How do we perceive the city as a layered space, shaped by geology, environmental relations, politics, and aesthetic forms in continuous transformation? This seminar considers the city as a space traversed by different layers that coexist, interact, and conflict, and interrogates their knowledges for future actions, narratives and forms of engagement. The city is approached as a site of critical enquiry, intervention, and reimagining.

The course begins by discussing Ann Laura Stoler’s concept of ruination as a critical lens for identifying and sensing these layers. Stoler shifts attention from ruins as remnants of a concluded past to ruination as an ongoing process through which power persists in landscapes, material conditions, and people’s lives. We will use this lens to interpret urban traces and fragments as evidence of enduring relations of power. For example, the “entanglements of people, soil, and things” that Stoler examines can lead us to recognise processes of urban displacement, reconstruction, collapse, repair, erasure, and re-signification. Drawing on the concept of ruination, we will investigate how layered political and historical forces remain active within the city we live in, Berlin.

Departing from Berlin, we will investigate and discuss two significant postwar housing projects shaping the city: Stalinallee, whose housing ensemble was built primarily between 1952 and 1958 in former East Berlin and renamed Karl-Marx-Allee in 1961; and the Hansaviertel reconstruction in former West Berlin, presented to the public in 1957 as part of the International Building Exhibition, Interbau. What kinds of spaces and social relations do these housing complexes produce? What do they shape, preserve, overwrite, or render invisible? The seminar will discuss women’s contributions to these housing projects, including Ludmilla Herzenstein’s modernist housing on Stalinallee built in 1949-1951, organised around light, air, greenery, and shared outdoor spaces; Hilde Weström’s designs for flexible living, presented in the exhibition Die Stadt von morgen, and Herta Hammerbacher’s landscape architecture for Hansaplatz, the latter two part of Interbau 1957. It will examine their contributions, often marginalised within a dominant architectural memory centred on male architects.

The seminar will combine theoretical readings, analysis of exhibitions that interrogate modern architecture, visits to housing projects, exhibitions, and art spaces, urban walks, and exchanges with cultural practitioners in Berlin. Visits will include Architektur Galerie Berlin and Café Sibylle on Karl-Marx-Allee, the latter hosting the exhibition Berlin Ost–West–Ost: Entwürfe für die Stadt von morgen; Grotto art space in the Schwedenhaus, designed by Fritz Jaenecke and Sten Samuelson for Interbau 1957; and Treppe B art space in the Le Corbusier building near the Olympiastadion, also built as part of Interbau 1957, among others.

A special collaboration with Grotto, an art space within the Interbau ensemble that researches women architects and landscape architects to bring their overlooked legacies into public discussion, and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, whose building also forms part of Interbau 1957, will provide a setting for collective inquiry and experimentation. This collaboration will engage with HKW’s forthcoming project, which interrogates architecture’s capacity for worlding, re-worlding, and un-worlding: how it shapes social, political, and ecological relations, sustains or erases existing worlds, and opens possibilities for repair and other ways of inhabiting space.

The assignments will be developed in classes. The first assignment will be a „personal political cartography“ in which you situate your practice in relation to the concept of ruination. The second assignment will be a practice on orality as spatial strategy related to your practice and questions of the course. The final assignment is a collaboration with Grotto, which we will define in the class. This way, the theory of the class will reinforce your own position and is intended to give you tools to formulate concepts, debates, and artistic strategies with specific knowledges on the politics of space. 

Literature

Ann Laura Stoler, ed. Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. “What Is a Concept?” In What Is Philosophy?, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, 15–34. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

Henri Lefebvre. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991 [French original, 1974].

Jack Halberstam. Anarchitecture After Everything: A Trans Manifesto. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2026.

Tom Avermaete, Serhat Karakayali, and Marion von Osten, eds. Colonial Modern: Aesthetics of the Past, Rebellions for the Future. London: Black Dog Publishing, 2010.

Jörg Haspel and Thomas Flierl, eds. Karl-Marx-Allee and Interbau 1957: Confrontation, Competition and the Co-evolution of Modernism in Berlin. Berlin: Hendrik Bäßler Verlag, 2019.

ARCH+ 265. Metaxy: Zwischen Zerstörung und Wiederaufbau / Between Destruction and Reconstruction. September 2026. Accompanying publication to the exhibition at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

Das Verborgene Museum, ed. Die Berliner Architektin Hilde Weström: Bauten 1947–1981. Exhibition catalogue. Berlin: Das Verborgene Museum, 2000.

Jeong-Hi Go. Herta Hammerbacher (1900–1985): Virtuosin der Neuen Landschaftlichkeit—Der Garten als Paradigma. Berlin: Universitätsverlag der Technischen Universität Berlin, 2006.

Matrix. Making Space: Women and the Man-Made Environment. London: Pluto Press, 1984; reissued by Verso, 2022.