The empty site where the Palace of the Republic once stood, now stands for the erasure of history, a silent void populated by the ghosts of a long and contentious past. The Palace stood in the way of vision---the vision of an invented past by the circumvention of a real one. The symbolic importance of the Palace and the history of its place in the city became the premise for its destruction.;This thesis is an investigation of the historical, social and political context surrounding the Palace of the Republic in Berlin, in order to understand strategies of reconstruction in the city. The proposed new architecture will attempt to find and determine new spaces through an alteration that acknowledges the history and context of the site.;The hope of this project is to arrive at a strategy for approaching similar sites of contention and destruction. The hope is to be able to find opportunity in loss, creativity in disagreement, and new life in seeming death. It is to rebuild without starting over, and without forgetting. The hope is to articulate a strategy of alteration with a new construction that speaks of itself and its history openly and unmistakably.
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