Berlin Footbridge International Competition
"There is perhaps no other major Western city that bears the marks of twentieth-century history as intensely and self-consciously as Berlin. This city text has been written, erased, and rewritten throughout this century, and its legibility relies as much on visible markers of built space as on images and memories repressed and ruptured by traumatic events."
- Andreas Huyssen, The Voids of Berlin
Between the Wall is an architectural attempt to access the ambiguous relationship between absence and presence. Instead of considering iconicity through figurative gesture or heroic scale, we propose a more inward and self-conscious approach.
As spaces, bridges may be defined through transient encounters: by people passing, moving and commuting, yet at the same time often displaced and in isolation. The physicality (iconicity) that defines such urban spaces of transition sits in contrast with the ephemerality of human experience along these channels.
In its self-awareness, the proposed scheme re-directs the Berlin Wall from two ends, drawing its human proportion and capacity for lateral bracing down through the Spree River bed. Just as the traumatic event is conceived of as a rupture, or tear in the subject, the immersive form punctures the water and demonstrates a visual disconnectedness at ground-level. Beneath the river surface, two rails form a new and continuous art hall, functioning as a canvas for the city. The voided hall extends beyond the interiorized figure, locking into the conditions of the city itself -- a pivot which reconstitutes the Wall (a divisive figure) as an infrastructure of connection.
As this thickened space displaces the water we not only encounter a strange structural condition, but an ongoing structural event: an invisible connection formed of a continuously submerging and re-emerging public. It is this absent, yet inhabitable space of rupture, which we propose expresses the possibility for a difficult reunification.
The bridge frames a new space and consequent discourse “between the Wall,” for the public to define. A process which architectural form can only initiate, or steer in a very general way. The continuous displacement of public produces new and complex understandings of depth and thinness (presence and absence)—from the collapse of the river into a fine plane, to the spatial thickening of historical fragments embedded in the Wall’s infinitely thin strata of paint. It is within this hidden dimension of memory and experience where, we suppose, true iconicity is found.