Journal of Landscape Architecture

ISSN: 1862-6033 (Print) 2164-604X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjla20

The City in the City. Berlin: A Green Archipelago

– Oswald Mathias Ungers and Rem Koolhaas
with Peter Riemann, Hans Kollhoff and Arthur
Ovaska. A critical edition by Florian Hertweck and
Sébastien Marot

Kelly Shannon

To cite this article: Kelly Shannon (2014) The City in the City. Berlin: A Green Archipelago –
Oswald Mathias Ungers and Rem Koolhaas with Peter Riemann, Hans Kollhoff and Arthur Ovaska.
A critical edition by Florian Hertweck and Sébastien Marot, Journal of Landscape Architecture, 9:2,
77-77, DOI: 10.1080/18626033.2014.931723

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/18626033.2014.931723

Published online: 19 Aug 2014.

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 Urban archipelago and the archipelago city, as Ungers, as well as the historical framing of Hert-
Sébastien Marot astutely articulates in the book’s weck and Marot, along with the interviews and
opening ‘Relaunch’ essay, has become a widely conversations they have with previous collabo-
used metaphor over the past several decades. rators. A base argument for the ‘city in the city’
The elegantly designed book includes previously was that the concept, ‘far from being a fantasy
unpublished material of the short, yet bold, superimposed on reality, would actually only
1977 urban manifesto The City in the City. Berlin: need to be revealed as the city’s underlying reality,
A Green Archipelago, authored by Oswald Mathias and pursued’ (p. 43). Ungers’ empathy for history,
Ungers and Rem Koolhaas, in collaboration with and the existing, was evident in the project, with
their then Cornell University colleagues, Peter multiple influences including Karl Fredrick
Riemann, Hans Kollhoff, and Arthur Ovaska. Schinkel and Peter Josef Lenné’s Havellandschaft
The radical model of disurbanism_of negative concept, in general, and the Schloss Glienicke, in
growth_, the ‘thinning of cities’ was symptomatic particular; Hermann Jansen’s winning design for
of many urban conurbations in the post-war, Greater Berlin (1910), which decentralized the city
car-based era of suburbanization (when the city with extensive green; and the work of Camillo
was competing with life in the countryside) how- Sitte and Leberecht Migge, both of whom devel-
The City in the City ever, the particular politics of Berlin led to the oped ‘healthy green space’ in the city, as opposed
Berlin: A Green Archipelago powerful site-specific manifesto. The retrench- the decorative green areas.
A manifesto (1977) by ment scenario for the controlled decrease of
Oswald Mathias Ungers and density was, according to the authors, to be In the 1970s, the enclosed nature of Berlin made it
Rem Koolhaas with Peter Riemann, choreographed by a programme of selective a pretext to declare the city a laboratory. The latent
Hans Kollhoff, and Arthur Ovaska dismantling of malfunctioning urban areas and qualities of the specificity of place, together with
A critical edition by a simultaneous intensification and completion Ungers’ obsession of a trilogy (the block, the villa,
Florian Hertweck and Sébastien Marot of other urban fragments_resulting in an ‘archi- and the garden) were intensified through ardent
UUA Ungers Archives for Architectural Research
pelago of architecture in a green lagoon of natures’ design solutions in the manifesto work of the
Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2013 (p. 12). authors. These lessons remain ever more relevant
ISBN 978 3 03778 326 9 today when collective form and concepts for a
176 pp., 226 colour and b/w illustrations
A consequence of the new dialectic of city and city in a garden play into the creative search for
€40 (cloth)
countryside, and culture and nature, both of new interplays of infrastructure, landscape, and
which would be intensified and made explicit, re- city. The 1970s were a golden era for site-specific
sides in ‘the green grid [that] could accommodate manifestos_Learning from Las Vegas (Venturi,
suburbs at a variety of densities, belts of farmland Scott Brown, Izenour, 1972), ‘Chicago à la carte:
that penetrate all parts of the city and parts that The City as an Energy System’ (Boyarsky, 1970),
are developed as ecological preserves_forests Los Angeles: the Architecture of Four Ecologies (Ban-
and wildparks_that would stimulate new forms ham, 1971), Collage City (Rowe, 1978), and Delirious
of tourism, such as hunting safaris’ (p. 16). New York (Koolhaas, 1978). The relevance of these
The above quotes are from the polemical first, texts and the Koolhaas/Ungers method of work-
six-page typescript penned by Koolhaas; later ing in Berlin with the city ‘as found’, has increased
versions were heavily edited and annotated by today as places and territories are being ever more
Ungers (none of which have been printed previ- transformed by the flattening processes of capital-
ously and are, therefore, interesting to see in the ism. As Hans Kolhoff commented in an interview,
book). The eventual and better-known version when speaking about Ungers and the archipelago
by Ungers, with eleven theses and extensive way of thinking, ‘the project is the interpretation
visuals, was presented in Berlin to the executive of the material that is already there, that happens
committee of the Social Democratic Party; it was, to be there. You are not inventing the project.
according to Koolhaas, no longer a ‘contemplative You have to look closely at the situation instead,
Utopia’ but, nonetheless, a magnificent text with and the closer you look, the more precise the
incredible relevance within the contemporary project becomes’ (p. 155). Kelly Shannon
discourse of landscape and urbanism.

The brilliance of the book lies in its constellation

of authors and the precise conceptualization of
the theoretical/script-writing of Koolhaas and

Journal of Landscape Architecture / Landscape Specifics 2-2014 77