Lecture
ONA Fokushalle E7
Urbanism and the Anthropocene

Tiergarten, Landscape of Transgression (This Obscure Object of Desire)Sandra Bartoli in conversation with Tanja Herdt

Tiergarten, 210 hectares of forest in the middle of Berlin and the oldest park in the city, is a place where many aspects of ecology, urbanism, heritage, daily culture, and politics are simultaneously present but also visibly transgressed. Over time, Tiergarten has become an island of anomalies that can be read as the radical expression of what is most urban and public in the city. Among many characteristics of Tiergarten is that here, human history and natural history are constructed together to shape a model for future environments in an ever-expanding sea of urbanisation. This lecture ranges from Tiergarten’s transgression as a key to shift established ways of talking about what is considered urban to elements of the biotope map of West Berlin, a far-sighted document of 1984 proposing to dissolve the alleged antagonism between city and nature.

Sandra Bartoli is a cofounder, with Silvan Linden, of the Büros für Konstruktivismus in Berlin. As a practice of architecture and research, an attention for high resolution and raw context, both found and constructed, is exercised. An example is the ongoing publishing series AG Architektur in Gebrauch (Architecture in use), started by the office in 2014, in which “use” is explored as an aesthetic category that informs the development and transformation of architectural space. Bartoli and Jörg Stollmann are the editors of the book Tiergarten: Landscape of Transgression, This Obscure Object of Desire (2018). She taught at the TU Berlin, the AdbK in Nuremberg, the adbk Wien, and is currently professor at the Munich University of Applied Sciences.