Oswald Mathias Ungers in Berlin

Research, project and experimentation

Abstract

In The City within the City: Berlin as a Green Archipelago, Ungers, along with his team of collaborators including Koolhaas, Riemann, Kollhoff, and Ovaska, defined important visions for urban life and architecture that were never realized but have continuously influenced architectural discourse, especially in the past decade. Viewed retrospectively, the Sommer Akademie held in Berlin in 1977 now appears as the primordial scene of our contemporary architecture and our way of looking at urban development. The aim of this contribution is not to discuss this document as an object of historical research but to outline the general aspects of Ungers' research on the city, within which the reflections on Berlin are situated, highlighting the main factors that influenced the genesis of the idea of the city as an archipelago. On the other hand, this contribution revisits the concept of the city as an archipelago with the belief that it can still serve as a meaningful tool for constructing new design narratives for today's cities.