Footprints and Supports. Public Spaces for “Berlin Haupstadt”

Abstract

The changed context appeared after the 2nd World War, influenced the urban planning to rebuild European cities, showing a gap between the theories of CIAM urbanism and the city necessities. Thereby, the 1958 “Berlin Hauptstadt” competition can be understood as the last episode in the urban planning´s history for a united Berlin before the Wall building, as well as the last episode of the CIAM urbanism. Some kind of scepticism in most of the CIAM participants, led them to respond specific cases and then after draw conclusions. A pragmatic attitude that could stimulate a development from the Modern Urbanism to projective practices highlighting the contradictions of CIAM urbanism in a new found context. The new monumentality that gave a higher scale to modern cities was far away from the daily public spaces lived in ancient European cities, closer to a human scale. A real and dramatic landscape of ruins was difficult to assume as the theoretical nature that modern urbanism proposed. The overflowed territorial areas appointed the necessity to recover the landscape architecture technics. The medieval city became an ideal of non-projected public space a reference in several proposals submitted for this competition.