Exhibition rome_berlin_rome of Heike Hanada and Uwe Schröder - Accademia Tedesca Villa Massimo
With the exhibition RomeBerlinRome, Heike Hanada and Uwe Schröder look back from the year 2070 into the distant future of the European city. The future viability of the city lies in the structure of „solids and voids“, which can only develop through a constant process of increasing the density of open structures to form urban textures. The predecessor of this process can be found in the lessons of the 19th and early 20th century city, tangible in both Rome and Berlin, but which today are increasingly threatened by disregard for the cultural assets of the city.
2070: Architecture has turned its back on the surrounding countryside. The city is again the subject of void and solid. Monumental buildings enter the city from its periphery. They are virtually waiting on the sidelines, waiting to take the urban stage. From the edges, the unity of the city is defined. Island and archipelago-like dense forests crisscross its area. They are like sunlit openings of the forest. As voids, they are counterworlds to the solids of the city; with them, the horti conclusi reemerge in the city of the 21st century. They form internal peripheries that interrupt the urban continuum of time, memory, and recollection. Like the Tiergarten in Berlin or the Giardino Villa Borghese, those voids grant nature its own space in the city. In a romantic sense, they become places of phantasmagoria and vagabond memory, all that is not fitting for man himself.
