Coincientia oppositorum. The building of the urban form in O. M. Ungers

In 1977 O. M. Ungers, with his assistants at Cornell University R. Koolhaas, H. Kolloff, P. Riemann and A. Ovaska, publishes a plan-manifesto about the city of Berlin: “Die Stad in der Stad”, in which is expressed a new model of development and composition for the contemporary city: the “city-archipelago”. With the aim to reflect about the problems and the issues of the urban form into contemporary, the research group draws up a programmatic plan where starting from the ‘given value’ of the structure of the urban form deposited by the history and remained, more or less manifest after the bombing, is developed a new concept of city for parts, where each part is enhanced in its ‘singularity’ and where the green, the space of nature, assumes the role to connect/ untie the same ‘singularity’. The research starting from the analysis of the plan and the theoretical lecture developed into the program-manifesto and focusing on the plans realized for Berlin later by O. M. Ungers, aims at the reflection and the updating of this experience by its re-reading. The confused growth of the periphery, the alienation of the individual into the place in which lives, the necessity to give answers to the form of the contemporary city, are still open issues. The research of Ungers is focused on the necessity to refound the problem of the form of the city starting from the same architecture, basing on the identification of the substratum, modern or ancient it is, looking the architecture as “coincidentia oppositorum” of the contemporary city, giving them form, assuming its complexities and contradictions.