Drawing the region: Hermann Jansen's vision of Greater Berlin in 1910

Borsi, Katharina (2015) Drawing the region: Hermann Jansen's vision of Greater Berlin in 1910. Journal of Architecture, 20 (1). pp. 47-72. ISSN 1466-4410

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Abstract

The Greater Berlin Competition of 1910 signals a key transformation in the conception of the city. For the first time, the city was no longer drawn as a continuous bounded urban fabric, but as a set of linked and dispersed urban components distributed across the region. The competition drawings show the beginnings of a set of principles that architectural history usually attributes to modernism: a shared programme to plan the city as a linked but differentiated system of social, technical and biological functions.

This paper traces lines of continuity between the urban vision of Hermann Jansen, one of the two joint competition winners, and subsequent planning thought, in particular the ‘Zehlendorfer Plan’ of 1947. It argues that Jansen can be understood as having initiated the concept of the strategic urban plan—his ‘skeleton’ of urban growth—that can adapt and change according to need, and in negotiation with a range of disciplines and stakeholders. Jansen saw the residential quarter as a distinct component of this growth, which could be resolved at a different moment in time, by a different set of expertise. The ‘Zehlendorfer Plan’ exemplified this flexible adaptable form of planning in which the drawing serves as an instrument of negotiation.

Item Type: Article
RIS ID: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/745193
Keywords: Hermann Jansen, Greater Berlin competition, Strategic Drawing, Berlin, Urbanism
Schools/Departments: University of Nottingham, UK > Faculty of Engineering > Department of Architecture and Built Environment
Identification Number: https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2015.1004619
Depositing User: Borsi, Katharina
Date Deposited: 29 Jul 2016 08:36
Last Modified: 04 May 2020 17:02
URI: https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/id/eprint/35538

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