2023-07-18 16:18:09
In my memory I see us sitting together almost exclusively on the right, north side of the linden trees. Structurally, it is the side of form+purpose, the art history of urban planning and “Aesthetics Today”. He had involuntarily left the other side behind in the mid-1970s. The ISA, Institute for Urban Planning and Architecture of the Bauakademie, and the editorial office of the journal Architektur der DDR, which temporarily became a critical institution under his editorship, were opposite our meeting points on the other side of the street, as polar opposites.
Every coffee break with Bruno Flierl, no matter how short, became a strategy game, a master lesson in structuring. Not only did he allocate precise spatial coordinates and axes of social relationships to everything in the social environment: This socio-spatial environment, which was within reach, was translated into small tranches of personal time into work and communication, incorporated, appropriated, abolished. With a slightly tilted head and a broad forehead, my boss and friend cut the days of life into incredibly dense clusters of activities.
Bruno Flierl was one of the most planned and active people under the sun. I have never seen him tense or rushed. Thanks to his pen, he was not at the mercy of signs and bodies. Savoir vivre in the dictatorship. That’s not a contradiction, because he was here voluntarily because the plan was good to manage the world in a fundamentally different way. He had changed sides early on, had “gone over” from Hardenbergstrasse. The GDR was the country of his choice and his social home.
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The architect and publicist Bruno Flierl has been constructing all his life
Most obituaries will probably call him “critic”. But that doesn’t really do justice to his calling. The architect and publicist Bruno Flierl has been constructing all his life. He created a world within the world that, in contrast to the empirical space, was always a little more plausible and attractive. save time in understanding. Appropriate the world. Assign order and meaning to it.
His most important subject was Berlin, namely the historic center, the center of power in the east of the city. With great originality, he analyzed the urban-design formation and development of the space between Pariser Platz and the new gates to the east and at the same time projected it as the optimally desirable. His structural schemes were always a little better, more ideal than the muddle through or failure of the actual planning. Thus he was a critic not in the sense of belittling or belittling, but as a promoter of more and more significance.
He understood everything he delivered as material for future, better things. His field was theory in a sense that challenged practice. The theory formation process, fundamentally embedded in the innovative system-theoretical approaches of the 1960s, is characterized by a reminiscence of the mimetic tradition of architecture as a reflecting architectural design, which is only recognizable in Bruno Flierl and is characteristic of his work. He did not want to give up this idea, no matter how ardently the aesthetician Lothar Kühne asked him around 1968 to consider overlapping subject-object relationships when defining the “built environment”. The fact that people not only appropriate their objects in a self-determined manner, liberated, but that they should experience and develop themselves as subjects in their planetary body.
Bruno Flierl’s perhaps most important contribution to Berlin building culture
With Bruno Flierl we bid farewell to the critical spirit and intellectual radiance of the 1960s and 1970s, when the word alternative began to describe a design program for the built world in all its social and biological diversity. Embedded in the various modernization theories, the architect, who died on the night of July 16/17 at the age of 96, developed a unique contribution, with reference to Karl Marx, a decidedly readable one that was formed according to the laws of beauty and justified in the light of reason to create a people-friendly city.
The most important structural ensembles in the eastern part of Berlin reflect this struggle and also its actual lasting influence. Especially the street Unter den Linden and today’s Pariser Platz. Even more important for the future is the understanding of the “central urban axis” of modern reconstruction, which is perhaps Bruno Flierl’s most important contribution to Berlin’s building culture. One only sees what one knows thanks to him: how beautiful this expanded landscape still is in terms of urban planning.
The author Simone Hain is an architecture and planning historian. From 2006 to 2016 she was a professor at the Institute for Urban and Building History at Graz University of Technology. The touring exhibition “Two German Architectures 1945-1989” curated by her and Hartmut Frank, a retrospective of building in the GDR and the FRG, can be seen in the New Town Hall in Suhl until December 31.
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