This project for a renewal of the ancient Berlin city-center risen
on the Spree island, after its destruction during the war and the
following reconstruction in the worst Stalinist style, has been presented
to an International Competition.
While the latter was intended only to urban planning contributions,
Mazzucconi felt that the very heart of the problem was to be recognized
in the ancient Castle, which ruins, surviving the war destructions,
were later on razed to the ground by Honecker. Working on the city
cradle, where Berlin had been born, was therefore equivalent to interpreting
its very symbol, the Castle. Therefore the project, besides recuperating
the originary urban texture of the area, proposes the partial reconstruction
of the Castle, to be incorporated in a modern complex. Its iron framework
would suggest the appearance of a building site, thus expressing a
reality in progress and not a could historical reconstruction.
Part of the Castle site would give room to an architectural development,
something like an immense sculpture centered on the Unter den Linden
axis. It contains also a glazed building which is a kind of idealized
acropolis. The sculptural shell is composed of three separate parts
which, in some official occasions, could assume the German flag colors.
Far behind embodying the symbols of a city and of a nation. this form
has the meaning of the mythical Arks which appear in so many of Mazzucconi’s
projects. They carry the treasures of civilization and of a superior
identity.
(See also the Ark
of the Halles in Paris, the project for the Canal
Area in Nancy, the New
Agora of Athens, the Flower in the project for the new Florence City-Center, the Palatine
Pyramid etc.)
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The Spreeinsel as it was
The
Spreeinsel in its actual state 