The Re-Use of Urban Ruins: Atmospheric Inquiries of the City (Routledge Advances in Sociology)

How do urban ruins provoke their cultural revaluation? This book offers a unique sociological analysis about the social agencies of material culture and atmospheric knowledge of buildings in the making. It draws on ethnographic research in Berlin along the former Palace of the Republic, the E-Werk and the Café Moskau in order to make visible an interdisciplinary regime of design experts who have developed a professional sensorium turning the built memory of the city into an object of aesthetic inquiry. How does architecture translate its cultural memory? How do urban ruins provoke their cultural revaluation? This book offers a unique sociological analysis about atmospheric knowledge of buildings in the making. It draws on ethnographic research in Berlin in order to make visible an interdisciplinary regime of design experts who have developed a professional sensorium in order to make the built memory of the city an object of aesthetic inquiry Cover 1 Title 6 Copyright 7 Contents 8 List of Figures 10 Preface 12 1 Introduction 14 2 The Emergence of Urban Laboratory Cultures of Re-Use 52 3 Aesthetic Experiments with the Memory of Urban Ruins 98 4 The Stabilization of Memory: Cultural Engineering of Ruins as Buildings 148 5 The Politics of Events in Historical Locations 184 6 Interdisciplinary Expertise and Its Concerns 214 Appendix 226 References 230 Index 250 The Emergence Of Urban Laboratory Cultures Of Re-use -- Aesthetic Experiments With The Memory Of Urban Ruins -- The Stabilization Of Memory : Cultural Engineering Of Ruins As Buildings -- The Politics Of Events In Historical Locations -- Interdisciplinary Expertise And Its Concerns. Hanna Katharina Göbel. Includes Bibliographical References And Index.