Breakup! Envisioning an Alternative Architecture

Excursion to Berlin (11. and 12. August 2016), a city of constant tension between global order and local ruptures, to search and explore interim, alternative, temporary, illegal, creative, unassimilated, transgressive, unordered and irrational places.

The sites we visited iclude: Holocaust memorial, Tiergarten, Hansaviertl, Dong Xuan Center,  Hochbunker in Pallasstraße and Internationales Congress Centrum Berlin.

On March 29, 2001, an article in London’s Evening Standard carried the headline “Sex has its place in public: Lord Rogers.” The article stated, “Architect Lord Rogers has said he supports streets and public squares being used by prostitutes, beggars and rough sleepers. [Rogers] told a packed lecture at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) that he defended the rights of buskers, vendors and ’participants in public sex’ to use London’s public places.”

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Transgressive Architecture Feature Article by Gil M. Doron

Transgression suggests operating beyond accepted norms and radically reinterpreting practice by pushing at the boundaries of both what architecture is, and what it could or even should be. The current economic crisis and accompanying political/social unrest has exacerbated the difficulty into which architecture has long been sliding: challenged by other professions and a culture of conservatism, architecture is in danger of losing its prized status as one of the pre-eminent visual arts. Transgression opens up new possibilities for practice. It highlights the positive impact that working on the architectural periphery can make on the mainstream, as transgressive practices have the potential to reinvent and reposition the architectural profession: whether they are subverting notions of progress; questioning roles and mechanisms of production; aligning with political activism; pioneering urban interventions; advocating informal or incomplete development; actively destabilising environments or breaking barriers of taste. In this new dispersed and expanded field of operation, the balance of architectural endeavour is shifted from object to process, from service to speculation, and from formal to informal in a way that provides both critical and political impetus to proactively affect change.

The Architecture of Transgression AD Rachel Sara

Memorial for the murdered Jews of Europe (Berlin 1995) by Horst Hoheisel