Strata 02 // Flex Detour and Kobuto Film Screening

Wir schneiden oder anders ausgedrückt flexen uns bei einem Stadtspaziergang durch die Stadt auf der Suche nach Widersprüchen, Zentralität und Differenz. Die Stationen um das Neue Kreuzberger Zentrum navigieren uns zum Filmscreening von KoBuTo in der Vierten Welt.

In deutscher und englischer Sprache.

We cut or, in other words, flex our way through the city on a city walk in search of contradictions, centrality and difference. The stops around Neues Kreuzberger Zentrum navigate to the film screening of KoBuTo at Vierte Welt.

Welcome to our 2nd STRATA event, a monthly to bi-monthly event series on urban talks, explorations and architecting. The particular interest lies in strata, interlocking, overlapping, interacting, or colliding layers and perspectives to bring out understandings of the urban. This time we warmly invite you to a journey across the urban multilayerdness of Kottbusser Tor, with two stops and a stroll.

In opposition to our last series, which dealt with the not very dense but nontheless urbanized countryside, this time we take a look at the very dense and charged cityscape of Kottbusser Tor in Berlin Kreuzberg. In the center of this exploration sits the massive (infra)structure of “Neues Kreuzberger Zentrum”, which is an urban keyelement of Kottbusser Tor and its most peculiar incredient. Built in the 1970s, this multiuse building with its more than 300 apartments was meant to shield off the never built motorway tangent along Oranienstraße. Following this formal idea and by ignoring the historic block fabric of old Luisenstadt, it forms an unique valley-like urban space. The building embodies two sides of urbanity. On the one hand it’s a relic to car centered, and big structure thinking of post-war cityplanning with its ideals of a profitable and functional city, which provoked repair-squatting and gentle urban renewal in the 1980s. On the other hand it is today one of the biggest housing-units with affordable apartments in the “inner-city” and stage for negotiating urban conflicts, that reflects a whole political mindscape of the city.

Besides looking at the virtual layers of politics, discourse, planning history etc., we want to take you to a situative journey on site, by the means of “flexing”, a strolling practice, which derives from recent female psychogeografic literature and forms a counteraction to the patriarch term of “flanieren”.

1. The Rotunda, 19.00h
We will start our flexing journey on the opposite site of Neues Kreuzberger Zentrum. In the postmodern courtyard rotunda by austrian architect Wilhelm Holzbauer, which is located in the triangle block inbetween Reichenberger Straße, Mariannenstraße and Kottbusser Straße. In the rotunda we start with an introduction.

2. The Walk, 19.15h
Starting from the rotunda in the “Südblock”, we will come along different places, garages which turned into kindergardens, public areas which turned into permanent protesthouses, several bars, clubs, casinos, spätis, and a police station, which is very new…

3. The Film, 20.00h
We will end our journey in the spaces of “Vierte Welt”, in the inbetween elevated floor level of Neues Kreuzberger Zentrum. Here we are happy to show the film “KOBUTO” by Peter Behrbohm and Masen Khattab, which is a poetic multimedia documentation on the architect Johannes Uhl, who was the leading architect behind the Neues Kreuzberger Zentrum.

German and English language.

STRATA Team: Maria Freimann, Fabian Herzog, Lorenz Krauth,

KoBuTo: Peter Behrbohm, Masen Khattab and others.

Foto: Lorenz Krauth