This is an excerpt from a longer essay, written in October 2002. The first half of the essay discusses how the symbiosis of a city has been lost by the emergence of free-standing buildings. …our post-modern pluralism may be colorful, but what makes it so trivial is the absence of any hierarchy in planning quality, a lack of scale, a lack of instinct for the essential magic and timelessness of a space. And Berlin is no exception. Berlin became the capital of the newly founded German Empire in 1871, which occurred "overnight by political circumstance, but did not evolve towards it from within". And, in quest of a "phantom identity that our young city has never had ... the tools of an almost fundamentalist restoration were applied and descended into farce." "Berlin cooped itself up, reduced itself for no reason, for fear of losing itself.
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