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| The World as Stage and Construct |
The area around the mock-ups in Bürkle’s photograph was a no man’s land—a setting for long walks beside the wall archived in Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire. Today, the temporary façade structures have been removed and urban planers have filled this place with new constructions. Yet before they did, architects and builders perused—for us—a full-scale model book for building exteriors. The life-sized models said something about surfaces and colors, materials and proportions. Their openings in the façade were vistas into nothingness; there was no closed-off area existing behind it. The mock-ups, some of which were three-stories high, were supported with stilts toward the back. In the third floor of one a balcony juts out with an iron grating.
With these snap shots, Bürkle questions architecture’s claim to representation. Instead of the hectic goings-on of the construction site, she shows the contemplative calm of the margins; instead of the architecturally grave, she opts for transitory lightness. In this way, Bürkle visualizes the before and after of a complex development in separate images. It is a concept of the image that is at once open and rigorous.
In later photographs from the series, Bürkle focuses her attention on historical buildings and new constructions in Berlin that have been covered with gigantic curtain facades consisting of nothing more than printed canvas. These images from the urban big-city laboratory are memorials for the future. It is because of them that we have enduring representations of moments in a radical urban transformation process. For many, the pictorial, three-dimensional-looking canvas facades mounted on scaffolding, which appear everywhere in the street scenery, represent an ideal of urban planning. In reality, however, they are more like Potemkin villages. “Pure curtain façade” is a dirty word among architectural purists. Yet more and more these villages for beholding are becoming common in urban planning. Putting giant advertising banners on buildings in renovation brings in considerable money. Some of these architectural illusions (which is not to say “utopias”) can now be wondered at in real form. The city today has become a stage set; the metropolis has mutated into a model settlement.
Bürkle’s photographs are documents of an overstaged reality. Her view of the city and its architectural interplay is critical and removed, probing and amused. It is a subversive position that contrasts with the affirmative image of the tourist office. This also applies to her series “Eiscafè Venezia,“ in which she tracks down and photographs identically-named establishments throughout Germany as if conducting a sociological field study.
By contrast, Bürkle’s photograph of the single stone corner of the Bauakademie—re-erected where it once stood, the former DDR Foreign Ministry having to give way to its reconstruction—demonstrates the power of an influential architectural lobby that wants to use powerful development associations to revive the historical landmarks of Berlin. Bürkle’s images show the radical transformation of the city that was formerly on the front of the Cold War and that which after vehement discussions mutated into a unified German capital with all its monumental construction projects.
In some pictures, Bürkle exposes the reverse side of architectural models, thus uncovering in a dual sense their mere illusionism. Across from the former “Kaisersaal” on Potsdamer Platz—its war-torn stone façade framed and protected in a glass wall and discharged into the today—stands, in a fenced-off construction area, a mock-up that appears to have been abandoned. Since Bürkle’s perspective does not allow us to see the face of the mock-up and to connect its façade with an architectural realization, the question of the use or nonsense of this unusual city furniture remains unanswered.
Along with their public, genre-specific function as architecture photography, Bürkle’s images could also be seen as framed still lifes, akin to the pointed formulation of Raimund Kummer’s, who characterized his images of random stumbling blocks in the city as “sculptures in public space.”
Bürkle composes consciously, even when some of her images seem like the spontaneous glimpses of passersby. She works in series, but the series are also the result of individual photographs of a complex urbanistic transfer. Taken together, one could describe the series faces-façades or Images of a City Under Construction as a kind of modern in-depth reporting or as cartographies of ephemeral construction site architecture. Using the examples of symbolic buildings and places in Berlin like the Reichtstag, the Palace of the Republic, the National Library, and Checkpoint Charlie, Bürkle makes urbanistic processes visual and transparent.
Already in the 1920s, Berlin was described as a city in a state of constant becoming, a city whose completion would never come. Bürkle’s work visualizes this bon mot en passant. Bürkle presents Germany’s capital in its self-chosen role as an exposed stage; her images transform the city to its own stage set.
Matthias Harder, studied art history, archaeology, and philosophy in Kiel and Berlin. Since 2004, he has been a curator at the Helmut Newton Foundation and has taught courses at the Freie Universität Berlin. Before that, he was a guest curator at the Fotomuseum in Munich’s Stadtmuseum, where he was responsible for the Herbert List and Stefan Moses retrospectives, among other projects. He was also director of the Glückstadt art association.
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