Winter 2025
FG Architekturtheorie Prof. Jörg Gleiter
Gastprof. Andreas Lechner
Typologies of Transformation (Tiergarten)
We began with four walls that were never built. In early 1991, Herzog & de Meuron with Rémy Zaugg proposed 'Berlin Zentrum' for a DAM exhibition: four blank slabs around Tiergarten—pure boundary, pure refusal, a centre manufactured by framing (2). In the seminar we treated this gesture not as a project to “continue,” but as a blunt analytic device: a disciplinary negative pressed against the city: Students rebuilt the four 1991 sites with today's structures as a shared drawing model (3) that we visited by foot, crisscrossing Tiergarten and climbing Goldene Else. The task was then: model the existing structures, incise the fictional slab (4), and let the collision do the thinking ... What emerges when a boundary is forced onto a given structure? Where does a wall become a hinge? What collective space can be coaxed out of an intersection—without heroic invention? (5)
The resulting axonometrics are not “designs of objects,” but arguments: subtracting to open voids, thickening edges into thresholds, stacking and reprogramming to turn perimeter into passage (6). Each project produces an intersecting space—part cut, part room, part interface—where the city’s everyday structures are treated as time-bearing substrate rather than disposable backdrop (7).
What the students pinned up is an atlas of collisions: four sites and four walls (10) - fictional slabs that produce a series of collective interiors carved out of the city’s given fabric …
Many thanks to @joerggleiter for the invitation and to the great students ✨ Seminar Guest Prof @a_alechner @architecturetheorytuberlin - credits in comments!