With a raised fist. Architecture between instrumentalization and subjectivation (GER)

A building standing on two black legs, with a raised fist on one side and a hand on the hip on the other. The symbol of the “Hermannplatz Initiative”, drawn by illustrator Nele Brönner in 2019, depicts the listed department store building on Hermannplatz as a protester. Although the status of the building as a protected monument, which was to be demolished as part of the construction plans of a real estate group, is mentioned in civil society statements and demonstrations, the criticism of the demolition is not based on identification with or appreciation of the “official heritage” (Harrison 2013), but on the development of agency in the context of an instrumentalization of the “unofficial heritage” (ibid.) constructed by Signa: The demolition of the existing building is to be followed by a façade reconstruction of the 1929 department store building. The speculative images with which Signa frames the project historically and narratively are questioned in the lecture as an “unofficial heritage” that discursively seek to displace and devalue the “official heritage”, i.e. the listed building. The approach chosen by civil society, on the other hand, goes beyond this dichotomy, as it points to a kind of subjectivization of architecture.

Architectural theorist Albena Yaneva describes how the political in architecture cannot be reduced to the embodiment of political symbolism or the instrumentalization of power, but rather to the role of architecture as an actor in conflicts and controversies (2017). The architect Petra Čeferin interprets this agency as a form of self-determination based on the social, historical and cultural conditions under which architecture was created and functions: “[…] these conditions are the material […] from which [architecture] constructs its body” (2021, 9). At Hermannplatz, the question arises as to whether architecture becomes a body when it enters into a relationship with human bodies in the context of political conflict in the city. And whether it, like the human body, is to be understood as a politically and socially contested construction that simultaneously intervenes in these constructions. Or: What does the building really do in the urban political conflict?