Berlin: a Green Archipelago

unsubmitted entry for the idea competition
Tempelhofer Feld, Berlin 2025

“Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.”
                                                   
— Daniel Burnham (1864-1912)

This work inverts Oswald Mathias Ungers’ 1977 vision of Berlin: A Green Archipelago. Where Ungers proposed a shrinking city of architectural “islands” surrounded by green, this collage presents the opposite: a city consumed by unchecked growth, with only a few green spaces, such as Tempelhofer Feld and Tiergarten, left afloat.

Here, the archipelago is no longer metaphor. It is diagnosis. The image literalizes Berlin’s transformation under neoliberal urbanism: from fragmented void to total surface, from potential to exhaustion. What remains of nature is residual - fenced off, fragile and symbolic.