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New installation by Sichong Xie opening at the Wende Museum's East German guardhouse

2021-09-08T16:47:00-04:00

The Wende Museum in Culver City, California has announced that a new installation by Los Angeles-based contemporary artist Sichong Xie will open in the museum’s former East German guardhouse this Sunday, September 12.

The guardhouse, which once monitored and controlled access to the state-run East German news agency, Allgemeiner Deutscher Nachrichtendienst, now hosts rotating installations by contemporary artists.

As stated by the museum, Xie’s installation, Memory Structure, Scaffold Series, “features objects and arrangements emblematic of memory and temporality: bamboo scaffolding, embroidery on industrial mesh, and a set of laser-engraved drawings that will fade from continual exposure to light, through which the artist reimagines architectural drawings created by her grandfather in the late 1950s and early 1960s.”

According to the project description, none of her grandfather’s building plans were realized after being exiled to a labor camp by Chinese authorities following the...

New exhibition documents the rise and fall of East Berlin's famed Palast der Republik

2019-06-10T14:33:00-04:00

Berlin’s Palast der Republik, the asbestos-riddled home of the powerless East German parliament that was demolished more than a decade ago, is being commemorated in a new exhibition at the Rostock art museum, a building also constructed under the Communist regime that narrowly escaped the same end.

"Built between 1973 and 1976 on the site of the former Berlin City Palace, the Palace of the Republic was the seat of the GDR’s government or Volkskammer (People’s Chamber), but also served as a public cultural center with a plethora of event spaces and culinary offerings," reads the description of the new exhibition Palast der Republik: Utopia, Inspiration, Politics at the Kunsthalle Rostock.

The iconic building in 1977. Image via Wikipedia.

"Daily activities took place in the Great Hall, the restaurants, the disco in the youth club, the theater, and the Spree Bowling Alley. In 1990 the Palace of the Republic was closed due to the emission of carcinogenic asbestos fibers, and the building was demolished from 2006 to 2008. In 2019 the Humboldt Forum will open in the reconstructed Berlin Palace at the same site."

The exhibition opened on May 31 and will run through October 13.

East Berlin’s Plattenbau may rise to new heights

2018-09-06T15:08:00-04:00

Berlin has decided on a novel location to host some of the new apartments the city badly needs—on top of the old ones. Yesterday, Berlin’s Senate announced a project to add more units on top of already existing buildings in the city’s east, with a possible capacity of up to 50,000 new homes. The plan to add floors isn’t novel in itself, of course, even in Berlin. What’s striking is the specific type of building chosen for the experiment: East Berlin’s Plattenbau.

Berlin After the Wall: A Microcosm of the World’s Chaotic Change

2014-11-18T14:18:00-05:00

Not far from the Brandenburg Gate, Potsdamer Platz was a no man’s land during the Cold War. Then the Berlin Wall fell, and the German authorities made it a petting zoo for celebrity architecture. The corporate headquarters of Germany’s new global swagger. But the ambitions for Potsdamer Platz, like the hopes and fears about a united Germany, turned out differently. The architecture was not so great. Many companies fled.

The Eerie Architecture of East Germany's Secret Police

2014-09-22T12:05:00-04:00

The sterility of the photos, especially the images of prisoner bedrooms, hints at the degree to which the Stasi kept a tight lid on dissenters. In prison culture (or at least prison culture as it’s portrayed in the movies), there’s a lot of graffiti: on the walls, in library books, between cells. “We were searching for any scratching or anything in the cells—usually you would think they were sending messages—but it was very clear you couldn’t see anything”