UTOPIONS
part of STADT_IONEN (Urban Ions)
Claudia von Funcke
|
Verkehrskanzel (traffic pulpit) photograph (and draft) by Claudia von Funcke
Post-war modernism in Germany is still regarded as an extremely controversial architecture. Hated and loved by town planners as well as citizens, it was built at a time when Berlin had lost 500.000 flats and the city required radical and ground-braking solutions to this problem. Some of the most influential architects of this time, amongst them Alvar Aalto, Egon Eiermann, Walter Gropius, Oscar Niemeyer and Max Taut were asked to come up with ideas.
Set in one of the most popular avenues of Berlin, the Kurfüstendamm in Charlottenburg, is a traffic pulpit from the 50s. I will transform the now out of service and listed “Verkehrskanzel”, an adjacent advertising pillar and two display cabinets by placing my own photographs of this architecture in and around them, so that these showcases of post-war modernism in Berlin become part of the city in a street that was meant to show a new moral, political and urban identity in western Berlin.
