LA CITTÁ DOPO IL PROGRESSO: LA STAZIONE DI STOCCARDA E L’AEROPORTO DI BERLINO

Abstract

The city post-progress: the station in Stuttgart and the airport in Berlin. by Florian Hertweck. In 2012 the Biennale di Venezia dedicated an entire room to the Hamburg Philharmonic. This was a tribute to the project by Herzog and De Meuron, but not for its splendid architecture, rather for the disaster represented by its construction. In a country which has built its identity around its faith in progress and growth, as much as its capacity for developing, on the national scale, a complex of technical, social and cultural infrastructures that is among the most competitive in the world, the inability to bring projects of this scope to term reveals a change in paradigm. In fact, the failure of the Hamburg Philharmonic is a symptom of the shift from a phase of quantitative growth in which man experiences the short-lived dream of unlimited progress, towards what Dennis Meadows and many others de! ne as an era of qualitative growth. The author develops these arguments as he focuses on the two great infrastructure projects of the Station in Stuttgart and the Airport in Berlin, which are both currently viewed as failures, and as substantial transformations of their respective cities. Looking more speci! cally at the role that these projects should have had in the city, both in a general sense as far as the actual scale of the building and the surrounding space is concerned, and with respect to their construction, these projects provide information on the role of the city in the age of qualitative growth.