The First Seven Sites in the City

We've found sites in the city. Sites are holes in the city fabric that are pregnant with potential. Think of how we think about the site of a surgery. It is a place marked with past and future but not engaged in the production of the city. It peculiar and definable in its surroundings and a trace of past or potential action. The evident thing is the trace of an action in the surrounding surface. In these places you'll study there are both traces of past urbanity and projections of possible urbanisms- scars and trajectories

No city in this time carries more scars than this one. It has torn itself apart twice in the last 100 years. Some would say it was all one trajectory--the rise in German society of the ideological over the scientific and pragmatic. Its fabric before these convulsions was a clear, dense, and simple yet grand typological structure of broad boulevards, mietskasern alongside, and hinterhöfen buried in the middle of some of the largest city blocks in the world.

The block structure is very parametric. There's no set size like the 50ft by 50ft "Denver Square" that is typical in Denver and many mountain western cities in the USA. The components and cellular structure of the mietskasern and hinternhöfen are not sized, they are related and limited in scaling by certain components--vertical circulation and wet areas, for instance, are full of fixed-sized components like stairs, refrigerators, and tubs. There's a unified and fixed size and shape Façade and the first room deep in the building. Everything past that is even deletable, as we'll see on many small and acute corner sites. There need not be a hinterhöf in the system. There must be a Façade. Façade is the most formal vertical surface of a building.

The primary criteria that came to as we sifted through many sites. We define the site as:
a small scale "hole" in the city fabric
the size of a typical Berlin "mietskasern" building or smaller
with a trace of the historic city, a trace of its removal, and a finite number of options to be successful in making a building in the city that re-reknits the hole back into the urban fabric.

Here are seven sites. The site names are typically the urban element that is affected most by the hole in the city under study.

Bersarinplatz
Thaerstraße (15) ecke Weidenweg

Senefelderstraße
endstelle Stargarderstraße (52)

Kopenhagenerstraße (17)
ecke Sonnenburgerstraße Eisenbahn Brücke

Juden Friedhof
Knaackstraße (41) an Kollwitzplatz ab Judengang Tor doch das Gang

Chorinerstraße
ecke Zehdenickerstraße (7A) und Gormannstraße

Rosa Luxembourg Platz
zwischen Linienstraße (34) und Torstraße(42) hintern Zolastraße

Monbijouplatz
ausser der Tram Stellen ecke Grosse Präsidentenstraße (4) an Haeckescher Bogen

These are marked on the class map linked to the class website. This is the order that we'll visit them today.