Sunday, March 16, 2014
Congressional A (Omni Shoreham)
This paper will explore the role of the urban gothic imaginary in postwar European reconstruction discourse. More precisely, it will take as its starting point the debates surrounding Berlin’s 1957 International Building Exhibition, the first major postwar urban reconstruction project in Europe, and Karl Otto’s accompanying Interbau publication Die Stadt von Morgen (The City of Tomorrow). Otto’s text, and the exhibition itself, introduced into circulation a series of profoundly influential but curiously understudied claims about the future of the postwar European city, whose image, he argued, should be recast in gothic form. Otto turned to Germany’s so-called vernacular age, to the Lebensgemeinschaft (living community) of the early corporatist city structure of the Middle Ages for solutions to the reconstruction of postwar Berlin. Writing as if in the grip of Nietzsche’s Apollonian oracle, Otto sought to rescue order and history in the reconfigured urban landscape of ‘New Germany’ by invoking a distinctly romantic imaginary community—a strange operation for an avowed modernist. In placing Otto’s claims into a broader discursive network, it is the aim of this paper to chart an ‘alternative’ modernity lurking within European reconstruction discourse, whose nostalgic imaginaries and peculiar restorations haunted postwar rebuilding efforts in Europe for decades. Indeed, the trope of the ‘organic medieval city’ continues to this day to be resurrected in debates concerning the reform and renewal of the post-industrial European urban landscape. This paper will offer a historical framework through which we might better understand the stakes of these deployments.
