Between the Lines:
U-Bahnstation Museumsinsel, Berlin
KARL FRIEDRICH SCHINKEL
lt seems to me that there is no way to camouflage the inability to speak about architecture coherently or from the beginning. The notion of an original point of departure, which presupposes a past, is in itself doubtful, because the past has never been experienced as being present. So I would rather skip the beginnings altogether and go straight to the middle, which in my case is the U-Bahnstation Museumsinsel, Berlin . But first I want to try to explain something about time-not only historical time, time in architecture, but also the time we are now living in. I came to the conclusion a while ago that when one is looking at time, looking at history, nothing seems to have taken place. One realizes that when one is looking at time, time is not playing along, time is not visible, so to speak, because one is looking for it. But then the minute you do not look for time you are transformed by it: suddenly it just happens overnight, so to speak, or between the drawings, or in between the works, that one has been completely transformed.
Thus, to speak about architecture (or to speak about Berlin and about the contemporary situation) is to speak about the paradigm of the irrational. In my view, the best works of the contemporary spirit come from the irrational, while what prevails in the world, what dominates and often kills, does so always in the name of Reason. The irrational as a non-beginning of this project was my starting point. Berlin is not only a physical place, but also something in the mind, something belonging to a past which never was present.
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