A+P2 - Kyoto 2009 | Adam Sharr "The Sedimentation of Memory" [05/41]
Channel: csxlab
Date: 2019-06-09

Dr. Adam Sharr
Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University, UK

Abstract heading:

Near the old Nordbahnhof in Berlin sits a preserved fragment of the Berlin Wall and the ‘no- mans land’ which once lay in-between. Adjacent, on Bernauer Straße, is the Chapel of Reconciliation designed by architects Reitermann and Sassenroth and completed in 2000. The Chapel sits on the foundations of a church which was first walled into the so-called ‘death strip’ in 1961 and then dramatically detonated by GDR border authorities ten years later. In a city which is arguably the capital of memorials, this Chapel is one of the least well known and yet it offers perhaps the richest texturing of layers of memory.

This paper reads the Chapel of Reconciliation for its presences and absences; in particular for physical totems of absence which stand for past presences, and physical presences which stand for past absences. These traces of memory are considered in Heideggerian terms of hiddenness and disclosure; of concealing and revealing. The details of the church – its multiplication of axis and denial of symmetry; the doubling and subtraction of altars; and the opening of a reconstituted side aisle outward rather than inward – are considered in order to explore how evocative presences and absences can invoke forgetting and remembering. The rammed earth walls of the Chapel’s sanctuary – made with millions of fragments of the detonated church – are found to be the most powerful device there for architectural memorialization. The alluvial presence of these fragments sedimented together in a new substance is a powerful token of the absent church, of the once singular assurance of its epoch’s worldview. Each deposit discloses the many millions of memories of the violent end of the church, and all that it stood and fell for.

It is concluded that the Chapel’s details reveal a matrix of memorial residues, and that the sedimentation of rammed earth offers a potent metaphor. Architectural traditions are dis- aggregated and re-aggregated there; reconstituted back together all-at-once in a new mix. They are recognisable but changed, recombined and re-settled. Their order is not a neat one; the Chapel does not suggest a teleological layering of history but instead a more ambiguous reconstitution of memory. The power of this reconstitution lies in its potential to ask visitors to act as their own archaeologists; to find projections of their own memories in the building’s conspicuously present and absent constituents in order to reach a new settlement with their expectations; to sediment their memories anew.

Author biography:

Adam is Senior Lecturer at the Welsh School of Architecture where he chairs the final year MArch design studio. He is author of Heidegger’s Hut (MIT Press, 2006) and Heidegger for Architects (Routledge, 2007). He is also Series Editor of the Thinkers for Architects series and Editor of arq (Cambridge University Press) with Richard Weston. Adam is currently researching towards two projects – an edited book titled Quality Out of Control: Standards for Measuring Architecture with Allison Dutoit and Juliet Odgers (Routledge, 2010) and a book on architecture and memory developing the themes of this paper. His practice, Adam Sharr Architects (http://www.adamsharr.com) is also based in Cardiff.