At its London campus the AA champions interaction between tutors, students and the public. It celebrates co-operation and collective imagination, seeing discussion and debate as essential for the future of good architecture. The school rejects the traditional model of the lone architect who transforms an idea into bricks and mortar, which enables people to react to buildings only after completion.
Berlin is being transformed by artists, collectors, curators and gallery owners. So how best to map these new relationships and networks. Through a collaborative process, the Mapping Unit produced a remarkable range of possibilities. Students constructed 3-d sound maps, Calder-esque mobiles of memory, even a multi-layer Berlin Wall map which recorded its creator’s moral outrage at tourists’ insensitivity to the history of suffering at that place. Together we learnt that maps can be filled with life, rather than simply listing street names. None of the students succumbed to a simple two-dimensional representation.
During the week I discovered that architects classify cities as either ‘invented’ or ‘found’. ‘Invented’ cities are most often in North America (and modern China), urbanisations which have developed without a past (or without respect for the past). ‘Found’ cities tend to be places which have grown organically over centuries, and are most common in Europe. In many cases these models have become moribund, with the transformation of historical centres into tourist ghettos and the migration of residents to the suburbs.
http://blog.goethe.de/meet-the-germans/archives/63-Mapping-Berlin-or-Berlin-as-a-Laboratory.html
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