Beiträge zur Geschichte Berlins

BEITRÄGE ZUR GESCHICHTE BERLINS Beiträge zur Geschichte Berlins / Gropius, George (Public Domain) ( - ) Title page ( - ) Illustration ( - ) Einiges zur Geschichte des Berlinischen Rathhauses (1) Ueber Stralow, seine Gegend und sein Volksfest, in historischer Beziehung (9) Zur Topographie von Berlin (17) Der berlinische Kaland. (18) Injurien im alten Berlin (18) Die Berliner im Jahre 1505 (19) Zur Sittengeschichte der Mark im 16. Jahrhundert (19) Berlinisches Armenwesen (20) Der Lustgarten im Jahre 1657 (21) Zur Geschichte der Buchdruckerkunst in Berlin vor dem Jahre 1540 (27) Vom Gastrechte in Berlin (31) Die Nothwendigkeit eines Nachweises Über zerstreut vorhandene Berolinensia. Einladung zu Mittheilungen für eine solche Sammlung (34) Berliner Chronik vom Jahre 1563 bis zum Jahre 1605 (37) Zur Geschichte der Churfürstlichen Capelle im 16. Jahrhundert (51) Das Haus des Geheimen-Raths Fromboldt in der Brüderstrasse (59) Hans Kohlhase (61) Verzeichniss der benutzten Quellen, welche unter dem Texte nur kurz citirt sind (79) Urkunden No. I. Vom 29. Juli 1538 (79) Die Reformation des Domstifts zu Cöln an der Spree im Jahre 1608 (81) Einige Notizen über das ältere Zunftwesen Berlins (86) Die Amtshauptmänner des Amtes Mühlendorf zu Berlin (88) Ueber das Berliner Schulwesen im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert (91) Eides-Ableistungen im 14. Jahrhundert (92

Rat cities and beehive worlds: density and design in the modern city

Nestled among E. M. Forster's careful studies of Edwardian social mores is a short story called "The Machine Stops." Set many years in the future, it is a work of science fiction that imagines all humanity housed in giant high-density cities buried deep below a lifeless surface. With each citizen cocooned in an identical private chamber, all interaction is mediated through the workings of "the Machine," a totalizing social system that controls every aspect of human life. Cultural variety has ceded to rigorous organization: everywhere is the same, everyone lives the same life. So hopelessly reliant is humanity upon the efficient operation of the Machine, that when the system begins to fail there is little the people can do, and so tightly ordered is the system that the failure spreads. At the story's conclusion, the collapse is total, and Forster's closing image offers a condemnation of the world they had built, and a hopeful glimpse of the world that might, in their absence, return: "The whole city was broken like a honeycomb. [⋯] For a moment they saw the nations of the dead, and, before they joined them, scraps of the untainted sky" (2001: 123). In physically breaking apart the city, there is an extent to which Forster is literalizing the device of the broken society, but it is also the case that the infrastructure of the Machine is so inseparable from its social structure that the failure of one causes the failure of the other. The city has-in the vocabulary of present-day engineers-"failed badly.

Critical Dimensions in Architectural Photography: Contributions to Architectural Knowledge

This paper illustrates and explores three critical dimensions of photography in architecture, each of which informs the production of images, texts, and other artifacts which establish what might be called a building’s media footprint. The paper’s broad goal is to question the extent to which these critical dimensions are relevant to architectural decision-making processes. Acknowledging that such dimensions as the ones examined here rarely predict an architect’s specific design decisions in a transparent manner, the paper discusses not only the decisions made by architects during the process of designing buildings, but the decisions made by critics, visitors, and members of the general public as they engage in activities such as visiting buildings, writing about them and, particularly, photographing them. First, the text discusses the potential of buildings to operate as mechanisms for producing images, in the sense originated by Beatriz Colomina. The question is developed through the analysis of the space of photography – mapping of points of view, directions of view, and fields of view of defined photographic collections. Secondly, it considers photography’s complicity in the canonization of buildings, and specifically, the extent to which photography is responsible for distinguishing between major and minor architectural works. Finally, the essay examines the erosion over time of photography’s historical power to frame when confronted with contemporary technologies of virtual reality and photo realistically rendered digital models. Each of these critical dimensions, or concepts, develops a specific aspect of how photographic information about buildings is organized, structured, and disseminated, and is thus only part of the larger project of architectural epistemology, which inquires into this wider field. This will be done through an examination of the Mies van der Rohe-designed Commons Building at ITT in Chicago and the evolution of its relationship with architectural photography and photographic representation – both on its own terms and through the prism of the Rem Koolhaas-designed McCormick Tribune Student Center, which adds to and incorporates the Commons Building. Until the end of the twentieth century, the Commons Building on the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology was generally considered one of Mies van der Rohe’s lesser works. Reportedly neglected by its own architect during the design process, and frequently marginalized in academic discussions of the campus, when mentioned at all the building was often cited as an unrefined prototype of Crown Hall. This discourse took a new direction when in 1998, Rem Koolhaas/OMA won a design competition for a student center on the IIT campus: uniquely among the competition entries, Koolhaas’s design incorporated the Commons Building within a new context – what ultimately became the McCormick Tribune Campus Center (MTCC). When critics concluded that the incorporation of the Commons Building into the larger whole could compromise its integrity as an exemplar of Mies’s work, the building became the object of renewed interest and controversy. The two projects considered here show a clear evolution in architecture’s relationship with the photographic image. Specifically, the history of the Commons Building can be traced through photographs: during and shortly following its construction, the building was photographed as part of Mies’s own attention to publicity; it was documented as part of historical analyses; and over time it was visited and photographed by casual and amateur photographers. Following the competition results, photographs of the Commons Building were strategically deployed by both proponents and critics of Koolhaas’s design. Contemporary photographs of the building appear in architectural and campus guidebooks and on websites such as Flickr.com. Examining the ways in which photographs of the Commons Building appear in these various contexts allows discussion of the critical dimensions identified above and permits us to trace the evolution of the mutually reinforcing relationship between architecture and photography

Capitalist Formations of Enclosure: Space and the Extinction of the Commons

Despite their theoretical and political potential, recent debates on enclosure usually lack an effective consideration of how space is mobilized in the process of dispossession. This article connects the analysis of enclosure's general spatial rationality to a range of illustrations of its particular formations and procedures. Enclosure is understood as one of capitalism's “universal territorial equivalents”, a polymorphous technique with variegated expressions in time but also with a consistent logic that uses the spatial erosion of the commons to subsume non-commodified, self-managed social spaces. In response to the ever-changing nature of commoning, successive regimes of enclosure reshape the morphologies of deprivation and their articulation to other state and market apparatuses in order to meet shifting strategies of capital accumulation and social reproduction. Through a spatially nuanced account of these phenomena, I outline a tentative genealogy of enclosure formations that allows tracking diverse geographies of dispossession across different scales and regulatory contexts in various historical stages of capitalist development