Global Urban Humanities/Future Histories Lab

Instructors: Lauren Kroiz, Andrew Shanken

Term: Spring 2020

Course #: ARCH 209 / HISTART 290

Why Read This Case Study?

How do cities use the urban public landscape to preserve, represent, and memorialize their histories? 

Nowhere is the “memory industry” that shapes the design of memorial landscapes more powerful and pervasive than in Berlin. This studio focused on the complex links between Berlin’s post-reunification urban renewal program designed to jump-start the city’s urban economy, and efforts to create an urban public landscape commemorating violent histories, collective trauma, and reconciliation. The studio used the lens of memory studies to trace Berlin’s uneasy efforts to attract foreign investment and tourists on the one hand, and create a ‘guilt’ environment marked by the preservation and memorialization of urban sites linked to the Holocaust, colonialism, and the Cold War.

Led by architectural historian Andrew Shanken and art historian Lauren Kroiz, students were challenged to rethink memory and commemoration in Berlin. Synthesizing graphic methods drawn from architecture, landscape architecture, art practice, and urban planning with literary, art historical, cinematic, historical, and geographical analysis, they worked collaboratively to propose site-specific revisions to Berlin’s memorial environment. The studio produced urban and architectural proposals; scholarly, literary and photographic essays; graphic novels; films; and sound pieces. The final project was an imaginative and provocative guide to the “guilt environment” of Berlin, highlighting commemorative interventions as architecture and design, but also as rhetoric, territory, and dynamic parts of everyday urban life.