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Islands-in-the-City: Berlin's urban fragments

Julia Walker

To cite this article: Julia Walker (2015) Islands-in-the-City: Berlin's urban fragments, The Journal
of Architecture, 20:4, 699-717, DOI: 10.1080/13602365.2015.1075226

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Islands-in-the-City: Berlin’s urban

fragments
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Julia Walker Binghamton University: The State University of

New York (SUNY), New York, United States of
America (Author’s e-mail address: walkerj@
binghamton.edu)

This essay examines a series of publications by Rem Koolhaas that de-naturalise the metro-
politan growth presumed by the authors of many modern architectural books. In 1977, Kool-
haas joined Oswald Matthias Ungers at the Berlin Summer Academy for Architecture, held at
Cornell University. The following year, they published the results of the Academy in a special
volume, entitled ‘The City Within the City: Berlin as Green Archipelago’, containing plans to
reconfigure Berlin as what Ungers labelled ‘islands-in-the-city’. In this green archipelago,
depopulation and urban flight were taken as facts of city life in the late-twentieth
century, not as problems to be fought. Koolhaas, Ungers and their colleagues proposed
that cities should work with these tendencies rather than against them, and take measures
to ensure that cities retained their most essential metropolitan qualities. To that end, they
planned to identify and emphasise Berlin’s ‘urban islands’, those areas that had remained
vital and vibrant, allowing the rest of the city to go to pasture and become a ‘natural
lagoon’. Their case study, the divided city of Berlin, would thus become a group of enclaves
(much in the way that West Berlin was itself an enclave), city fragments ‘liberated’—Ungers’
word—from the falsity of a unified urbanism.
The book’s treatment of the city is consistent with its post-modern contemporaries, such as
Learning from Las Vegas and Collage City, in which the urban environment is offered as a
disintegrated perceptual experience rather than a unitary image. Yet a closer look at the
publications in Koolhaas’s oeuvre that pre-figured it helps to clarify the book’s unique
stake in presenting the city as the result of a process of decay, a process that reveals archi-
tecture’s most essential qualities.

Books about modern architecture, like the cities they
helped to build, presumed that development was
the object, end and goal of the metropolis.
Whether the city was valenced positively (Le Corbu-
sier’s ‘human organism both for protection and for
work’ from The City of To-morrow and its Planning)
or negatively (Frank Lloyd Wright’s ‘monstrous
Leviathan’ from ‘The Art and Craft of the
Machine’), most modern architects took for
granted its necessary growth. By the turn of the
twentieth century, this growth was understood to
be virtually unstoppable in its momentum; as
Georg Simmel identified, the metropolis eventually
took leave of its earthly form, becoming a ‘totality
of effects’ that rhizomatically perpetuated itself
and extended its magnitude.1 In the early 1900s,

# 2015 RIBA Enterprises 1360-2365 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2015.1075226

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the problem remaining to be addressed, then, was
the role of architecture in disciplining that growth
and endowing the city with an orderly form.
In many modern architectural books, the salient
characteristic of the industrial city is precisely this
unlimited development, expanding infinitely with
the same logic and drive of the apparatus of
capital that powers it. Therefore, what might it
mean instead for an urban plan not only to
assume, but also to embrace, the process of urban
decay? What might it mean to plan the shrinking
city? To answer this question, we must turn to pub-
lications reflecting the post-war devolution of the
urban ideal. Planning the city’s denouement has
been the unusual tactic of Rem Koolhaas, who,
early in his career, prophetically declared, ’More
important than the design of cities will be the
design of their decay.’2
For Koolhaas, the challenge posed to architecture
by the city’s metastasis lay in the necessity for the
profession to recognise its own futility—as an act
of creation always encumbered both by its own
destructiveness and by its own inevitable decay. He
observes the strange blindness in the fact that the
discipline of architecture is defined only in terms of
building, or ‘adding to the world’.3 To survive, he
argues, architecture must reorient itself and its activi-
ties towards acts of cancellation: ‘Only through a
revolutionary process of erasure and the establish-
ment of “liberty zones”, conceptual Nevadas
where all laws of architecture are suspended, will
some of the inherent tortures of urban life—the fric-
tion between program and containment—be sus-
pended.’4 Yet it is worth returning to the scene of
these insights: the divided city of Berlin, which sup-
plied Koolhaas with a basis for interpreting the city
not as a unitary whole but rather as an aggregation
of fragments suspended in a post-pastoral, post-
industrial landscape where, in Koolhaas’s words,
‘what was once city is now a highly charged noth-
ingness’.5
To understand the development of Koolhaas’s
intentions for designing decay, this paper examines
his early, text-based projects, oriented in the revel-
ations he experienced in Berlin and culminating in
the seminal, and yet little-known, work of urban
theory known as Die Stadt in der Stadt: Berlin das
grüne Stadtarchipel (‘The City in the City: Berlin
as Green Archipelago’ (Fig. 1). In 1977, Koolhaas
joined Oswald Matthias Ungers at the Berlin
Summer Academy for Architecture held at Cornell
University. The following year, they published the
results of the Academy in a special volume contain-
ing plans to reconfigure Berlin as what Ungers
labelled ‘islands-in-the-city’. In this green archipe-
lago, depopulation and urban flight were taken as
facts of city life in the late-twentieth century, as con-
ditions to be acknowledged, not as problems to be
fought. Koolhaas, Ungers and their colleagues pro-
posed that cities should work with these tendencies
rather than against them, taking measures to ensure
that cities retained their most essential metropolitan
qualities. To that end, they planned to identify and
emphasise Berlin’s ‘urban islands’, those areas that
had remained vital and vibrant, allowing the rest of
the city quite literally to go to pasture, becoming a
‘natural lagoon’. For Ungers, the green archipelago
followed autogenetic architectural processes since,
according to him, ‘Architecture … always consists
in the recognition of the genius loci out of which it
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Figure 1. O. M. Ungers
with Rem Koolhaas,
Hans Kolhoff, Arthur
Ovaska, Peter Riemann,
‘Die Stadt in der Stadt–
Berlin das Grüne
Stadtarchipel’ (‘The City
in the City–Berlin as
Green Archipelago’,
1977; image courtesy of
Ungers Archiv für Arch-
itekturwissenschaft,
Cologne).
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grows.’6 Their case study, divided Berlin, would thus
become a group of enclaves (much in the way that
West Berlin was itself an enclave), city fragments ‘lib-
erated’—Ungers’ word—from the falsity of a unified
urbanism.
The argument advanced in ‘Berlin as Green Archi-
pelago’ is that the decay of the city—in the form of
depopulation and dilapidation—is built in to the pro-
cesses of the city, constituting a sort of urban dialec-
tic. It is not that ‘Berlin as Green Archipelago’
romantically naturalises the process of architecture’s
gradual reclamation by the earth. Rather, it denatur-
alises the act of architecture itself. In this project,
expansion is merely the obverse of decay, as both
inevitably result from the city’s unremitting state of
flux. Indeed, the contemporary city represses its
own decay, insisting instead on the spurious opti-
mism of speculation and development. By pointing
out the artificial stasis in which most urban theory
suspends urban conditions, the green archipelago
reveals decay as immanent in the city, which necess-
arily insists on its own constant renewal.
‘Berlin as Green Archipelago’, to which I will
return later, was a critique of modernist urban mani-
festos such as Le Corbusier’s The City of Tomorrow
and its Planning, which revelled in the new, dense
and efficient metropolis and its rational and techno-
cratic inhabitants. But it was likewise a riposte to its
post-modern contemporaries, such as Kevin Lynch’s
The Image of the City (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT
Press, 1960), Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown
and Steven Izenour’s Learning from Las Vegas (Cam-
bridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1972) and Colin
Rowe’s Collage City (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT
Press, 1978), each of which presents the urban
environment as a disintegrated perceptual experi-
ence rather than a unitary image. Although frag-
mented, this view of urban life does not resemble
Koolhaas’s archipelago. Instead, these publications
argue polemically for a radically non-hierarchical
experience of the city, celebrating the ‘ugly and
the ordinary’ as well as the ‘heroic and original’ (as
the authors of Learning from Las Vegas put it) and
use the putatively objective processes of documen-
tation and collection as their method rather than
value-based selection.7
If the modern architectural book (such as The City
of Tomorrow and its Planning) instructed its reader
not only in how to build the modern city, but also
in how to see the modern city, these post-modern
theories of urbanism instructed the reader in how
to see the city anew. ‘Berlin as Green Archipelago’
does the opposite, teaching the reader how to
unsee the city, enacting a visual and intellectual dis-
integration that mimics the unceasing crumbling of
the city. Koolhaas’s work is often described as
emblematic of the explosion of the city and its
effects above; but looking closely at his prehistory
—prior to the foundation of the Office for Metropo-
litan Architecture, or OMA—reveals different com-
mitments that have far more to do with decay
than they do with growth. By denaturalising the
modern form of the city, ‘Berlin as Green Archipe-
lago’ opens up new possibilities for the relationship
between architecture and urban experience. To be
clear: I am not arguing that the plan evinces an
emancipatory aesthetics in response to the domi-
nance of the city. On the contrary, it lays bare the
violent forces subtending any act of architecture.
Here, I will treat Koolhaas’s collaboration with

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Ungers as the culmination of a long reflection,
inspired by Berlin, on the way in which architecture
proceeds from order to entropy.
******
The theme of decay runs throughout Koolhaas’s
work as a theorist, architect, and planner. Consider
the simulated senescence manifest in his 1999 Exhi-
bition Cities on the Move, in which he produced a
hodgepodge ‘East Asian City’ with borrowed bits
from Bangkok, Tokyo and Shanghai (among
others), claiming, ‘We’ll do newness and airport con-
struction, but we’ll also do decay, sex and drugs, just
like in a real city’; or his brief but scathing 2001 essay
‘Junkspace’, in which he explores the dross of mod-
ernisation and consumption that increasingly litters
the globe.8 In all cases, Koolhaas reminds us that
decay is not disappearance. Rather, it indicates a
process of breaking down or breaking apart—or
what we might instead term analysis. It is no coinci-
dence that Koolhaas counts Constructivism and Sur-
realism among his strongest influences, since both
subject the work of art to unstinting critical explora-
tion—one on the production line, the other on the
couch. Aaron Betsky has observed that Koolhaas
seeks to ‘condense, shape and celebrate urbanism
in highly allusive form’ while also ‘ground(ing) archi-
tecture not in form, but in analysis and prognosis’.9
It is my claim here that his contact with the city of
Berlin during his formative years instilled in him a
sense of decay as a savage ordering force, an inevi-
table process that belies modern architecture’s
quixotic social claims. Against the prevailing wave
of post-modern urban theory, which framed the
city as a collage of layered, juxtaposed and
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remixed images, Berlin in the 1960s and 1970s
offered an alternative, more disciplined model for
interpreting the city, obdurately resisting this imagis-
tic approach. The Wall that cut through the city
centre and surrounded West Berlin disallowed the
possibility of seeing the city as a collage, with too
many absences. For Koolhaas, the Wall acts not
only as a cancellation of possibility, a boundary
edge, a mark of closure—it also acts, surprisingly,
as a door to new possibilities and as an affirmation
of the vitality of urban life. As we will see, the Wall
becomes a powerful analytical device for discovering
architectural essences.
Given the significance of the city to his thinking, it
is worth recounting the sequence of events that led
Koolhaas to visit Berlin for the first time in 1971 on
what he would later call ‘a field trip that spoiled
the charms of the field; tourism that left a kind of
scorched earth’.10 For Koolhaas, this visit to Berlin
was both revelatory and decisive, closing the door
on a set of modernist architectural pieties but
opening a window onto his future career. In some
ways, Berlin represented an all-too-familiar land-
scape. Koolhaas was born in November, 1944, in a
Rotterdam flattened by years of German and Allied
bombings. He notes that the final winter of the
war created what he calls ‘a very borderline situ-
ation’ in Rotterdam, in which the area south of the
Nieuwe Maas River had been liberated but conflict
continued to the north. As Koolhaas would later
observe, ‘Rotterdam and Berlin have much in
common. Both historical centers … both destroyed
by World War II; like Cain and Abel, one good and
the other bad … both now in the grip of intense revi-
sionism … In both cases, the current revisions are
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based on denial.’11 The war remained a palpable
presence in the cities where he spent his early
years—Rotterdam and then Amsterdam, where the
family lived from 1946 to 1952—and yet his
account of a childhood spent among the ruins
differs distinctly from the usual tone of rubble litera-
ture.
Rather than pointing to the air of tragedy attend-
ing these cities, Koolhaas claims that the War’s dev-
astation of the urban environment was, of all things,
exhilarating. ‘On my way to school, for instance’, he
states, ‘I would always stay behind, play in the ruins,
and find bullets’; he remembers that these
expeditions always made him feel ‘very adventur-
ous’.12 However broken it was, the post-war land-
scape seemed appealingly stimulating: ‘My parents
would tell many exciting stories about their life
during the war—how they got food, for example
—and all of it sounded more like an intensified life
rather than a terrible life.’13 In 1952, at the age of
eight, he moved with his parents to Jakarta, ulti-
mately spending four years living on the actual Indo-
nesian archipelago. Koolhaas notes that these years
marked his first awareness of that term, saying, ‘The
word [archipelago] always had an incredible reson-
ance. It symbolised the separateness, but also the
larger entity of something … It seemed to have a
great relevance in conditions where the whole had
been broken.’14 The family also travelled in Brazil
in 1956, where Koolhaas wandered through cities
such as Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasília,
then in the early stages of construction and cropping
up like an island in the vast landscape of the country.
According to Koolhaas, his peripatetic childhood
and his experiences of the diverse forms of cities
instructed him in how actual urban experience
always differed from the best-laid plans of its
designers.
Once the family returned to Amsterdam, he often
spent time in the office of his grandfather, Dirk Roo-
senburg, a modernist architect who started his
career working for Hendrik Petrus Berlage, the
Dutch modernist known for the purity, rationality
and geometrically strict compositions of his
designs. Yet Koolhaas’s first professional pursuits
were not architecture but rather journalism and film-
making. ‘In a script’, Koolhaas says, ‘you have to link
various episodes together, you have to generate sus-
pense and you have to assemble things—through
editing, for example. It’s exactly the same in architec-
ture. Architects also put together spatial episodes to
make sequences.’15 In 1963 he began to work as a
journalist for De Haagse Post, covering cinema, lit-
erature, art, architecture and politics. He wrote
articles about architects such as Le Corbusier and
interviewed figures such as Federico Fellini and Con-
stant. Around the same time, he joined the coopera-
tive 1,2,3 Groep of filmmakers, headed by Rene
Daalder, in which Koolhaas participated as a screen-
writer and occasionally an actor.
These experiences became inextricably linked to
architecture for the young Koolhaas, who began to
view architecture as a narrative, scripted experience,
a scenario or series of scenarios whose success can
be gauged by their emotional impact. While attend-
ing a seminar on architecture and cinema at the
Technische Universiteit in Delft, Koolhaas met
Gerrit Oorthuys, a professor at the TU who had
worked with the De Stijl architect Gerrit Rietveld.
Through Oorthuys, Koolhaas realised that architec-

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ture could most effectively stage the narrative situ-
ations he had explored in film and journalism. This
link between architecture and film has been con-
stant in Koolhaas’s work and in the production of
his firm, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture
(OMA). As Jean-Louis Cohen puts it, ‘If the screen-
play … is out of OMA’s hands, then the cutting,
the centering, and, last but not least, the editing is
up to them.’16
To test his theory of architecture’s affective poten-
tial, Koolhaas enrolled in the Architectural Associ-
ation (AA) in London in the watershed year of
1968. At the time of his arrival, the AA was
immersed in the rebellious momentum of the inter-
national student movements, the revolutionary
vigour of world-wide protests against the Vietnam
War, and the youthful and irreverent energy of
London’s music scene. The staff comprised figures
such as Cedric Price, Charles Jencks and Alvin Boy-
arsky, and the ludic fantasies of Archigram domi-
nated the curriculum. As Jeffrey Kipnis describes
the environment of the AA during Koolhaas’s years
of study: ‘Anything goes, everything goes. For
studio, write a book if you want. Dance or piss
your pants if you want. Even draw or make models
if you want, long as they are “with it”. Structure
or codes or HVAC? Go to Switzerland.’17 Koolhaas
recalls his alienation from the laid-back ethos of
the AA, since his own approach to architecture,
which was already based on the emotional intensity
he experienced in the war rubble of his childhood
home town, clashed with the antic lightheartedness
of many of his cohort (among the marginalia in S,M,
L,XL, is a fragment of text that points to how ill-
fitting his formal education was: ‘At the AA, Rem
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said, “Sorry, I’m not gonna play with ping-pong
balls.“ So he got a bad report! Almost thrown
out!’).18 During his years of study, Koolhaas
defined his own radical principles not parallel with
but in contrast to the counter-culture of the AA.19
The Architectural Association’s curriculum was
notoriously unstructured, meant to serve as a correc-
tive both to the formality of Beaux-Arts-based archi-
tecture schools and to the disciplined inward
investigation of Bauhausian methods. Yet one of
the iron-clad requirements for graduation was the
Summer Study, in which each student would
spend the summer holiday analysing a single archi-
tectural object. Italian villas, Greek villages and pyra-
mids were the usual objects of exploration, Koolhaas
notes, observing caustically that the sites selected
tended to be situated ‘in a good climate.’20 What
was to be produced by the end of the course was
appropriate and comprehensive documentation
revealing the object’s architectural meaning. For
his Summer Study, Koolhaas selected a less idyllic
and less popular destination: the divided city of
Berlin, where he arrived in August of 1971, ten
years to the month after the initial construction of
the Berlin Wall. There followed his initial encounter
with this monument what Koolhaas calls a series
of ‘reverse epiphanies’—more intimations of intel-
lectual decay—that, he claims, transformed his
thinking about architecture dramatically and irretrie-
vably.21 He returned to London with a project that
he entitled The Berlin Wall as Architecture, extolling
the merits of the form, its high modernist ability to
make a maximum of impact with a minimum of
architectural intervention. To Koolhaas, less, in the
Berlin Wall, was truly more. He painstakingly
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researched the formal history of the Wall and illus-
trated his project with photomontages that irresist-
ibly recalled the projects of the avant-garde: for
example, a souvenir postcard of the Brandenburg
Gate, with an over-scaled aeroplane added by Kool-
haas, plainly evokes a photomontage made by Ivan
Leonidov for his Linear City project complete with
a giant dirigible (Fig. 2).
In The Berlin Wall as Architecture, Koolhaas
sought not to condemn the Wall, but to consider
its virtues. For Koolhaas, those virtues were
complex, encompassing all of modernity’s terrifying
dialectics. After all, West Berlin was part of the
so-called ‘free world’, and yet it, not the East, was
cordoned off and confined, isolated from its allies
by concrete and barbed wire. Banal, mass-produced
materials were used to draw the literal line between
two ideologies, whilst the adherents of each doc-
trine were forced to gaze at each other across the
divide, imprisoned by their own worldviews. Each
‘side’ believed it was good, and the other bad, it
right, and the other wrong. He was also struck by
how the Wall’s materiality—so monolithic in the
imaginary of that same ‘free world’—was anything
but, integrating functioning buildings that hap-
pened to lie in its path, incorporating ruins when it
encountered them, ranging from concrete slab in
most places to bricks in others to nothing but
tangles of barbed wire in some of its far-flung sec-
tions. He noted with amazement that some portions
of the Wall comprised nothing but piled-up rubbish
—heavily guarded, of course.
In the text accompanying his studies of Berlin’s
history, Koolhaas leveraged his considerable rhetori-
cal abilities (honed through journalism and filmmak-
ing) to make the case for the Wall. ‘The Berlin Wall
was a very graphic demonstration of the power of
architecture and some of its unpleasant conse-
quences’, he argued. ‘Were not division, enclosure
(i.e. imprisonment), and exclusion … the essential
stratagems of any architecture?’22 Intent on deci-
phering exactly what it was that made the Wall so
powerful as a built form, he observed: ‘The Wall
forever severed the connection between importance
and mass.’23 He points out that, ‘ … in narrowly
architectural terms, the Wall was not an object but
an erasure, a freshly created absence … it was the
first demonstration of the capacity of the void—of
nothingness—to “function” with more efficiency,
subtlety, and flexibility than any object you could
imagine in its place.’24 What made the Wall so effec-
tive, he noted, was precisely this flexibility, the ad
hoc nature of its construction superseding any a
priori notions of form’s production of the social.
He states: ‘The Wall had generated a catalogue of
possible mutations; sometimes the new object/
zone slashed mercilessly through the most (formerly)
impressive parts of the city; sometimes it yielded to
apparently superior pressures that were not always
identifiable.’25
Part of what was so significant to Koolhaas about
the Wall was the way in which it brutally actualised
many of the shibboleths of high modernism, includ-
ing the link between form and function. ‘Its range
from the absolute, the regular, to the deformed
was an unexpected manifestation of a formless
“modern”—alternatively strong and weak, impo-
sition and residue, Cartesian and chaotic—all its see-
mingly different states merely phases of the same
essential project.’26 Furthermore, Koolhaas docu-
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Figure 2. Rem
Koolhaas, collaged
postcard from ‘The
Berlin Wall as
Architecture’;
reproduced in ‘Field
Trip’, SMLXL (New York,
Monacelli Press, 1995),
pp. 212–13 (# Rem
Koolhaas, 1971).

mented not only the Wall itself, but also the way in
which it shaped city life, detourning the growing
popularity of urban sociology in the mould of Jane
Jacobs. He was fascinated by the way in which the
Wall functioned as ‘a vast system of ritual’, noting
that it ‘was a script, effortlessly blurring divisions
between tragedy, comedy, melodrama’.27 In fact,
he observed that it was the very flexibility of the
architecture itself—its lack of specific programme
—that allowed it to function so meaningfully. He
noted that in the Wall’s short life, it had ‘provoked
and sustained an incredible number of events, beha-
viours, and effects’, from daily procedures to deadly
standoffs.28 He concluded that ‘[t]he greatest sur-
prise’, was that ‘the Wall was heartbreakingly beau-
tiful’.29
Once he returned to the Architectural Association,
Koolhaas presented The Berlin Wall as Architecture
to an audience of staff and fellow students. He
claims that they seemed prepared for an exercise
in architectural perversity, recalling that the mood
was one of ‘semifestive, semicynical expectation
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(this school was nothing if not fun)’.30 However, his
colleagues, steeped in the puckish aesthetics of the
counter-culture, were unprepared for what fol-
lowed: a veritable onslaught of images, information,
documentation and analyses of the Wall and its
socio-architectural consequences, treated with the
utmost seriousness. Koolhaas presented the project
as evidence of a proof, arguments demonstrating a
truth as incontrovertible as gravity. After the presen-
tation, he recalls, ‘There was a long silence. Then
Boyarsky asked ominously, “Where do you go
from here?”’31
The tale of Koolhaas’s performance is often
trotted out in interviews or newspaper profiles,
intended to demonstrate quickly that the architect’s
provocateurial tendencies were in place even at the
beginning of his career.32 Yet what such flourishes
overlook is his resolute engagement with the social
consequences of the form of the Wall and his insis-
tence that its unpleasantness did not justify the pro-
fession’s myopic failure to consider it in architectural
terms, as architecture. Finally, Berlin and its Wall
forced Koolhaas to determine that the playful exper-
iments fostered at the Architectural Association,
with its emphasis on the construction of spon-
taneous situations to reconfigure social transactions,
were nothing more than childish counter-cultural
games. Instead, he concluded, the message of the
Berlin Wall was simple and devastating: ‘Where
there is nothing, everything is possible. Where
there is architecture, nothing (else) is possible.’33
To think about Berlin is to aim at the void; it is
‘imagining nothingness’, as Koolhaas entitled the
1985 essay on the decay of cities with which I
began this paper. In this phrase, Koolhaas referrers
to a venerable philosophical conundrum: how can
we imagine nothing, when we can only mediate
our consciousness through images—or at least the
residuum of images—of something? Of course, the
question of nothingness poses a critical problem as
well as an ontological one. When pure negation
amounts to nothing, or nothingness, then how can
the author escape affirmation? For Koolhaas, to
imagine nothingness might be something like the
process of decay-as-analysis described above—
that is, to aim at the void using architecture as an
heuristic. Imagining nothingness is, he says,
‘Pompeii—a city built with the absolute minimum
of walls and roofs … The Manhattan Grid—there a
century before there was a “there“ there …
Central Park—a void that provoked the cliffs that
now define it … Broadacre City … The Berlin Wall
… ’.34 His nothingness reveals the ‘procrustean’
systems which, once subjected to processes of
decay, emerge clearly as less potent aspects of the
built world recede around them. These architectural
interventions become figures against a ground,
islands, as it were, in a sea of weaker spatial stuff.
Despite his uneasiness with the environment at
the Architectural Association, Koolhaas formed
one of his most significant relationships in its class-
rooms. Elia Zenghelis, an architect from Greece
who had likewise received his education at the AA
and was teaching there at the time, taught an archi-
tectural method based on the idea of the subcon-
scious, which resonated with Koolhaas’s interest in
architectural affect. Koolhaas and Zenghelis collabo-
rated on a number of projects whilst the former was
enrolled at the school, and upon his graduation they
continued to work together, producing ideas that

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flowed from a shared interest in Surrealism and
radical manipulation of the urban condition. In
1972, together with their spouses, Zoe Zenghelis
and Madelon Vriesendorp, they produced a project
entitled Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Archi-
tecture, comprising eighteen drawings, waterco-
lours and collages that built directly on the ‘reverse
epiphanies’ Koolhaas had experienced in Berlin.
The architects entered the project in a competition
sponsored by the Italian magazine Casabella on
the theme of a ‘city with a significant environment’.
A polemical response to London’s rapid depopula-
tion in the 1970s, Exodus proposed that a walled-
off strip of ‘metropolitan desirability’ be inserted
into the historical centre of the city (Fig. 3).35 Within
the void created by the walls would be eleven auton-
omous squares into which various monuments could
be relocated from elsehwere. Divested of their orig-
inal content and removed from their former context,
these monuments would serve as the focus of collec-
tive meditation, ‘social condensers’ along the lines of
those envisioned by Constructivists such as El Lis-
sitsky and Moisei Ginzburg. The rest of London’s
monuments would be destroyed in a clean sweep
of the scale envisioned in Le Corbusier’s Plan
Voisin. This reference to the idealism of the avant-
garde is far from unique, and the project creates
utopian environments only to critique them. Prison-
ers would be given a plot of land to cultivate, collec-
tively known as ‘The Allotments’, that would allow
them ‘to recover in privacy from the demands the
intense collectivism and the communal way of life
make on them’ (think Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broad-
acre City) and a small house ‘built from the most
lush and expensive materials (marble, chromium,
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steel)—small Palaces for the People’ (think Ludwig
Mies van der Rohe’s villas). In Exodus, the void
would function as ‘a prison on the scale of a metro-
polis’, in Terence Riley’s words.36 Citizens could
then choose to live in this newly intensified zone,
marking themselves as its voluntary prisoners, or
‘those who were strong enough to love its architec-
ture’.37
But the images were not meant to stand alone,
and—typical of Koolhaas—came complete with a
story:
Once, a city was divided in two parts.
One part became the Good Half, the other part
the Bad Half.
The inhabitants of the Bad Half began to flock to
the good part of the divided city, rapidly swelling
into an urban exodus.
If this situation had been allowed to continue
forever, the population of the Good Half would
have doubled, while the Bad Half would have
turned into a ghost town.
After all attempts to interrupt this undesirable
migration had failed, the authorities of the bad
part made desperate and savage use of architec-
ture: they built a wall around the Good part of
the City, making it completely inaccessible to
their subjects.
The Wall was a masterpiece.
Originally no more than some pathetic strings of
barbed wire abruptly dropped on the imaginary
line of the border, its psychological and symbolic
effects were infinitely more powerful than its
physical appearance.
The Good Half, now glimpsed only over the for-
bidding obstacle from an agonising distance,
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Figure 3. Rem Koolhaas

with Elia Zenghelis, Zoe
Zenghelis, Madelon
Vriesendorp, ‘The Strip,
Aerial Perspective’, from
‘Exodus, or the
Voluntary Prisoners of
Architecture’, 1972;
cut-and-pasted paper
with watercolour, ink,
gouache and colour
pencil on gelatin silver
photograph, 16” x 19 7/
8” (# Rem Koolhaas;
digital image # The
Museum of Modern
Art/Licensed by SCALA/
Art Resource, NY).

became even more irresistible. Those trapped,
left behind in the gloomy Bad Half, became
obsessed with vain plans for escape. Hopeless-
ness reigned supreme on the wrong side of the
Wall. As so often before in this history of
mankind, architecture was the guilty instrument
of despair.38
The text is intentionally ambiguous; whilst it makes
clear reference to the Berlin Wall, neither the
‘Good’ nor the ‘Bad’ half of this fictive city is specifi-
cally identified with West or East Berlin. In fact, the
authors seem less interested in a specific economic
critique levelled either at the capitalist West or the
communist East than they are in the erotics of the

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Wall, its ability to heighten the experience of those
who dwell in its shadow on either side. Those creat-
ing it are ‘desperate’ and ‘savage’; the Good Half is
‘irresistible’, and those who cannot get to it experi-
ence an ‘agonising’ desire with which they are
‘obsessed’. According to Felicity Scott, the term
‘exodus’ acted as a reference not only to the histori-
cal Jewish exodus from Egypt, with its narratives of
bondage and salvation, but also to the Socialist
theory revolving around a refusal to work, and there-
fore an abnegation of the production processes of
capitalism.39 Indeed, the production of the urban
environment was at the heart of Exodus as well as
the impact Koolhaas had observed in the Wall.
Here, he discerned authentic revolutionary potential
against the capitalist machine: In Exodus, he
claimed, ‘It is possible to imagine a mirror image of
this terrifying architecture; a force as intense and
devastating but in the service of positive inten-
tions.’40
As Demetri Porphyrios has observed, what would
result from the architectural interventions proposed
in Exodus would be nothing less than an ideal city,
the most potent object of desire in modernity.41
However, its authors keenly observe the role that
seeing has historically played in each iteration of
the modern ideal city—depending not only on an
envisioning of the city, but also on the mutual obser-
vation of its inhabitants. They were granted
‘freedom’ within their parcel, but each citizen
would require constant supervision to prevent trans-
gression or thievery. In fact, these voluntary prison-
ers bring to light and make explicit the element of
surveillance inherent in most modernist urban plan-
ning. Here, one of the aspects of the Wall that so
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intrigued Koolhaas during his first pilgrimage to
Berlin—the way in which it became a sort of erotic
machine, creating both fear and desire of what lay
on the other side—is put to evocative use. In one
image, Henri Cartier-Bresson’s indelible image of
figures gazing over the Wall from the West towards
the East is referenced, standing at the same intersec-
tion of Bernauer Strasse and Wolliner Strasse, with
the same ambiguity of the original (Fig. 4). Are the
figures represented free, triumphantly surveying the
less enlightened territory adjacent? Or are they
trapped, looking mournfully towards the land that
they cannot approach? The ambiguities multiply the
longer one ponders the image.
In the zone beyond the Wall, Empire State Build-
ings reproduce themselves beautifully and mena-
cingly, looming over the minuscule figures on the
viewing platform. Similarly, a troop of Rems and
Elias, clad in prison-issue clothing, jog towards this
sublime skyline, pulsing in energetic infrared in the
top register, which seems to monitor the city’s vital
signs. In another image, two figures (lifted from
Jean-Francoise Millet’s 1859 painting The Angelus,
with which Salvador Dalí was famously obsessed)
crouch in front of an effigy of the Wall, complete
with a tangle of barbed wire running along its top
(Fig. 5) These figures stand on a displaced modernist
marble-paved plaza fronting a blocky house appar-
ently made of the same green marble Mies used in
so many projects. (Once again, the image is ambig-
uous—the luxurious grain of the marble, out of
context, also resembles kitschy paisley wallpaper).
As in Surrealist films, registers of action are
unclear; they seem to ignore the statue or figure in
the waters that surround their home, as though he
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Figure 4. Rem Koolhaas

with Elia Zenghelis, Zoe
Zenghelis, Madelon
Vriesendorp, ‘Training
the New Arrivals’, from
‘Exodus, or the
Voluntary Prisoners of
Architecture’, 1972;
cut-and-pasted
photolithographs and
gelatin photograph on
paper, 10 5/8×14 1/2”
(# Rem Koolhaas;
digital image # The
Museum of Modern
Art/Licensed by SCALA/
Art Resource, NY).

is a dream or a fantasy. Throughout the project,
there is a curious vacillation between the specific
and the general. Generic cityscapes combine with
specific maps of London, figures are either entirely
identifiable as individuals or clumped in an anon-
ymous and faceless mass.
So Exodus is not so much urban theory as it is
counter-urbanism.42 As with The Berlin Wall as
Architecture, Exodus decentres and denaturalises
the city, showing us how it might be newly under-
stood—but not without voluntary assent to this
newly intensified life. According to Koolhaas,
Exodus ‘requires a fundamental belief in cities as
the incubators of social desires’, and the inhabitants
would be ‘ecstatic in the freedom of their architec-
tural confines’. Casabella awarded the project first
prize and published it in the June, 1973, issue. In
1975, Koolhaas, Vriesendorp and the Zenghelises
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Figure 5. Rem Koolhaas

with Elia Zenghelis, Zoe
Zenghelis, Madelon
Vriesendorp, ‘The
Allotments’, from
‘Exodus, or the
Voluntary Prisoners of
Architecture’, 1972;
cut-and-pasted paper,
marbelised paper, and
photolithographs with
ink and watercolour on
paper, 11 1/2×16 1/2”
(# Rem Koolhaas;
digital image # The
Museum of Modern
Art/Licensed by SCALA/
Art Resource, NY).

would officially found the Office for Metropolitan
Architecture (OMA). The double slab of the Wall
would resurface in Koolhaas’s later work, such as
his project for Welfare Island of 1975–6 and the
competition entry for La Villette, as well as many
others that ‘deal with bands’.43
‘Exodus’ would be the last project that Koolhaas
completed in Europe before travelling to the
Cornell University College of Architecture, Art and
Planning. After graduating from the Architectural
Association, Koolhaas studied at Cornell in the
early 1970s with Oswald Matthias Ungers, the
German architect and planner whose work in
Berlin Koolhaas had known well and who, at the
time, chaired Cornell’s department of architecture.
Since the 1950s, Ungers had been asking the same
questions about the city’s eccentric urbanism that
had preoccupied Koolhaas. Ungers was as invested
as Koolhaas in the idea of the city as a researchable
archive, and found Berlin to be a particularly rich site
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of urban history, including typological transform-
ation, metamorphosis and what he called ‘Variety
in Unity’. Koolhaas then returned to Ithaca in 1977
at Ungers’ invitation to help his mentor teach the
famous Cornell Summer Academy, during which
they, along with Hans Kollhoff, Peter Riemann and
Arthur Ovaska, would produce ‘Berlin as Green
Archipelago’.
The authors took inspiration for the green archipe-
lago from analysis of Berlin’s genius loci, extending
far beyond the twentieth century. In fact, aside
from the Wall, the archipelago’s genealogy includes
Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s so-called Havellandschaft
(the landscape around the river Havel), the network
of landscape and architectural events that Schinkel
planned throughout the first half of the nineteenth
century. Pier Vittorio Aureli points out that Ungers
particularly had in mind Schinkel’s Klein Glienicke,
an example he often used with his students in
Berlin, in which pavilions were set into a lush
garden setting.44 While they were not organised
along hierarchical or axial lines, the pavilions were
nonetheless linked by dynamic spatial relationships
and unexpected tensions. Schinkel’s strategy of treat-
ing buildings as autonomous formal episodes placed
in a dispersed network resonated both with Ungers’
theory of ‘variety in unity’ and with Koolhaas’s idea
of condensed socio-architectural events.
The form of the text is unassuming, and, as Sébas-
tien Marot points out, at least partly accounts for the
document being little-known.45 It is a simply typed,
48-page pamphlet printed by the Arnold Printing
Corporation in Ithaca, free of the dazzling profusion
of charts and colour photographs that overspread
the pages of its contemporaries (such as Learning
from Las Vegas). The plan comprises eleven theses,
each of which identifies an imperative of the shrink-
ing city (for example, the need to bolster urban
quality by offering varied and versatile spaces
which could contain a number of activities). The
authors emphasise that necessity demands not the
construction of new environments, but the restruc-
turing of existing ones.
As a case in point, preparatory drawings by
Riemann of the southern part of the Friedrichstadt
show Mehringplatz condensed and displaced,
repeating across a number of scenarios (Fig. 6).
Here, architectural intervention is treated as a set
of excisable and repeatable building blocks, potent
as individual components while nonetheless lacking
in urban coherence. One section of the pamphlet
contains analytical maps that show how architects
might pinpoint and isolate those areas of urban
intensity that would ultimately become ‘islands’ in
the archipelago. Another section illustrates moder-
nist ‘social condensers’ that could potentially be
transported into the landscape to amplify these
islands. In general, Ungers and Koolhaas hoped
that the green archipelago would fundamentally
break apart any faith in the idea of the ‘master
plan’; instead, they reflect Koolhaas’s later insight
that ‘The kind of coherence that the metropolis
can achieve is not that of a homogeneous, planned
composition. At the most, it can be a system of frag-
ments.’46 By ‘liberating’ individual zones from within
the totalising city system, ‘Berlin as Green Archipe-
lago’ reveals the very fragility of that system,
always teetering on the verge of chaos.
For many critics, Koolhaas’s practice treads a
dangerous line between complicity and critique.
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Figure 6. Peter
Riemann, ‘Urban Islands
of the Green
Archipelago’, from
O. M. Ungers with Rem
Koolhaas, Hans Kolhoff,
Arthur Ovaska, Peter
Riemann, ‘Die Stadt in
der Stadt–Berlin das
Grüne Stadtarchipel’
(‘The City in the City–
Berlin as Green
Archipelago’, 1977;
image courtesy of
Ungers Archiv für Arch-
itekturwissenschaft,
Cologne).
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Indeed, his well-documented willingness to aid the
processes of empire places him at risk of being dis-
missed, Hal Foster puts it, as ‘an impossible crossing
of Situationist flâneur and Baron Haussmann’.47 Yet
I would argue that his contribution has been to
expose the artificiality of that binary, instead building
his career on a flamboyant body of work, both
written and built, that exposes architecture’s absol-
ute complicity. Architecture writes the script; to
survive, the actors must interpret it. In the end, it is
the in-born decay of the city itself that Koolhaas
uses to reveal its nature. Berlin, its urban condition
aggravated by years of conflict, offered him a
testing ground—what he would later call a ‘labora-
tory’—for architectural analysis. For Koolhaas, the
city and its Wall were concepts, part of a set of arche-
types that always remain dispersed and fragmented.
Here, I have presented ‘Berlin as Green Archipe-
lago’ as a typically post-modern publication, but
like so many of its contemporaries, it is more accu-
rately an analysis of the implications of some of
modernism’s propositions. The history of the
avant-garde is littered with utopian precursors of
the green archipelago, including Ebenezer
Howard’s Garden Cities, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broad-
acre City and, most pertinently, Bruno Taut’s Die
Auflösung der Städte [‘The Dissolution of Cities’],
in which he proposed that humans could be re-har-
monised with nature through the disintegration of
urban centres. Yet where these projects retain a
modernist emphasis on the systematically planned
islands floating in a natural landscape, ‘Berlin as
Green Archipelago’ calls our attention to what sur-
rounds them—to the blank spaces, as it were, on
the pages of the modern architectural book.
Notes and references
1. Le Corbusier, The City of To-morrow and its Planning,
Frederick Etchells, trsl. (New York, Dover, 2013), p.
xxi; Frank Lloyd Wright: Essential Texts, Robert C.
Twombly, ed. (New York, W. W. Norton, 2009), p.
65; Georg Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’,
in Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings (London,
Sage Publications, 1997), p. 17.
2. Rem Koolhaas, ‘Imagining Nothingness’, in SMLXL
(New York, Monacelli Press, 1995), p. 201.
3. Katrina Heron, ‘From Bauhaus to Koolhaas’ (interview
with Rem Koolhaas), Wired, 4 (July, 1996), p. 31.
4. R. Koolhaas, ‘Imagining Nothingness’, op. cit., p. 201.
5. Ibid.
6. Reinhard Gieselman and Oswald Matthias Ungers,
‘Towards a New Architecture’, in Ulrich Conrads, ed.,
Programs and Manifestoes on Twentieth-Century
Architecture (Cambridge, MA, 1971), p. 166.
7. We might also think of certain works of art, such as Ed
Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip from
1966.
8. Rem Koolhaas, ‘Cities on the Move’, in Cities on the
Move: Urban Chaos and Global Change (London,
Hayward Gallery, 1999), p. 25; Rem Koolhaas, ‘Junk-
space’, October, 100 (Spring, 2002).
9. Aaron Betsky, ‘The Fire of Manhattanism inside the
Iceberg of Modernism’, in Considering Rem Koolhaas
and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture: What is
OMA, Okwui Enwezor, Neil Leach, Anthony Vidler,
eds (Rotterdam, NAi Publishers, 2003), p. 28.
10. Rem Koolhaas, ‘Field Trip: A(A) Memoir (First and
Last … )’, in SMLXL, op. cit., p. 225.
11. Rem Koolhaas, ‘The Terrifying Beauty of the Twentieth
Century,’ in SMLXL, op. cit., pp. 206–207.
12. Quoted in Florian Hertweck, Sébastien Marot, The City
in the City—Berlin: The Green Archipelago (Zürich, Lars
Müller Publishers, 2013), p. 131.
13. Ibid.

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14. ‘Archipelago’, in ‘Rem Koolhaas A-Y’, conversation
with Beatriz Colomina, El Croquis, 134/135 (Madrid,
2007), p. 379.
15. ‘Evil Can Also be Beautiful: Interview with Rem
Koolhaas’ (27th March, 2006) http://www.spiegel.
de/international/spiegel/spiegel-interview-with-dutch-
architect-rem-koolhaas-evil-can-also-be-beautiful-a-
408748.html [accessed 03/15].
16. Jean-Louis Cohen, ‘The Rational Rebel, or the Urban
Agenda of OMA’, in OMA-Rem Koolhaas: Architecture
1970–1990, Jacques Lucan, ed. (New York, Princeton
Architectural Press, 1993), p. 16.
17. Jeffrey Kipnis, Perfect Acts of Architecture (New York,
The Museum of Modern Art, 2001), p. 14.
18. R. Koolhaas, SMLXL, op. cit., p. 16.
19. On Koolhaas’s formation relative to 1960s’ counter-
cultures, see Ellen Dunham-Jones, ‘Irrational Exuber-
ance: Rem Koolhaas and the 1990s’, in Architecture
and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present, Peggy Deamer,
ed. (London, Routledge, 2013), pp. 150–171.
20. Rem Koolhaas, ‘Field Trip: A(A) Memoir (First and Last
… )’, op. cit., p. 216.
21. Ibid., p. 225.
22. Ibid., p. 226. Italics original.
23. Ibid., p. 228.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid. (italics in original text).
27. Ibid., p. 222. (italics in original text).
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid., p. 231.
31. Ibid.
32. For example, Tim Adams, ‘Metropolis Now’, The Guar-
dian (24th June, 2006).
33. R. Koolhaas, ‘Imagining Nothingness’, op. cit.. p. 199.
34. Ibid., p. 202.
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35. Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, ‘Exodus, or the Volun-
tary Prisoners of Architecture’, Casabella, 378 (June,
1973), p. 42.
36. Terence Riley, Envisioning Architecture: Drawings from
the Museum of Modern Art, Matilda McQuaid, ed.
(New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1993), p. 166.
37. Harry Francis Mallgrave, An Introduction to Architec-
tural Theory: 1968 to the Present (Chichester, Wiley-
Blackwell, 2011), p. 149.
38. R. Koolhaas, E. Zenghelis, ‘Exodus’, op. cit., p. 42.
39. Felicity Scott, ‘Involuntary Prisoners of Architecture’,
October, 106 (2003), pp. 75–101.
40. Quoted in Lieven De Cauter, Hilde Heynen, ‘The
Exodus Machine’, in, Martin van Schaik, Otakar
Máčel, eds, Exit Utopia: Architectural Provocations
1956–1976 (Munich, Prestel, 2005), pp. 263–76.
41. Demetri Porphyrios, ‘Pandora’s Box: An Essay on
Metropolitan Portraits’, Perspecta, 32 (2001), p. 18.
42. As M. Christine Boyer says, ‘This is a negative mani-
festo out to destroy the city and all reformist theories
intent on improving it.’: M. C. Boyer, ‘The Many
Mirrors of Foucault and Their Architectural Reflections’,
in, M. Dehaene, L. De Cauter, eds, Heterotopia and the
City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society (New York, Rou-
tledge, 2008), pp. 66–67.
43. Jacques Lucan, ‘The Architect of Modern Life’, in OMA-
Rem Koolhaas: Architecture 1970–1990, op. cit., p. 37.
44. Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Possibility of an Autonomous
Architecture (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press,
2011), p. 192.
45. An in-depth exploration of this work, and a full repro-
duction of the pamphlet, can be found in the superla-
tive work of F. Hertweck, S. Marot, The City in the City,
op. cit.
46. R. Koolhaas, ‘Imagining Nothingness’, op. cit., p. 201.
47. Hal Foster, ‘Bigness’, London Review of Books, 23 (29th
November, 2001), p. 16.