Robert Caldwell; A Scholar-Missionary in Colonial South India (2025)

Neo-historical East Berlin: architecture and urban design in the German Democratic Republic 1970-1990

Journal of Architecture, 2011

Capital under construction: History and the production of locality in contemporary Berlin

Ethnologia Europaea, 2001

Revisiting the Fascist City

Italian Studies, 2015

The City In The City: Berlin as a Magneric Archipelago

In 1977 O.M. Ungers and a number of his colleagues from Cornell University published a pamphlet called “The City in the City: Berlin as a Green Archipelago”. This document belongs to the larger context of the production of site-specific manifestos, such as Rem Koolhaas’ Delirious New York and Scott Brown and Venturi’s Learning from Las Vegas. Although never reaching the extensive attention of the previous examples, the City in the City has been attracting the interests of many architects throughout the years. This thesis takes its steps from this document. Not as historical inquiry, though, but rather as a critical review based on the assumption that site specific manifestos in general - and The City in the City in particular - could still constitute a significant tool to trace design narratives today. The exercise here is that of rewriting the City in the City by keeping its fundamental framework, scrolling through its eleven thesis in search of continuity, but simultaneously putting in discussion its ideological background and all those assumptions and theories that don’t seem to be valuable anymore. As The City in the City triggered both the metropolitan and the architectural scale, so does this thesis. While the first part is a discussion of the manifesto itself and delineates a scenario for Berlin, the second part of the work focuses on the architectural scale and it constitutes of a research on the typological level. If in 1977 Ungers proposed the urban villa as a possible “architectural tool”, so the objective of this research is to find an urban typology that could be appropriate to the requirements of the contemporary city and that, in this case, is based on the density and complexity of the Berlin Block. This work is an experiment in terms of procedure and an exploration of the logic behind a project. It begins with the assumption that some documents within the discipline could still be source of teaching and an active instrument to change the ways in which we look at the practice of architecture. This doesn’t mean transforming these tools into venerable relics and segregate them in the autonomous world of architecture, though, but it rather means forcing them to face reality, testing their potential on the contemporary city, on contemporary society, on the contemporary way of living.

Making Up Meanings in a Capital City: Power, Memory and Monuments in Berlin

European Urban and Regional Studies, 2006

An Ideal City? Contemporary City for Three million inhabitants (1922) by Le Corbusier

Of Cities and Their Mores

Books and Ideas, 2018

What do late nineteenth-century Berlin and Cairo have in common? The German historian Joseph Ben Prestel accepts the challenge of comparing these two cities in order to interrogate the boundaries between Europe and the Middle East, as well as orientalism's assumptions. Comparative approaches to history have, for several decades, been the subject of profound debate. At issue is the cross-cultural validity of analytical frameworks, the ability of scholars to be competent in multiple domains, and the appropriateness of greater levels of generality. Joseph Ben Prestel's recent book, though it avoids addressing these methodological issues head on, proposes an innovative approach, the primary mechanism of which is the thematic juxtaposition of compatible archival materials relating to different realities, yet which, in the way they echo one another, elicit curiosity and thought. Through this method, Ben Prestel is able to propose parallel interrogations, the main effect of which is to challenge the force of orientalism's most persistent paradigms, while raising the question of the cultural character of morality and gender identities. By using as its entry point the perception of various sources of urban excitement and the imposition of social norms for controlling emotions, the book also aspires to propose a displaced reading of a newly defined urban modernity in the late nineteenth century.

The Presence of the City, The Identity of the City, Berlin (pp. 135-156)

Into the Noise Anthropological and Aesthetic Discourses in Public Sphere, A. Kunce, M. Popczyk, 2013

Claremont Colleges Scholarship @ Claremont The Plots of Alexanderplatz: A Study of the Space that Shaped Weimar Berlin

Building the City on Propaganda: Urban Development in post-war Berlin between the Ideologies of East and West

Architecture and Ideology. Conference Proceedings (Internationale Konferenz der Universität Belgrad, Fakultät für Architektur, Belgrad, Serbien, 28.-29-09.2012); hg. v. V. Mako, M. R. Blagojevic, M. V. Lazar; Belgrad 2012, 2012