The interview project »Berliner Portraits – Erzählungen zur Architektur der Stadt« started with a fascination for the richness, complexity and heterogeneity of Berlin’s cityscape and its history. At the same time it started from problems we, being architects ourselves, are facing today: Urban development nowadays is mainly economic driven, it suffers from a lack of diversity and thus leads to a uniform cityscape. In dialogue with practitioners from the field of architecture we studied the question of how their practice was shaped by society as well as history and in how far the context Berlin influenced their specific position. The result is a collection of different subjective and often very personal perspectives on historic events, concepts or buildings and is thus a plead for a heterogenous and pluralistic city.
All the interviews were conducted in 2018, they werde recorded on video and later published as a book, as well as an online archive (berlinerportraits.de) which can be accessed either through persons, topics or buildings as entry point.
