OBRIST:

In your book S, M, L, XL you talk about the Berlin

Wall. Can you tell me about this very first project of
yours in Berlin in the early 1970s?

KOOLHAAS:
I was a student at the end of the '60s, the end of a
period of an innocent way of looking at architecture
in general. There was especially an optimism that
architecture could participate in the liberation of
mankind. I was skeptical about this, and instead of
going to Mediterranean villas or Greek fishing
villages to "learn" (as most people did at that time), I
decided to simply look at the Berlin Wall as
Architecture, to document and interpret it, to see
what the real power of architecture was.

It was one of the first times that I actually went out

and did field work. I really didn't know anything
about Berlin and the Wall, and was totally amazed at
many of the things I discovered. For example, I had
hardly imagined how West Berlin was actually
imprisoned by the Wall. I had never really thought
about that condition, and the paradox that even
though it was surrounded by a wall, West Berlin was
called "free," and that the much larger area beyond
the Wall was not considered free.

My second surprise was that the Wall was not really a

single object but a system that consisted partly of
things that were destroyed on the site of the Wall,
sections of buildings that were still standing and
absorbed or incorporated into the Wall, and
additional walls, some really massive and modern,
others more ephemeral, all together contributing to
an enormous zone. That was one of the most exciting
things: it was one wall that always assumed a
different condition.

OBRIST:
In permanent transformation.

KOOLHAAS:
In permanent transformation. It was also very
contextual, because on each side it had a different
character; it would adjust itself to different
circumstances. It also represented a first naked
confrontation with the horrible, powerful side of
architecture. I've been accused ever since of taking
an a-moral or un-critical position, although personally
I think that looking, interpreting, is in itself a very
important step toward a critical position.

OBRIST:
How do you feel about the disappearance of the Wall,
the fact that it was completely erased?

KOOLHAAS:
In the early '80s, we did a number of competitions for
Berlin that anticipated the fall of the Wall proposals
for the "Afterlife of the Wall" that made a new
beginning without removing all the traces...

OBRIST:
The IBA building?

KOOLHAAS:
Yes, but it's not the current building. In an early
competition it was a much more interesting, more
open situation, where walls were used to exclude the
impact of the Wall... It was simply through a
proliferation of walls that you could live next to the
Wall. We thought that the zone of the Wall could
eventually be a park, a kind of preserved condition in
the entire city. I've been appalled ever since that the
first thing that disappeared after the Wall fell was
any trace of it. I think it is insane that such a critical
part of memory has been erased, not by developers
or commercial enterprises, but simply in the name of
pure ideology really tragic. The paradox is that it
creates now a completely incomprehensible "Chinese
situation."

OBRIST:
Can it be compared to the disappearance of the
whole industrial architecture which Hilla and Bernd
Becher documented?

KOOLHAAS:
But at least it disappeared by accident. The Wall
disappeared deliberately, and in the name of history.

OBRIST:
You are very involved with the current Berlin
projects...

KOOLHAAS:
Yes. It has been very exciting. In terms of my
personal history that was the early '80s. In the early
1990s I participated in the Potsdamer Platz
competition where I disagreed with the outcome, in
fact, not even so much with the outcome, but with
the whole content of the discussion, with the
virulence of the discussion, with the arguments put
forth.

OBRIST:
Did you agree with Libeskind? This idea that there
shouldn't be a master plan, that there shouldn't be
an overall solution? That it should be much more
heterogeneous, heteroclite, and fragmented.

KOOLHAAS:
There were many beautiful projects, not only the
project by Libeskind, but also the project by Alsop.
The project by Kollhoff was also really interesting. In
other words, it's not that there weren't any
interesting proposals, and the three of them, Alsop,
Libeskind, and Kollhoff were then in one camp of
architects who could work with the destruction that
was the essence of Berlin, and who were not out to
repair, to (re)create a synthetic metropolis. After the
Potsdamer Platz competition, there was a serious
discussion in the Berlin Parliament to deny me the
right to enter the city... Recently it has been very
exciting for me to be involved again in Berlin, as the
architect of the Dutch Embassy, to rediscover Berlin
and at the same time the Dutch, and also a certain
spirit of adventure which is perhaps Dutch, in the
sense that they chose a very courageous location,
not near all the other embassies but in the former
middle of Berlin, in the formerly communist part,
according to a very logical reasoning that in this way
they will be near to the other Ministries. They are
willing to engage in the East Berlin condition. What is
fascinating there is also to discover that there is a
whole army of formerly East German bureaucrats
who are actually much more rational about the whole
reconstruction of the city, who clearly feel offended
that the "liberalism" of the East has led to the
imposition of an inflexible urbanistic doctrine. So
they have been extremely collaborative in terms of
doing things differently. I think that simply because
of the fact that we work with a formerly East German
bureaucracy we have been able to experiment.

OBRIST:
Since 1991 a conservative idea of architecture is
prevailing in Berlin. As Philipp Oswalt showed in Der
Mythos von der Berlinischen Architektur an initial
idea of conservative reformism which in Kollhoff's
words follows the new, only "if it proves to be more
performative, more comfortable and beautiful than
the old. Oswalt shows how these initial ideas little by
little turned against the twenties and became a
formal anti-modernist reconstitution of the city
according to the conservative, metropolitan
architecture as it existed from 1870 to 1930. You told
me yesterday that even if many forces in Berlin tried
to reconstitute the center, it would, nevertheless,
against all odds, become a "Chinese" city. Could you
develop that a bit?

KOOLHAAS:
I think that Kollhoff as an architect is still very
powerful and very interesting, and that the discourse
is to be separated from what he does. I still sense
that what he does is seriously felt. Disregarding the
discourse, some of the work is strong. What's
exhilarating about being involved in Berlin now is
that there is a completely new situation. You can see
the results of the "first wave." In a way, I admire it.
At least they were very serious. In spite of that, in
spite of the most incredible effort to "control" the
new substance, simply through the sheer quantity, it
has become a Chinese city. It shows that the Chinese
city is seemingly inevitable everywhere where there
is a lot of building substance.

OBRIST:
How would you define the Chinese city?

KOOLHAAS:
The Chinese city is for me a city that has built up a
lot of volume in a very short time, which therefore
doesn't have the slowness that is a condition for a
traditional sedimentation of a city, which for us is still
the model for authenticity. Beyond a certain speed of
construction that kind of authenticity is inevitably
sacrificed, even if you build everything out of stone
and authentic materials, and that's a kind of irony.
For instance, if you look at the color of the stone of
the new Berlin, it's the color of all the worst plastics
that were produced in East Germany in the 1960s.
It's kind of a weird color of pink, a weird color of light
yellow... they're artificial. There is no escaping the
artificial in the new architecture, and certainly not in
large amounts of architecture being generated at the
same time.

OBRIST:
There is this story about this speed that everyone
tells in Shanghai. The Mayor of Berlin was boasting
about the rate of construction in his city and the
Mayor of Shanghai responded by saying it's 20 or 25
times more in his.

There is very little knowledge in Germany about the

urban explosion in China.

KOOLHAAS:
That for me is the debatable thing about the
Prussian, because the Prussian is either a form of
naïveté or just a strategic claim. There is a deep
ignorance in Germany about conditions outside
Germany, an incredible preoccupation with the self,
and therefore those kinds of misreading occur easily.
At the same time there is something irritating about
the automatic assumption of modernity, of the
inevitability of, or the application of, state
modernism. For instance, their conversion of the
Reichstag is at least as strange as the emphasis on
Prussian building, because these are two forms of
innocence or naïveté, and to think that in the
Reichstag you can exorcise the spirits with a new
sort of dome is a sort of very polite gesture and a
very compromised esthetic. It is an equally weak
intellectual stand.

OBRIST:
I didn't understand the word "innocence" in this
context. By the way, Gabriel Orozco has a show at
the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris at the
moment entitled "Clinton is Innocent."

KOOLHAAS:
Innocent in terms of historical givings. For Foster,
high-tech architecture was never dealt with in
context, etc. To simply put a new head on a building
that had an incredibly ambiguous history is innocent,
or perverse, whatever you want to call it. Therefore
it's a very moving condition. Only now are all these
civil servants realizing that they actually have to
inhabit Nazi buildings as their new ministries, with
the anxieties that emanate from that, that demand
exorcism, but do glass and steel still drive out evil
spirits?

OBRIST:
I remember this very strange event in 1989... There
was the Metropolis exhibition at the Gropius-Bau,
followed by a party in the former Reichstag which
was abandoned at the time. It felt very scary.

KOOLHAAS:
That's the whole point, Berlin is very scary. And
somehow everything that tries to cover it up, either
by an ersatz past or by a kind of ersatz exorcism
(which is what modernity is doing), is equally
implausible. I also believe that the monumental
production of monuments is not going to work either,
because that's part of an "official" exorcism.

OBRIST:
In certain ways, the monument by Christian Boltanski
is very interesting. It is a sort of anti-monument, a
missing house where he just inscribed the names of
all the former inhabitants before the war on the
adjoining walls.

KOOLHAAS:
Yes.

OBRIST:
How do you see the East-West exchange? In art there
is very little exchange between Berlin and Warsaw,
Berlin and Prague... The lack of exchange is even
more evident in Vienna where Bratislava is half an
hour away and there still is this wall in people's
heads.

KOOLHAAS:
I think it is related to the whole misreading: the
single misreading that has a number of sub-
misreadings...The idea of the encounter between
East and West is still based on difference. What they
don't realize is that there is no difference. They
consider themselves an advanced trading post. This
was incomprehensible to me when I first came, that
West Berlin was sort of a satellite in the middle of
East Germany, and that condition of being in the
middle of another condition is something that they
still do not completely assume.

OBRIST:
In your book S, M, L, XL, there is this entry under
"Berlin" which talks about memory, loss and
emptiness. How do you see these notions with regard
to the contemporary city? This is something
Libeskind pointed out a lot, like when he kept the
center in his building empty.

KOOLHAAS:
The Berlin Wall as architecture was for me the first
spectacular revelation in architecture of how absence
can be stronger than presence. For me, it is not
necessarily connected to loss in a metaphysical
sense, but more connected to an issue of efficiency,
where I think that the great thing about Berlin is that
it showed for me how (and this is my own campaign
against architecture) entirely "missing" urban
presences or entirely erased architectural entities
nevertheless generate what can be called an urban
condition. It's no coincidence for example that the
center of Shenzen is not a built substance but a
conglomeration of golf courses and theme parks
basically unbuilt, or empty conditions. And that was
the beauty of Berlin even ten years ago, that it was
the most contemporary and the most avant-garde
European city because it had these major vast areas
of nothingness.

OBRIST:
Landing in Berlin was very beautiful, with all these
gaps and holes in the urban tissue.

KOOLHAAS:
Not only was it beautiful, but it also had a
programmatic potential, and the potential to inhabit
a city differently represented a rare and unique
power. The irony of course is not only that the
architecture being built is not the right architecture,
but that it is built at all. It's a city that could have
lived with its emptiness and have been the first
European city to systematically cultivate the
emptiness. Like Rotterdam where there is a lot of
emptiness inside. For Libeskind, emptiness is a loss
that can be filled or replaced by architecture. For me,
the important thing is not to replace it, but to
cultivate it. This is a kind of post-architectural city,
and now it's becoming an architectural city. For me
that's a drama, not some kind of stylistic error.

Hans Ulrich Obrist lives and works in Paris, Vienna

and London. He is curator of a museum-in-progress,
Vienna (since 1993), founder of the migratory
Museum Robert Walser (1993), and the Nano
Museum (1996), and co-founder of Salon 3 in London
(1998). He has edited more than 20 art books, and
curated dozens of museum exhibits. This interview
was partially published in the catalogue of the Berlin
Biennial BERLIN BERLIN, Published by Cantz.

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