The euphoria, optimism, and belief in architecture’s messianic potential, which characterized the early stages of the German Democratic Republic GDR, are expressed in the wish of a leading state architect ‘to project heaven directly onto the drawing board.’¹ Especially the beginning of the young socialist state was driven by the hope to be able to construct a better and socially more just society by means of architecture and urban planning. Countless utopian designs were the output of this departure into a seemingly better future. In the course of historical and political developments, however, these hopes grew dimmer and were finally stifled by authoritarian politics and economic shortages. With the reunification of Germany in 1990, the generally accepted opinion was that the system of the GDR – particularly the visions that were closely associated with the socialist state – had failed. This perception, which was mostly promoted by the West, is currently being challenged.
The design studio ‘eastopia’ has set itself the task of unraveling this aspect of the GDR, based on the thesis that its optimistic and utopian approaches vis-à-vis society building – which formed the underlying framework on which socialist architectural typologies were developed – can still be of value today. We thus have embarked on a search for clues pertaining to the relation between the former visions for a better society and the present-day reality of shrinking cities, as well as the relation between different layers of time and political systems, aiming to develop positive concepts out of a seemingly failed past – its architecture and planning processes as well as its societal frameworks and faith in the collective.
To these ends we initially compiled an inventory of socialist typologies, working with the utopian fragments of GDR architecture. Employing a method of transformative archeology, we critically questioned the traces and remains of socialist architecture and tried to transform them into contemporary design contributions. Urban and architectural proposals were developed, situated on the threshold between the factual and the fictional as well as between the past and possible futures. In order to frame potential future trajectories the design propositions projected the past onto the present.
Can such an approach enable us to devise design strategies for Eastern Germany and potentially elsewhere, not by projecting an imaginary ‘heaven’ of growth and regeneration onto the ‘drawing boards,’ but by critically engaging and transforming former visions? Would this allow us to formulate architectural interventions that are at the same time visionary and pragmatic, and that instead of necessarily envisioning landscapes of decline in ‘full bloom’² can partially revive them?
1 Hermann Henselmann, Vom Himmel an das Reißbrett ziehen: Baukünstler im Sozialismus – Ausgewählte Aufsätze 1936 bis 1981 (Berlin: der Beeken, 1982).
2 ‘And I am more convinced than ever that in the next three to four years we will create blooming landscapes in the new federal states’ said German Chancellor Helmut Kohl in a televised speech in 1991
Text by Michael Hirschbichler
Published in ETH Jahrbuch 2015