New Buildings for Berlin VI

Isa Genzken’s series New Buildings for Berlin, which she began in 2002, envisions the quickly changing nature of the city she calls home. In these architecturally inspired works of neo-assemblage, she proposes a lightweight cityscape where colored glass takes the place of the currently existing gray infrastructures that seem to pervade Berlin. Irreverent, dissident, punk, lighthearted, and cheerful, these architectural models suggest a building tradition made of colorful, found, and reused materials that defy the “junk-burden globalized world.” They consist of ensembles of rearticulated readymades that are daring yet simple, sustainable and aspirational at once. Strips of colored glass, painted MDF, and lacquered panes lean on one another, a reference to the modernist architecture of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Bruno Taut, while moving beyond a pure illustrative function. In this series, the model becomes a motif, not so much a tool of representation but as a proposal for an architecture that does not yet exist.

New Buildings for Berlin VI is presented on a tall pedestal, which extends its towering volumes, evoking the metropolis without referring to any real building in the German capital. Instead, it alludes to a utopian imagination for an alternative social constellation, conveyed through architecture. The sculpture then becomes a space for investigating both the speculative and political function of architecture, and ultimately, of art.

(Text written by TBA21 and used as wall label in the exhibition "Abundant Futures", C3A, Córdoba, 2022)