Towers in the City: Berlin Alexanderplatz

This book examines the tower as the architectural expression of a long-term commitment to the city, arguing that development must be driven not only by property value and architectural ingenuity but also by a responsibility to collective memory and to a common humanity.
These public commitments find architectural expression in a tectonic radically different to that of contemporary patterns of development. Taking Berlin's Alexanderplatz as an opportunity for studying the role of the skyscraper within the urban fabric, the volume presents a series of prompts, provocations, and projects to address the challenge of designing a tower that can be understood as a monolithic whole, even if it is assembled from discrete parts.\nFrom the Author\nThis book is the product of an advanced graduate design studio taught by Hans Kollhoff with Kyle Dugdale at Yale School of Architecture. Broadly stated, the studio addressed the role of the skyscraper in the contemporary city, taking as point of departure Hans Kollhoff's own master plan for Berlin's Alexanderplatz. The studio's lessons, however, extended far beyond the context of Berlin. Its more pointed contention was to insist that the tower bears a public responsibility that in turn places certain demands upon the architect. Those demands must inform decisions about material, tectonic, and scale, just as they must take account of climate, cost, and collective memory. But above all, the tower's design must embody a serious commitment to the public space of the city. The book opens with the studio brief, describing specific challenges and laying out terms of engagement. This is followed by a collection of prompts that draw on Hans Kollhoff's body of written work to offer a taste of the studio's characteristic dialogue, leading to a presentation of the carefully worded exercises that shaped the studio's process. Two essays by Hans Kollhoff and by Kyle Dugdale offer provocations that illuminate particular aspects of the studio's concerns: one illustrating the power of the idea of the tectonic within the trajectory of architecture's history, the other based upon close observation of the contemporary city. The book then presents, in texts and images, each of the eleven projects designed by the students, before closing with an acknowledgment of its various participants. Some readers may find this book to be out of step with the discipline's current preoccupations. It is our hope that a closer examination of its contents will show this to be not a weakness but a strength.\nFrom the Inside Flap\nEdited by Kyle Dugdale with Kirk Henderson\nFrom the Back Cover\nWith contributions by Hans Kollhoff, Kyle Dugdale, Gina Cannistra, Eunil Cho, Dov Feinmesser, Richard Green, Kirk Henderson, Ha Min Joo, Karl Karam, Jason Kurzweil, Aymar Mariño-Maza, Megan McDonough, and Yazma Rajbhandary