Soviet bloc, while the western part remained a capitalist enclave. In 1961, the GDR authorities built border structures right along the demarcation line that ran through the city center - this is how the famous Berlin Wall appeared. The city was actually split in two; the central, most active part of it before the war in the area of Potsdamer Platz and Leipziger Platz became a border area and an urban outskirts, both for the eastern and western parts. No new buildings were built in the vicinity of the Wall, but the surviving ones survived.
In West Berlin, the restoration of the city was carried out according to the principles of the Athenian Charter - multi-residential buildings free standing in space, forming "superblocks" - micro-districts. In Vostochny, after a short-term implantation of "Stalinist" architecture, which left its mark in the form of the ensembles of Stalin Allee and the Soviet embassy in Under der Linden, modernist urban planning ideas also prevailed. The historical planning fabric was ignored, and new panel buildings filled the gaps between the houses preserved after the fighting and bombing.
Thus, at the time of the fall of the Wall and the unification of Germany, Berlin was two cities that had been developing autonomously for thirty years, the historical fabric of which had been preserved fragmentarily, and the geographical center was a strip of alienation of the state border. Sewing together the torn parts, transforming a conglomerate of chaotically built up spaces into the capital of a unified German state and, at the same time, a city convenient for life, was perhaps the most difficult and large-scale urban planning task carried out over the past century.
The idea of Hans Stiman, Director of the Urban Development Department of the Berlin Senate, who led the city's reconstruction project, was to restore the dense urban fabric that existed before the war, but not to follow the path of “antique” stylization or creating copies of destroyed buildings, but to fill it with modern architectural content. In order to create such a historical in topology, but modern environment, a well-known and widely used tool throughout the world was used - regulations.
The easiest way to see how this tool was applied in practice is on the example of Friedrichstadt, a district in the center of Berlin that emerged during the era of Frederick the Great. But more on that in the next essay.
