City of Objects: Designs on Berlin

In 1991 seventeen architects were invited to submit plans for the regeneration of Potsdamer Plotz and Leipziger Plotz, an enormous area at the center of the reunited city of Berlin. This extraordinary and beautiful book documents the responses of the British architect William Alsop, collaborating with the artist Bruce McLean, a response to which radical ideas are given new architectural forms. Underlying the final scheme are a range of new possibilities for the city - streets as objects in their own right; a continuous landscape running between, beneath and through buildings; buildings that are themselves responsive to changing seasons ans uses; a new kind of planning, layered and ambiguous. The ideas which form the Berlin project are both specific to the site and at the same time universal in their implications. --- from book's cover