Akshith Santosh

AR3030

The museum eventually becomes a thoroughfare between the Brandenburg Gate and the Eiseneman Memorial, where the user discovers the entire museum as a Void within the site. The plaza itself suddenly creates confusion within the preexisting landscape, with the wall resurfacing from the ground, signifying the presence of something that once resided a few hundred metres apart. 
 The strategy for developing this site was twofold. The first was to expose its history and its memories. The wall, a significant part of its history, was mapped along its path, forming the active space as one calls it, signifying the absence of a presence of its unforgettable history. The divide between the two sides of Berlin at the time of the wall is thus highlighted in the process, with a regular uniform development in the plan and a more irregular approach. The significance is amplified with the presence of an artificial excavation of the once-present urban fabric, around the wall The excavation of the history is carried out in different layers which carry forward a seamless blend in its historical context. The second was to acknowledge that Berlin was the crossroads of every place and no place. In the process of materialising this duality, the project attempts to memorialise a place and to deny the efficacy of that memory. As Eisenman mentions, “The act of memory obscures the reality of the present to restore something of the past. Anti-memory makes a place that derives its order by obscuring its past.” These artificial or “neutral” walls begin to erase the physical presence of the historical walls. It also renders them inaccessible by causing the ground plane to become deeply eroded; the ground now becomes a figure of its history.