THE CULTURAL FUNCTION OF A BUILDING is often to tell us about the past, to embody and reify history — immanent within it is the piling up of time. We also feel the horror, or the glee, of understanding the agency that we possess to shape the environment, to choose what it looks like and how it functions, and the lingering sense that one day we too will join that immanence.
In few places is this fundamental role of architecture felt more keenly than in Berlin. Difficult pasts abound on every corner; the city bears the monumental relics and the scar tissue of enlightened absolutism, romantic nationalism, imperialism, fascism, Cold War partition and the stitching back together of the German state. Its buildings self-evidently tell us something about that history, they speak to their times in ways that exceed mere stylistic change or . In turn, the way
