Versuch und Scheitern. Zur Aushandlung öffentlicher Räume

The volume brings together texts on urban planning and architecture that were created between 1993 and 2022. At its core is the architectural form of streets, squares, and places as a confrontation between public order claims and individual representation. The efforts towards a civic architecture in the late 18th century, where the house is understood as a social body while simultaneously guaranteeing free individuality, the staging constraints of princely sovereignty in the construction of a residence city, ideas of counter-enlightenment dressed in the latest architectural trends, and questions regarding a constructive modernity even before the onset of classicist and historicist architectures are all suitable to shed new light on essential aspects not only of Prussian building and urban history. Reflecting on poetry as the most important medium of patriotic thoughts at the beginning of the 19th century, the negotiation process of a viable building code in mid-19th century Berlin, and the foundational points of socialist urban planning dating back to around 1900 brings many previously shared assumptions and perspectives to the test, questioning them based on little-noticed, newly evaluated sources and particularly through unusual cross-references to fields beyond architectural history.