25 March 2025
10:00 AM EDT / 3:00 PM CET
ROBIN HUEPPE
ETH
Respondent: Anny Li, Harvard University
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Left: Mound Lübarser Höhe by Märkisches Viertel, 1989, Right: Mound Kienberg by Marzahn, 1990 ©Bundesarchiv, Bild 180
***
EDMOND DRENOGLLAVA
University of Cincinnati
Respondent: Federico Marcomini, Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History
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“The Waiter” – the so-called mural on the facade of the Hotel “Luboteni”. Source: Spomenik Database postcard archive.
1Referring to activities, issues, or policies that occur within the boundaries of a single nation and its domestic context. Although Yugoslavia was a multi-state federation, many of its policies were implemented intranationally within each republic, allowing for distinct regional dynamics to emerge while still operating under a unified federal framework.
2This was done in and on various pavilions at the 1937 Paris Exposition Internationale and at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. On the latter, see Barbara Cohen, Trylon and Perisphere, New York: Abrams 1989.
10:00 AM EDT / 3:00 PM CET
TO COVER A MOUND
Post-War Land Governance in and around
Berlin's Mass Housing Estates (1945-1990)
ROBIN HUEPPE
ETH
Respondent: Anny Li, Harvard University
Left: Mound Lübarser Höhe by Märkisches Viertel, 1989, Right: Mound Kienberg by Marzahn, 1990 ©Bundesarchiv, Bild 180
Mounds
of rubble and waste emerged as companion infrastructures to the housing estates
of former East and West Berlin. In the neighborhoods of Marzahn (East) and Märkisches
Viertel (West), they conceal a complex narrative of power, resistance, and negotiation
in the pursuit of modern urbanization. Architectural histories often depict
Berlin's post-war expansion as a disruptive break from the periphery's
agro-industrial past, portraying it as an inevitable progression towards grands
ensembles. However, they frequently overlook the specific institutions and
their actors whose rejected, revised, and adopted land development plans reveal
how they used their power to control, divide, and displace.
This paper explores the governance of mass housing estates through a land-oriented approach, focusing on the mounds' transformation through various regimes. The design concept drew from a 1946 landscape master plan envisioning a linear city along Berlin’s glacial river valley, utilizing war rubble and disposed material to emphasize plateau edges. The covering topsoil of each mound narrates the story of the two neighborhoods from the ground up, considering the medium-term temporality of two transient state systems. By investigating the impact of tenure, funding, and political constraints on development plans, the story illuminates how governing institutions such as state and district planning offices wielded their power to divide and seize control of the land, leading to demolitions and accumulation of matter.
After considering the post-war context of migration and farmland buyouts, the evolution of the mounds from topographical concealment technologies to managed park-like pastorals is shaped by diverse design, labor, and planting practices. This study reads the rapid, bureaucratically layered development in West Berlin alongside the centralized, state-led approach in East Berlin, emphasizing transactions and shared dynamics. Through two detailed case studies, it unpacks the complexities of land governance, offering a different understanding of Berlin's mass housing estates by analyzing landscape as both a medium of power and a site of negotiation.
This paper explores the governance of mass housing estates through a land-oriented approach, focusing on the mounds' transformation through various regimes. The design concept drew from a 1946 landscape master plan envisioning a linear city along Berlin’s glacial river valley, utilizing war rubble and disposed material to emphasize plateau edges. The covering topsoil of each mound narrates the story of the two neighborhoods from the ground up, considering the medium-term temporality of two transient state systems. By investigating the impact of tenure, funding, and political constraints on development plans, the story illuminates how governing institutions such as state and district planning offices wielded their power to divide and seize control of the land, leading to demolitions and accumulation of matter.
After considering the post-war context of migration and farmland buyouts, the evolution of the mounds from topographical concealment technologies to managed park-like pastorals is shaped by diverse design, labor, and planting practices. This study reads the rapid, bureaucratically layered development in West Berlin alongside the centralized, state-led approach in East Berlin, emphasizing transactions and shared dynamics. Through two detailed case studies, it unpacks the complexities of land governance, offering a different understanding of Berlin's mass housing estates by analyzing landscape as both a medium of power and a site of negotiation.
***
The Waiter’s Wall: The Neo-Constructivist Microhistories in the 1960s Kosova
EDMOND DRENOGLLAVA
University of Cincinnati
Respondent: Federico Marcomini, Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History
“The Waiter” – the so-called mural on the facade of the Hotel “Luboteni”. Source: Spomenik Database postcard archive.
The internal colonial (hi)stories surrounding socialist Yugoslavia, in all of it, in its paradoxes and tenaciousness, are an intense global microhistory. The narratives emerging from Kosovar cities can be included among the neglected narratives, whereas those of avant-garde artists and artworks originating from Kosova are among the undiscussed and unacknowledged accounts—constituting the marginal of the marginal. To map out a more expansive international, and in this case, an “intra-national”1 constructivist network of individuals, ideas, and coalitions, this study analyzes the neo-constructivist mural called “The Waiter” (1961) displayed on the south-eastern elevation of the 1960s building, Hotel “Luboteni” (Fig.1.).
This unheeded example reveals the tension between the abstract, idealized art and the often practical, utilitarian architecture that mirrored the broader struggle within Yugoslav society to balance ideological purity with real-life constraints. In Kosova, hence in Yugoslavia as elsewhere in the world, with the economic depression and the rise of propagandistic governments, the painting entered the domain of architecture and flourished. Leger, Duty, and Delaunay in Paris, and Pollock, Gorky, and de Kooning in New York covered ‘architecture’ with their art.2 In the case of Hotel “Luboteni,” the mural is conceived as tectonic and allows architecture not just to include the figurative but to become the figurative, dematerializing architecture.
This only leads the study to raise two important questions about the ontological and cross-pollinative status of art and architecture (of the country) itself: first, how permeable was Kosova’s cultural space in receiving neo-avant-garde tendencies; and second, if and when representation becomes architecture, does the translation from drawing to building have a particular character in neo-avant-garde practice, retaining the qualities of idealism? The research, then, endeavors to illuminate and redefine one among many histories of a micro-zone and that of a micro-community aiming toward the end of history (in inverted Fukuyama terms)—all this microhistory is therefore not diminutive, it is not “micro” at all and is worth knowing for.
This unheeded example reveals the tension between the abstract, idealized art and the often practical, utilitarian architecture that mirrored the broader struggle within Yugoslav society to balance ideological purity with real-life constraints. In Kosova, hence in Yugoslavia as elsewhere in the world, with the economic depression and the rise of propagandistic governments, the painting entered the domain of architecture and flourished. Leger, Duty, and Delaunay in Paris, and Pollock, Gorky, and de Kooning in New York covered ‘architecture’ with their art.2 In the case of Hotel “Luboteni,” the mural is conceived as tectonic and allows architecture not just to include the figurative but to become the figurative, dematerializing architecture.
This only leads the study to raise two important questions about the ontological and cross-pollinative status of art and architecture (of the country) itself: first, how permeable was Kosova’s cultural space in receiving neo-avant-garde tendencies; and second, if and when representation becomes architecture, does the translation from drawing to building have a particular character in neo-avant-garde practice, retaining the qualities of idealism? The research, then, endeavors to illuminate and redefine one among many histories of a micro-zone and that of a micro-community aiming toward the end of history (in inverted Fukuyama terms)—all this microhistory is therefore not diminutive, it is not “micro” at all and is worth knowing for.
1Referring to activities, issues, or policies that occur within the boundaries of a single nation and its domestic context. Although Yugoslavia was a multi-state federation, many of its policies were implemented intranationally within each republic, allowing for distinct regional dynamics to emerge while still operating under a unified federal framework.
2This was done in and on various pavilions at the 1937 Paris Exposition Internationale and at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. On the latter, see Barbara Cohen, Trylon and Perisphere, New York: Abrams 1989.