Tiergarten, Landscape of Transgression - This Obscure Object of Desire

Description

Tiergarten is Berlin's oldest park, with more than five hundred acres of woodland in the heart of the city. Before it was absorbed by the city, the area that became Tiergarten was a natural forest. Throughout its history, it was used as royal hunting grounds and as a landscaped public park, and (in the years of hardship following World War II) an area where trees were felled for firewood, before changing social and political circumstances and the growing ecological movement led to measures to restore and replant this vast public space. Thus, the Tiergarten has become not only a very popular recreation place, but also a biotope of extraordinarily high biodiversity. Generously illustrated with historical and contemporary photographs, Tiergarten, Landscape of Transgression takes readers through the history of the park, with an eye toward exploring it as a radical spatial expression - a space where humans and wild species and conflicting histories coexist in close proximity, and as a model for future environments in areas of intense urbanisation. Born of a recent symposium staged by Technische Universitat Berlin, this book brings together twelve essays with a range of archival documents, including newspaper articles, maps, reports, plans, and photographs.

Sandra Bartoli is an architect, and the co-founder of the Berlin-based firm Buros fur Konstruktivismus. She teaches as a Professor of Architecture and Urban Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg, Germany. She graduated from the University of Venice (IUAV) and the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. Jorg Stollmann is a Professor of Urban Design and Urbanization at Technische Universitat Berlin. He is co-founder of unrbaninform.net and works as a researcher from Berlin and Zurich.