The Near Distant Ago Becomes Even More Distant

Slab Magazine, a journal of Architectural fixations sums it up best in review of new work and urbanism is what used to be the death strip between the two Berlins:

Floating Further out into the Cultural Vacuum

Everything looked clean and new and in a certain sense no less reflective than the polished glass of the new building’s curtain walls. In a world of Photoshop effects, smoothing filters, color balancing and corrected saturation, it seems there’s an irresistable drive to create a world in the image of the image.

Which in reflection, seems as unreal as the DDR's Potemkin villages, or West Berlin's Architectural social experiments.

People use the metaphor of a desert to describe a place -or a state- in which you feel empty or placeless, but my childhood in New Mexico gave me a sense for the richness of life to be found there. At HPI I felt a truer form of emptiness, and now I wonder why I became so transfixed by the polished reflections of the new learning and research center. They seemed to have a cathartic effect, somehow canceling the irritation I’d felt from sustained exposure to high levels of bogusness traversing the vicissitudes of The New Death Strip . To just look away entirely, straight into the sky or towards the rail line or a group of trees outside the campus’s border, seemed like the denial

Please note that I called it TWO Berlins, as it really DID diverge culturally into two cities and two cultures.